U.N. Mediator for Yemen Conflict Leaving Post

The U.N. special envoy for Yemen, whose attempts at diplomacy to resolve the devastating war in that country have repeatedly failed, is resigning as of next month, the organization announced Monday.

The envoy, Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, a veteran diplomat from Mauritania, is the second U.N. mediator in less than three years to vacate the Yemen post in frustration.

His predecessor, Jamal Benomar, a Moroccan diplomat, quit in April 2015 after four years as the special Yemen envoy. That was a month after a Saudi Arabia-led coalition began intensively bombing Yemen’s Houthi rebels, who had dislodged the Saudi-backed government and seized much of the country, including the capital, Sanaa.

Since then the war has ravaged Yemen, the Middle East’s most destitute country, and created what the United Nations has called the world’s biggest man-made humanitarian disaster.

Three-quarters of the population — more than 22 million people — need food and other aid, including 11.3 million “in acute need who urgently require assistance to survive,” the U.N. humanitarian relief agency said Sunday in its latest update. It said 1.8 million Yemeni children younger than 5 were “acutely malnourished.”

Ahmed has informed Secretary-General António Guterres of the United Nations that “he does not intend to continue in his position beyond the end of his current contract ending in February 2018,” Guterres’ office said in a brief statement. It expressed thanks to the envoy “for his strong and determined support to reach a political solution to the conflict that has engulfed the country.”

There was no immediate word on a successor.

Ahmed’s resignation punctuated the stalemate over the conflict, which is widely viewed as part of a larger struggle between Saudi Arabia and its regional rival Iran, which supports the Houthis.

Ahmed’s tenure was tumultuous from the start. His many attempts to bring the antagonists together in Yemen were repeatedly flustered.

Any prospects for his success may have been fatally damaged in June, when the Houthis accused Ahmed of having abandoned his neutrality and warned him never to come to Yemen again.

The basis for the Houthi accusation was never made clear. But it came a few weeks after the United Nations requested that the Houthis investigate an attack on Ahmed’s motorcade as it traveled from the Sanaa airport to the U.N. compound. The Houthis denied that any attack had occurred.

In more recent months, Ahmed has been able to do little except implore the warring sides to ease the plight of civilians, entreaties that have been largely ignored.

In November, Saudi Arabia imposed what humanitarian groups described as a draconian blockade on Yemen ports, raising fears of famine in the country. The Saudis only recently loosened the blockade.

The announcement that Ahmed was leaving came the same day that Saudi Arabia said it was expanding emergency relief to Yemenis with an infusion of more than $3.5 billion in aid, including $1.5 billion in funding to U.N. agencies and humanitarian groups. Relief agencies welcomed the Saudi announcement but coupled their response with caution about the details and timetable.

They said previous pledges by Saudi Arabia to help ease a crisis that its own military helped create had not always been fulfilled. They were especially wary about access to the Yemen port of Al Hudaydah, which is under Houthi control and is considered vital for aid distribution to Yemenis living in Houthi areas.

Tamer Kirolos, the Yemen director for the international charity Save the Children, said there was a misconception that the Saudi-led coalition had lifted their blockade of the port and that “fuel is still being blocked, leading to crippling shortages across the country and unsustainable rises in the price of basic goods.”