WASHINGTON — The Department of Defense announced on Sunday that it had transferred five lower-level Yemeni detainees from the Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba to the United Arab Emirates. The United States had held each for nearly 14 years as wartime prisoners, and none had been charged with a crime.

The transfers reduced the detainee population at the prison to 107. As many as 17 other proposed transfers of lower-level detainees are in the bureaucratic pipeline, an official familiar with internal deliberations said.

The resettlement of the Yemeni detainees was the first of its kind to the United Arab Emirates, which had previously taken in just one former Guantánamo detainee, in 2008 — its own citizen.

For years, the Obama and George W. Bush administrations had held out hope that the political and security climate of Yemen would stabilize enough that the dozens of lower-level Yemenis detained at Guantánamo could be repatriated there. Over the last few years, however, the United States has begun persuading other countries to take in small batches of that group instead.