ADEN (Reuters) – Yemen’s President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi will leave Saudi Arabia and head to the United States for medical treatment early on Wednesday, two sources close to the matter told Reuters on Tuesday.
The head of the country’s internationally-recognised government, who has lived in exile in Riyadh since the Iranian-aligned Houthi group captured the Yemeni capital Sanaa in 2015, has been treated for a heart condition since 2011.
He is set to return in a week, the sources said.
Hadi has been on several trips for medical checks and treatment to the United States, most recently in June 2019.
Yemen’s conflict has killed more than 100,000 people since a Saudi-led alliance intervened in Yemen in March 2015 to try to restore Hadi’s government, an ally of Riyadh. The war is largely seen regionally as a proxy struggle between Riyadh and Tehran.
The sources said the trip would not delay talks between Hadi’s administration and the separatist Southern Transitional Council (STC) around the formation of a new government.
Riyadh is seeking to end a conflict between the separatists and the Saudi-backed government, which has been based in Aden for five years after the Houthis ousted it from Sanaa.
The government and the STC, which is backed by the United Arab Emirates, are the main Yemeni forces in the Saudi-led anti-Houthi coalition. But the two Yemeni allies have been at loggerheads since last August when the STC took over Aden.
In July, Saudi Arabia presented a framework to expedite a stalled November deal in Yemen’s south designed to end the dispute.
(Reporting by Mohammed Ghobari, writing by Marwa Rashad; Editing by William Maclean)
