Yemen's government will give UN-sponsored peace talks in Kuwait a "last chance," the country's foreign minister said on Saturday, four days after the delegation suspended participation in the process aimed at ending the year-long war. Representatives from the government of President Abdrabbu Mansour Hadi and the Iran-allied Houthi rebels have been meeting for nearly a month in Kuwait for talks to ease a war that has killed more than 6,200 people. The government withdrew from the talks on Tuesday, saying it would only return if its opponents committed to withdraw from cities they have seized since 2014 and hand over weapons. Yemeni Foreign Minister Abdel-Malek Al-Mekhlafi wrote on Twitter on Saturday that the government delegation would give the talks "a last chance" after President Hadi held meetings with the emirs of Qatar and Kuwait, as well as UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. The talks are focused on government demands for the Houthis to hand over their weapons and quit captured cities, as well as the formation of a new government that would include the rebels. The government is currently based in the southern Yemeni port of Aden. UN envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed said that President Hadi had agreed to end the latest boycott. Hadi's supporters had baulked at discussing rebel proposals for a unity government that they fear will sideline him and undermine his claim to international legitimacy. They insist that the talks should focus instead on enforcing an April 2015 UN Security Council resolution demanding the rebels' withdrawal from the capital and other territories they have overran since 2014. Meanwhile, Yemeni troops killed 13 militants in a raid on a house outside the southern city of Mukalla on Sunday in which two soldiers also died, the army said, extending a struggle to restore security in the area ruled until last month by Al-Qaeda. "Special forces and the army gained complete control over the site backed up by helicopters from the Arab coalition, which dealt with groups of terrorists spread around the area who were fleeing," an army statement said. "A search confirmed that these fighters were about to carry out a surprise terrorist attack on some military command centers at dawn this morning." Before being forced out, Al-Qaeda militants took advantage of more than a year of war to carve out a mini-state stretching across much of the Arabian Peninsula country's southern coast, including Mukalla. The United Arab Emirates trained and funded Yemeni forces for months and backed up their re-conquest of Mukalla on April 25 with air strikes. Militants in Yemen's branch of Daesh have carried out a series of suicide attacks on all parties to Yemen's tangled conflict, killing 25 police recruits in a bombing outside Mukalla last week. — Agencies
