Yemeni sources said that Saudi Arabia started deporting hundreds of Yemeni soldiers from its southern border areas after they organized protests against mistreatment and failure to pay their salaries for several months, and demanded that they be returned to Yemen.
The sources added that these soldiers were fighting the Houthis in border areas adjacent to the Yemeni province of Saada, and that the Saudi authorities held them in quarantine in a school for 14 days in light of the outbreak of the Corona epidemic, before transporting them on buses to Yemen.
Sources said that about a dozen soldiers are still being held by Saudi intelligence on charges of inciting their colleagues to protest.
Dozens of Yemeni soldiers had left the frontlines and moved on foot marches towards the Saudi city of Al Ardha, near the border.
During the past weeks, hundreds of Yemeni recruits demonstrated in border areas in southern Saudi Arabia - including Jizan, Al-Rabwah and Sharurah - to protest the way they were treated by the Saudi leadership.
Some of the recruits said that Saudi Arabia had refused to grant them leave to visit their families two years ago, and that they had suspended their salaries since last October when they demanded that they be returned to their homes, and arrested a number of them.
Al-Jazeera obtained videos of Yemeni recruits in Jizan calling for their eviction from a building where Saudi forces are holding them, and the recruits called on the Yemeni government to intervene to end their detention.
Yemen has been witnessing an armed conflict since 2014 when the Houthis took control of Sanaa and rushed to other areas, before the escalation of battles with the intervention of Saudi Arabia at the head of a military alliance in March 2015 to fight the Iranian-backed Houthis.