Last month the administration of President Donald Trump announced it was planning to add the movement to the U.S. list of foreign terrorist organizations.
The move has faced opposition from humanitarian groups who argue that it is counterproductive and could disrupt international aid efforts and UN-backed peace initiatives as the country, devastated by a Saudi-led war, approaches its sixth year of conflict.
Al-Busaidi said that David Schenker the U.S. Assistant Secretary of Near Eastern Affairs had brought up the possibility of the issue during a recent visit to Muscat.
"Yes, that was raised,” the Omani diplomat acknowledged according to a Reuters report, before adding "I don’t think there is a solution based on classifying or blockading one key player in that conflict and not bringing them to the negotiating table.”
Scott Paul, the humanitarian policy lead at Oxfam America, warned that terrorist designation of the Ansarullah movement would create a situation in which all aid work in Yemen would be criminalized, and no licenses or authorizations for aid work would be available.
Paul further emphasized that the U.S. government’s failure to issue licenses for humanitarian assistance to Somalia in 2011 led to a famine that took the lives of a quarter-million people in the Horn of Africa nation.
Saudi Arabia and a number of its regional allies launched their aggression against Yemen in March 2015 aimed at bringing the government of former president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi back to power and crushing the popular Ansarullah movement.
The U.S.-based Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), a nonprofit conflict-research organization, estimates that the war has claimed more than 100,000 lives.
The Ansarullah movement, backed by Yemeni armed forces, has been defending their country against the Saudi-led military aggression, preventing the aggressors from fulfilling the objectives of the atrocious war.
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