UN calls for negotiations as Yemen crisis worsens

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said negotiations, which the U.N. would facilitate, “remain the only chance to prevent long, drawn-out conflict” in the troubled country, ABC News said.

Shiite Muslims in Yemen, known as Houthis, are rebelling against the country’s Sunni leadership.

Yemen’s foreign minister, Riad Yassin, said Friday night that an “arrangement” had been reached for ground troops from a Saudi-led coalition to deploy in Yemen, the BBC reported.

The coalition has led three days of airstrikes against the Houthis. Two Saudi pilots were rescued from the ocean overnight by American forces after they ejected from an F-15 fighter jet off Yemen’s southern coast, the New York Times reported.

Yemen’s president, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, called the Houthis “stooges of Iran.” Speaking at an Arab League summit in Egypt regarding the Yemeni crisis, Hadi said Iran was trying to destabilize his country, the BBC said. Meanwhile, senior Houthi figures have been spotted in the Iranian holy city of Qom, the BBC said.

Hadi was forced to flee his country by sea on Wednesday after the rebels attacked the capital city of Sanaa and overtook its airport.

A small nation on the coast of the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen figures significantly in the U.S.’s overall strategy in the war on terrorism and the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. The Obama administration had held up Yemen as a model of counterterrorism success, and a White House spokesman repeated that claim Wednesday, even after Hadi fled the country.

The al Qaeda group in the Arabian Peninsula has a presence in Yemen and opposes both Hadi’s government as well as the Houthis, the BBC said.

Yemen is the ancestral home of Osama bin Laden’s family. Aden was the site of the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, which killed 17 American servicemembers, and for which bin Laden’s group, al Qaeda, later took responsibility.