A deal has been made between the fighting sides of the Yemen conflict to exchange around 1,000 prisoners. Abdel Kader Mortaza, the rebel official in charge of their prisoner affairs, made a post on the 14th saying, “The transaction will be executed, with God’s help, on the scheduled dates today and tomorrow.” Mortaza also added, “The preparations have been completed by all parties.” The deal was made in Switzerland last month. A United Nations envoy Martin Griffiths hailed it as a “very important milestone” when the deal was struck after a whole week of talks in Switzerland. The prisoners would arrive by plane A spokesperson for the International Committee of the Red Cross said their teams were present at a number of different airports involved in the transfer.
My take is that this could be the start of a de-escalation of the rising Middle Eastern conflicts. The article mentions how, “this week’s planned swap would mark the first large-scale handover since the war erupted in 2014.” This action between the warring sides could result in more of these prisoner negotiations. But I have a second take that sits at the back of my mind, saying that prisoners from one side will just be rearmed and sent back out there to possibly commit acts against humanity to the prisoners that other side’s newly released prisoners. It’s brutal out there in the Middle East.
In class, we were discussing the larger levels of International Relations, and it got me thinking about how the Yemen got to this point and the individual level, the state level, the interstate level, and the global level. I had to do my own research on how the Yemen conflict began and I could recognize how each of the levels could have played into the Yemen conflict, for example, on the global level, the division of Islam between the Shias and Sunnis. Then on the more individual level, terrorism destroying Yemen from the inside out from the radical Islamic terrorists.