"

Yemen's multiple wars

A growing worry for the West

Dec 30th 2009 | CAIRO
From The Economist print edition

A tribal rebellion in the north and al-Qaeda elsewhere are jangling nerves

AFPAn al-Qaeda man preaches Yemeni jihad

STRUGGLING to fend off many threats, Yemen’s government has looked increasingly beleaguered. Yet over the past few weeks it has taken the initiative, scoring what amounts to a hat trick. In concert with neighbouring Saudi Arabia, Yemen’s air force has hammered rebellious tribesmen in the north. Some reports claim that the leader of the uprising, Abdul Malik al-Houthi, was among those who have been killed. Security forces have also raided al-Qaeda targets in the south and centre of the country, killing several commanders and arresting others, in their most sustained offensive yet against the jihadists.

That campaign parried a third dangerous challenge. Foreign donors have grumbled that their crucial support for the government has not been matched by action, even as evidence accumulates that Yemen’s rugged fringes have become a secure base for jihadist terrorism. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian student who tried to down an American airliner with explosive underpants on Christmas Day, had been in Yemen since August. Al-Qaeda’s local affiliate claimed responsibility for his failed attack.

Yet in the context of Yemen’s complex politics, all these apparent gains come with caveats. Despite the army’s superior firepower and help from the far better-armed Saudis, little headway appears to have been made on the ground in the north. The Houthi rebels, an alliance of tribesmen who complain of state neglect and discrimination against the minority Zaydi Shia sect, have pressed their claims in a bitter, five-year-long guerrilla war that has generated more than 175,000 refugees.

The involvement of Saudi Arabia, a regional Sunni power whose dominance Yemenis tend to resent, simply adds to their grievances. Some Yemeni commentators, meanwhile, worry that a mooted ceasefire, whose terms Mr Houthi had apparently agreed on, could be postponed by his as-yet-unconfirmed demise. Others in the region fear that the Saudi intervention may draw the Iranians indirectly into the fray; they have already been accused, so far without independent corroboration, of arming and financing the Houthis.

Clobbering the jihadists

Bolder action against al-Qaeda may, however, have produced more solid gains. The government claims that five separate raids, including air attacks on December 17th against an alleged training camp in Abyan province and others on December 22nd and 24th that targeted jihadist conclaves in Shabwa province, have killed at least 60 fighters. Its says a further 29 are now in custody, including members of a suicide cell that had planned to hit the British embassy. Several of the alleged al-Qaeda people killed in the bombing raids belonged to the Awlaki tribe, so were kinsmen of Anwar al-Awlaki, a fugitive American-born Yemeni preacher who is accused of inspiring a killing spree by a Muslim American major in Texas in November.

These are big blows to al-Qaeda, considering that Yemen itself has, by the government’s own tally, suffered some 61 al-Qaeda attacks since 1992. Until recently, the state had shied from all-out conflict with the jihadists, adopting instead a carrot-and-stick approach that created such embarrassments as the suspiciously easy escape of 23 al-Qaeda convicts from a maximum-security prison in 2006. But early last year the group’s Saudi branch, many of whose members had fled to safety in Yemen, formally accepted Yemeni leadership under a new name: al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Since then it has launched numerous small-scale attacks against Yemeni security forces and has struck in Saudi Arabia too. And it appears to have secured tribal protection as well as some political backing from groups in southern Yemen which demand a repartition of the country, which was formed from two chunks in 1990.

More  . . .

"