Yemen’s road to perdition
While the world was carefully observing the drama in Syria and Iraq, new conflict arose 2,500 kilometers away in Yemen. This should not come as a surprise knowing that the poorest Arab country has been facing long periods of instability and internal ethnic and political clashes paving the road to a war which seriously threatens to endanger regional security especially in the sense of regional rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Military intervention launched on 25 March, signifies a new dangerous chapter in the Arab world.
Throughout its history, Yemen has witnessed a chain of conflicts and instability due to unequal access to power and struggle for limited recourses – oil and water. Nowadays, insecurity and sectarian clashes in the already impoverished state, where around half of the population lives below the poverty line, make conditions ideal for the incubation of extremism in the form of Al Qaeda and ISIS especially among Sunnis. “The fundamental problem is that Yemen is not a nation state; it has never been a nation-state; and it will never be a nation-state,” says Dr. Roby C. Barrett, president of consulting firm specializing in defense and security technology applications and systems and senior advisor to the Board of Directors of the Bilateral US-Arab Chamber of Commerce.
“One should look at Yemen as a geographic place that is always in a state of civil war, it is merely a question of intensity. No one ever controlled the area drawn on the map that we call Yemen. Right now the pot is boiling as it did multiple times in the last 100 years,” Dr. Barret tells bq.
Since the civil war last September, after UN sponsored political dialogue completely failed, Houthi rebels, who become most powerful and organized faction in Yemen, stormed the capitol city of Sana’a, continuing their campaign in other parts of the country. Yemeni think-tank Abaad Centre for Strategic Studies indicated Houthi rebels control about 70 percent of the army’s capabilities. They completely isolated and later overthrew internationally recognized president Abd-Rabbuh Mansour Hadi who found refuge in the coastal city of Aden and then Riyadh.
Although Houthis participated in the National Dialogue Conference (NDC) led by President Hadi in February 2014, they were opposed to the plan which proposed the transition of Yemen to a federal country constituted from six regions as they believe such a solution would weaken their position in the country. Until March this year it was almost certain that the logical outcome would be a deal enforced between the weakened government led by president Hadi and Houthis. This would put aside all other players and it was believed that such solution would also be supported by international community, GCC and Iran, as this would be only way to counter the more active Al Qaeda. However, such forecasts were obviously too optimistic as the situation in the country escalated.
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