An Old Hand Is At Work in
Yemen's Bloody Civil War
Yemen is not Syria. But America’s skewed
comprehension of the Middle East has now
produced a remarkably similar scenario
By Robert Fisk
January 22, 2015 "ICH"
- "The
Independent"
- It’s all about the Saudis. No matter
how complex the new Yemeni civil war may
appear – nor how powerful the Houthi rebels
have become in the capital of Sanaa – it’s
the Zaidi sect of Shiism which the Houthis
represent that frightens the Sunni Wahabi
monarchy of Saudi Arabia, and not without
reason.
For more than five years, there has been
armed conflict between Saudi forces and the
Houthis, who at one point captured a low
mountain range inside the Saudi border. The
Saudis blame the usual suspects: Iran and
the Lebanese Hezbollah. The Houthis blame
the usual suspects: the Sunnis of Yemen and
their Saudi supporters along – you guessed
it – with the United States.
But like every crisis in the Middle East,
the Yemen conflict, which has followed
almost seamlessly from the civil war that
brought Nasser’s Egyptian army into conflict
with the Yemeni royal family - which was
supported by the Saudis - is a little more
nuanced than news dispatches might suggest.
Indeed, Yemen’s first independent ruler was
a Shia Zaidi – not a Sunni - who extended
his territory over much of northern Yemen
between the world wars.
The Imam Yahya was head of the Zaidi sect,
whose beliefs and worship have almost as
much in common with Sunni Islam as they do
with Shiism, but he struggled against the
Saudis when they seized Asir and Najran from
what Yahya called “historic Yemen”.
Oxford scholar Euegen Rogan has described
the ruthlessness of Yahya’s successor, his
son Ahmed, who imprisoned and executed his
rivals, opened diplomatic relations with the
Soviet Union and China but then found
himself confronted by Nasser’s call for the
overthrow of “feudal regimes” in the Middle
East.
Ahmad was not averse to condemning Arab
socialism in verse (stealing private
property was “a crime against Islamic law”).
When Ahmed’s son Badr was overthrown in a
military coup, Nasser supported the new
republic and the Saudis sought to destroy
it, supporting the Shia Zaidi rebels.
The sad story of Yemen’s partition and
eventual (and unhappy) unity, of Sanaa’s
33-year history of dictatorial rule under
Ali Abdullah Saleh - himself a Shia Zaidi -
and then the inevitable minority claims of
disenfranchisement, meant that the Arab
awakening – a bloody ‘spring’ indeed in
Yemen – would open still-painful wounds.
Saleh’s departure was to produce a new
constitution unsatisfactory to the Houthis.
The Saudis now feared that the Shia rebels
of the north, named after Hussein Badreddin
al-Houthi, the Zaidi leader killed in 2004,
were supported by Iran and thus – given
their own substantial Shia minority – a
threat to the stability of the Kingdom
itself.
Many were the Saudi claims of Iranian and
Lebanese Hezbollah support for the Houthis –
and many were the denials of Iran and the
Hezbollah – but the growth of al-Qaeda’s
Yemeni faction (following, of course, the
same Salafist-Wahabi beliefs as Saudi Arabia
itself) brought inevitable United States
military involvement.
US drone strikes in Yemen, largely
unmonitored by the West’s media, were
directed against al-Qaeda, supposedly on
behalf of the Saudi-supported Yemeni
government. But in December 2009, Houthi
spokesmen began to catalogue a series of US
raids against their own forces, including 29
air raids which killed 120 people in
northern Yemeni cities.
The Houthi advance on Sanaa divided the
government army’s strength - since it was
now battling al-Qaeda (on behalf of the
Americans) and the Houthis (on behalf of the
Saudis). Al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula
moved north to fight the Houthis, garnering
Sunni support as it did so.
Yemen is not Syria. But America’s skewed
comprehension of the Middle East has now
produced a remarkably similar scenario:
instead of the US trying to destroy both the
Shia Alawite Assad regime and its Sunni Isis
enemies in Syria, it now appears anxious to
crush the Shia Zaidi Houthis and their Sunni
al-Qaeda enemies in Yemen. The Saudis would
have it no other way.
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