Tearing Yemen apart As clashes revive fears of a Saudi Arabia-Iran proxy war, the US is focused on al-Qaida's presence in a troubled nation Renewed fighting in northern Yemen between government and rebel forces is feeding fears that a Middle Eastern proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran is spreading to the ungoverned spaces of the southern Arabian peninsula. But western analysts are staring boggle-eyed at quite a different spectre: the prospect that the biggest beneficiaries of Yemeni weakness will be the fanatical jihadis of al-Qaida. UN agencies raised the alarm last week after 55,000 people, mostly women and children, fled clashes in and around Sa'ada city in northern Yemen between the forces of President Ali Abdullah Saleh's Sunni-led government and the Zaydi Shia followers of Sayyid Abd al-Malik al-Houthi. The exodus brought to 150,000 the number of people rendered homeless since July by a conflict that rekindled in 2004 but whose roots reach back to 1962. The UN complained that its $23m emergency appeal launched on 2 September "has not yet received a single cent" despite the refugees' acute need. "Internally displaced people from Sa'ada governorate who fled to Amran arrived traumatised and exhausted, having spent three to five days walking in the desert," the UN said. Access to the remote area was hazardous and attempts were under way to open a humanitarian corridor from Saudi Arabia. Yet according to the Houthi rebels, the Saudis are part of the problem. Claiming Riyadh is arming and supporting government forces, they issued a video last week purporting to show captured Saudi mortars. They also claim to have been bombed by Saudi jets. "We are placing before everyone the fact of direct Saudi support," a rebel statement said. "The regime has ceded sovereignty [and] delivered the country to foreign interests." Saudi Arabia denies the charges. Saleh's government in turn accuses Iran and its Iraqi Shia ally Muqtada al-Sadr of backing the Houthis, who say they want greater autonomy. They also oppose the spread of Saudi-inspired Wahhabi teaching – an ostensibly reasonable aim given the links between Wahhabism and Sunni extremism. Saleh told al-Jazeera television that unnamed Iranians were in direct communication with the rebels and had funded secret "cells" within Yemen's security apparatus. Iran's ambassador to Yemen was recently warned of "negative consequences" should Iranian media continue "to be a tool in the hands of the subversives in Sa'ada". Saudi Arabia's concerns about its neighbour's plight go beyond northern instability. Reviving separatist tendencies in southern Yemen are combining with shrinking national earnings (caused by declining oil revenues), high male unemployment, corruption, kidnapping and a chronic water shortage to undermine the central government's ability to hold the country together. Last month's assassination attempt on a Saudi minister was launched from Yemen. For its part, Iran believes it has good reason to be suspicious of the Yemeni government's pro-western stance, suspicions stoked last week by a visit to Sana'a by John Brennan, the White House's counter-terrorism chief. Ignoring the complex nuances of the war in the north, Brennan delivered a letter from Barack Obama declaring that "the security of Yemen is vital for the security of the United States" – a surprisingly brash commitment – and promised increased US and international assistance. Obama stressed partnership in confronting the "common threat" posed by al-Qaida and Islamic extremism in general. "Even if the actual foreign material support in Yemen's civil strife is minimal, the conflict is probably the newest front in a broadening proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia," said Robert Haddick of Small Wars Journal. "Lebanon is one front. Iranian attempts to gain influence over Shia populations in eastern Saudi Arabia, Iraq and the Persian Gulf is another." Now Yemen must be added to the list, he said, with Saudi officials nervous that Tehran's ultimate aim was control over Red Sea shipping lanes. All this is worrying enough for the Obama administration and allies such as Britain with its own colonial era links to Aden. But as Brennan's mission suggested, al-Qaida's ongoing, apparently successful effort to establish a regional base in Yemen, taking advantage of a weak, distracted government, remains Washington's uppermost concern. "Only Pakistan's tribal regions rival Yemen as a terrorist Shangri-La," the Wall Street Journal commented recently. Osama bin Laden was of Yemeni extraction, while about 100 Yemenis were held in Guantánamo Bay, it noted. It went on to quote Yemen's estimate that up to 1,500 al-Qaida-linked jihadis are based in the country – including Nasir al-Wahayshi, al-Qaida's "emir of the Arabian peninsula" and Jamal al-Badawi, wanted for his role in the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Aden harbour. The editorial accused Saleh of double-dealing, by pursuing "a tacit non-aggression pact" with al-Qaida that allowed him to deal with other challenges. "If left unaddressed Yemen's problems could potentially destabilise Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states," warned author Christopher Boucek in a new report for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "The inability of the Yemeni central government to fully control its territory will create space for violent extremists to regroup and launch attacks against domestic and international targets. The international community must be realistic about the limitations of intervention in Yemen. In the near term, however, inaction is not an option." http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/14/yemen-al-qaida-saudi-arabia-iran
Mer 16 Sep 2009 - 5:42