The other insurgency

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May 2007
Headlines may be fixed on Iraq, but the Gulf's poorest relation is increasingly fractured and unstable.

It should have ended when Yemeni troops, supported by artillery and helicopter gunships, cut down rebel leader Hussein Badreddine al-Houthi, a firebrand cleric of Yemen's Zaidi Shi'ite sect, his brother and 20 of their followers in a doomed last stand in their mountain stronghold. But the rebellion has dragged on.

And now, nearly three years after the rambunctious al-Houthi fell in a fusillade of gunfire on September 10, 2004, that climaxed ten weeks of bitter fighting, the government of President Ali Abdullah Saleh is still battling to crush al-Houthi's insurgency in the rugged highlands of Sa'dah province in northwestern Yemen. This mountain skirmish, which military sources say has cost impoverished Yemen an estimated $800 million, flared up again in late January, ending a truce that had largely held since March 2006. At that time Saleh's government had released some 600 captured rebels under an amnesty in hopes of mollifying the rebels known as al-Shahab al-Moumin (the Youthful Believers).

But what had started back in June 2004 as one more tribal rebellion against the central government in Sana'a and its support for the United States appears to have taken on more sinister ideological overtones. Al-Houthi followers are threatening to widen the conflict to other provinces if the regime does not back off. That could seriously threaten what limited control Saleh has over his unruly land.

Al-Houthi's brother, Abdel Malik, who has taken over leadership of the powerful Zaidi clan, has said the militants are now fighting under the banner of a new organization, the Mujahedeen Group. Its slogan, he says, is "God the Greatest ... Death to America and Israel ... Victory for Islam and Muslims." There is no indication that this group is linked to Al-Qaeda. Indeed, the Sunni Salafists of Osama bin Laden's ever-expanding global network are bitter foes of the Shi'ites, as can be seen in Iraq.

Strongmen
And this seems to be part of the problem. The al-Houthis belong to the Sa'dah tribal group (the name means superior people who refuse to be dominated) of the Zaidi Shi'ites, who comprise about 20 percent of Yemen's 30 million people. Saleh himself hails from the Zaidite community, like all northern strongmen before him, and participated in the overthrow of the Zaidi imamate in Sana'a on September 26, 1962. He belongs to the Sanhan tribe of the Hashid federation, the most extensive and influential tribal grouping in predominantly Sunni Yemen. But he cannot claim descent from the Prophet Mohammed as Hussein al-Houthi could.

"The Sa'dah rebellion highlights a split within the Zaidi Shite elite," says Australian scholar Sarah Phillips, who has written extensively on Yemeni politics. After earlier clashes, Saleh called on al-Houthi's forces to disarm, but was rebuffed. Now he says they must surrender unconditionally - or die. The al-Houthis claim that Sana'a is seeking to promote Salafism in Sa'dah, an encroachment they virulently reject. They want to see the restoration of the old imamate, which Saleh helped overthrow and which they believe to be the legitimate authority. They also oppose Saleh's post-9/11 alliance with the US.

Saleh views the insurrection as a challenge to his regime, and claims the al-Houthis seek to dislodge him from power. He accuses the rebels of being "ignorant forces of darkness who have adopted deviant terrorist and racist ideas." Saleh has enjoyed a long and often bloody political career, surviving countless intrigues and plots. He has held power in Sana'a since June 1978 - which makes him the second longest reigning Arab ruler after Colonel Muammar Gadhafi of Libya. He rules through the military, which he heads - as he does the judiciary, the ruling General People's Congress party (GPC), and an extensive intelligence apparatus. But he depends heavily on the support of tribal groupings, so crushing the Zaidi rebellion is essential if he is to retain control and for his ambitions of Yemen, the Arabian Peninsula's most populous nation, joining the GCC.

The rebellion, with its complex mix of political and sectarian grievances, is far from the major confrontations taking place in the region and barely registers on the region's political seismographs. But a tribal rebellion on this scale is the last thing that Saleh needs as he struggles to implement an ambitious reform program that he hopes will attract desperately needed foreign investment, particularly from the US and Europe.

Old enmities
Yemen has always been difficult to govern. The Ottoman Turks and the British, who at different times occupied parts of the country, found it prudent to leave the more unruly regions alone. The insurgency in Sa'dah, some 250 kilometers north of the ancient capital of Sana'a, is the bloodiest internal conflict in Yemen since a six-week north-south civil war in mid-1994. Accurate casualty figures are difficult to come by. But in February, Ali Mohammed al-Ansi, the national security chief, said that some 730 government troopers had been killed and nearly 5,300 wounded since mid-2004. Tribal losses are believed to run into the hundreds.

The military offensive currently underway is the third government crackdown on the rebellious Shi'ite tribesmen since June 2004. A prolonged and bloody war with the Zaidi tribesmen could upset the delicate sectarian and tribal balance that keeps Saleh's ruling GPC in power. Some believe al-Houthi's rebellion is morphing into a sectarian conflict, an extension of the slaughter waged by rival Sunni and Shi'ite militants in Iraq and the brewing confrontation between the Muslim sects in Lebanon.

Saleh accuses Tehran of sponsoring the rebellion as part of its expanding effort to project its power across the region. Tehran denies that, and there are suspicions that Saleh finds it politically expedient to invoke the Iranian threat to keep the Americans and international aid donors on his side. There are also allegations that Gadhafi in Libya is resorting to his old ways by backing the rebels as well. The Libyans harbor al-Houthi's brother, Yahya, a former member of Yemen's parliament who fled in 2005. But Tripoli has refused Sana'a's repeated requests to extradite him.

The jihadists appear to have regrouped in Yemen after a string of setbacks, in part due to US special forces and CIA operating in Yemen with Saleh's security services. A series of attacks on key oil facilities in the north and the Hadramaut region in the south along the Arabian Sea coast in September marked the first systematic terrorist operations against multiple targets in Yemen since the 2002 bombing of the French oil tanker Limburg near the al-Shihr oil terminal on the country's southern coast.

Escalation
It was also the first coordinated use of suicide car bombs in Yemen and was thus a significant escalation in jihadist depredations. The plan was clearly to cripple the country's vital oil industry and it was only the clumsy execution of the operation that prevented serious damage. Four attackers perished. Further attacks against economic targets are likely despite a government crackdown. Several important jihadists were captured or killed. Among them were Fawaz al-Rabai and Mohammed al-Daylami, two of 23 Al-Qaeda suspects who tunneled out of a supposedly heavily guarded prison in central Sana'a in February 2006 - a breakout widely seen as engineered by sympathizers in the Political Security Organization (PSO), the main Yemeni intelligence service, which runs that prison.

Like most institutions in this ancient land, the PSO has been thoroughly penetrated by Islamists and their sympathizers and this has the Americans tearing their hair out at what they see as Yemen's ambiguous attitude toward fighting global terror. But Saleh cannot afford to alienate Yemen's Islamists.

Saleh was a staunch ally of the late Saddam Hussein, many of whose former army officers have found employment in Yemen. Indeed, Saddam once presented Saleh with a gold-plated AK-47 as a token of his appreciation for standing foursquare behind him over the invasion of Kuwait. Iraqi fighter pilots flew for Saleh's forces in the 1994 war.

But the Yemeni leader, reelected in September 2006 for a third seven-year term as president of a united Yemen (after declaring he would not run again) has undergone a serious transformation since 9/11. He has become an enthusiastic Bush ally in the war against terrorism - an alliance that did a lot to secure more than $5 billion in aid from Europe and the Gulf states at a donors' conference in London in November 2006.

However, Saleh's security problems just keep getting worse. In recent months there has been an influx of Islamic militants from Somalia, across the Gulf of Aden, which is plagued by pirates and smugglers. The militants were driven out of anarchy-ridden Somalia by Ethiopian troops supported by US special forces in what was seen as an effort to prevent Al-Qaeda setting up shop there.

Saleh's efforts to crack down on Yemen's prolific gunrunners, who are providing Somalia's Islamic fighters with arms, have done little to staunch the extensive trade in weapons by Yemeni networks. More and more, Western and Arab security sources say, Yemen is becoming a focal point for radical Islamists seeking military training because of counter-terrorist crackdowns in their home countries, such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Yemen is a good jumping-off spot for Iraq, Somalia and East Africa.

"Yemen's the new Wild West," said one source.

By Ed Blanche, Beirut

© Arabies Trends 2007