Islam Times - Abdollahian En-Route to Saudi Arabia to Attend OIC Summit on Yemen

Islam Times - Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister for African and Arab affairs Hussein Amir-Abdollahian has departed for Jeddah today to attend the Extraordinary Summit of Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) on Yemen, Fars news agency reported.

Foreign Ministers of OIC member states will attend the Summit to review the current situation in Yemen.

The one-day summit will be held on Tuesday, a day after the Yemen peace talks in Geneva, Swiss.

The UN-sponsored talks aimed at ending the conflict in Yemen by bringing representatives of rival factions to Geneva are expected to begin today.

According to Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, the UN's peace envoy for Yemen, the talks would bring together representatives of the exiled government, the Ansarullah movement, former president Ali Abdullah Saleh's General Peoples' Congress and other opposition groups.

Ban Ki-moon, UN secretary-general, is due to take part in the opening session of the talks on Monday before returning to New York.

Yemen has been under brutal aggression by Saudi-US coalition since Saudi Arabia launched military strikes against its southern neighbor on March 26 without a UN mandate.

Thousands have been martyred and injured in the attack, with the vast majority of them are civilians.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), over 2,600 people have so far lost their lives during the conflict in Yemen. However the death toll released by local authorities puts it much higher at about 4,300.

Riyadh launched the attack on Yemen in a bid to restore power to Yemen’s fugitive president Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi who is a close ally to Saudi Arabia.