Riyadh, April 7 (AFP/APP): Yemen’s president announced Thursday he is handing his powers to a new leadership council, in a major shake-up in the coalition battling Huthi rebels as a fragile ceasefire takes hold.
“I irreversibly delegate to this presidential leadership council my full powers,” President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi said in a televised statement early Thursday, the final day of peace talks held in the Saudi capital Riyadh.
Hadi’s internationally recognised government has been locked in conflict with Huthi rebels who control the capital Sanaa and most of the north despite a Saudi-led intervention launched in 2015.
A United Nations-brokered truce that took effect on Saturday — the first day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan — has offered a glimmer of hope in the conflict which has triggered what the UN describes as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
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