Yemen was forced to use the military option to pressure the Iranian-backed Houthis to come to the negotiating table since they never complied with peace deals, the country’s ambassador to the US has told Arab News.

“The military option has never been our choice or something that we initiated,” Ahmed bin Mubarak said.

“The government has always sought peace since the beginning of the war by signing the Peace and National Partnership Agreement,” he said, referring to the first peace deal that the internationally recognized government signed with the Houthis, which was designed to defuse the tension caused by the rebels’ takeover of Sana’a.

Fighting in Yemen has escalated over the past couple of months following Houthi drone and missile attacks that killed more than 110 soldiers and civilians at a military base in the city of Marib.

The Houthis intensified attacks on government forces in Nehim, outside Sana’a, Marib’s Serwah and the northern province of Jawf.
Hundreds of soldiers and civilians have been killed since early last month.

The Yemeni ambassador said that the latest Houthi escalation in shelling and fighting coincided with intensive diplomatic efforts by the UN envoy to Yemen and European diplomats who sought to break the impasse in peace talks.

The escalation during peace efforts, Bin Mubarak said, is a sign that the Houthis are not serious about peace.

“Any concrete advance in peace efforts and addressing important issues are always matched with an escalation by the Houthis. We have no other choice but to defend ourselves against the escalation,” he said, adding that the Houthis read concessions by the government as signs of weakness. Instead of reciprocating the concessions by making similar concessions, they launched attacks on government forces.

“The intensity of Houthi attacks on Jawf shows that they have been preparing for the escalation for a long time,” Bin Mubarak said.
Bin Mubarak, who holds a Ph.D. in business administration from Baghdad University, was President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi’s chief of staff when Houthis seized the capital and placed Hadi under house arrest in early 2015.

He was detained by the Houthis for two weeks. In July 2015, he was appointed as ambassador of the Republic of Yemen to the US. He has served as a senior adviser in Yemeni government delegations during the several rounds of UN-brokered peace talks in Geneva, Biel and Kuwait.

He is also nonresident ambassador of Yemen to Brazil.

Last year, fighting on major battlefields largely subsided as UN Yemen Envoy Martin Griffiths announced that the number of air strikes by the Saudi-led coalition dropped by nearly 80 percent.