Kerry Discusses Humanitarian Pauses for Yemen

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is in Riyadh today to discuss a variety of regional security issues before President Obama convenes Gulf leaders at Camp David next week. In particular, Kerry is pressing Saudi officials for a humanitarian pause in the fighting in Yemen, a proposal he has already discussed with Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif. The United States has become increasingly vocal in its concerns about civilian casualties and the growing humanitarian crisis in Yemen, but Saudi officials are now discussing escalating their intervention. “It is possible to repeat the same number of sorties, a land operation is possible, all options are open to prevent these practices of the militias,” a spokesman for the Saudi military said yesterday. Kerry also met with Yemeni President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi this morning. The new U.N. envoy for Yemen will travel to Riyadh this week to explore the potential for a negotiated resolution to the conflict.

Kerry is also using his trip to lay the groundwork for the summit of Gulf leaders next week, which will focus on easing concerns about the Iran nuclear negotiations and its implications for the region. President Obama is expected to propose a region-wide missile defense system and increased security cooperation to assure Gulf allies of their safety from Iranian attack.

Netanyahu Forms Government with Narrow Majority

With just two hours remaining before the deadline to form a government, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced last night that he had formed a governing coalition with the necessary 61-seat majority of the Knesset. When Netanyahu’s Likud Party received a plurality of the votes in March, forming a government seemed like an easy prospect, but it was complicated when the Yisrael Beitenu party shifted to the opposition this week. As a result, Netanyahu had to make concessions to Naftali Bennett’s Jewish Home party, which is expected to receive Education and Justice Ministry cabinet seats. Observers of Israeli politics noted that the coalition’s narrow majority will make it weak to internal demands, divided by policy issues, and vulnerable to collapse.

Headlines

• Iranian press has reported that the Maersk Tigris, a cargo ship seized by Iranian forces in the Persian Gulf last week, has been released; the U.S. military said that it stopped a brief mission to escort commercial vessels in the Persian Gulf on Tuesday.

• Masoud Barzani, president of Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government, shifted away from calling for coalition partners arming the Kurdish Peshmerga directly; “How they will come and which way — that’s not as important as the fact that Peshmerga need the weapons to be there,” he said in a speech in Washington, DC.

• A new study on refugees and internally displaced people found that Iraq had the largest change in displacement last year, with 2.2 million people uprooted by the advance of the Islamic State; Syria has the worst displacement overall, where 7.6 million have fled violence in the country’s civil war.

• U.N. Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura is preparing to start his new diplomatic initiative this week to test for potential starting points for negotiations with a wide array of parties to the civil war.

• After three decades of exile, Syrian members of the Muslim Brotherhood are returning to rebel-held portions of the country to reestablish the movement’s credibility there.

-J. Dana Stuster

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