Poor, poor Yemen

Hopes for a solution to the crisis in Yemen after the cessation of air strikes announced by Riyadh last week turned out to be futile: fighting resumed with renewed vigor

A nightmare. Another Middle Eastern state is falling apart before our eyes. However, Yemen, strictly speaking, did not have time to become a real state. Neither under the Ottoman Empire, nor under the British in the south of the country, nor under the monarchy that fell in 1962 in the north, nor during the era of division into two independent countries in the 60-80s of the twentieth century, nor after the unification that occurred in May 1990. Governing Yemen is essentially impossible. You can only pretend that you are doing it. In many ways, this is a pre-feudal country. In it, the tribes and their associations play an immeasurably more significant role than the state apparatus. Positions in it, in any case, are also distributed according to the principle of tribal loyalty.

I served in North Yemen (officially the Yemeni Arab Republic) as a military interpreter in the second half of the 1980s, under President Ali Abdullah Saleh. Then there were two threats for foreigners in the country. The first is to be kidnapped on the high road for ransom. For a number of tribes, this was a kind of business. After negotiations between the central authorities and the representatives of the sheikh of the tribe, a ransom in the form of cash and several boxes of cartridges, as a rule, successfully solved the problem.

The second danger was to accidentally come under fire in the event of a coup d'état. The short history of post-monarchical and post-colonial Yemen is extremely rich in them. Saleh himself came to power in 1978 after the assassination of the previous president of the Yemeni Arab Republic, Ahmad al-Hashimi. In the very first weeks, he was faced with a new attempt at a putsch. After executing the conspirators, Saleh then sat in the presidency until 2012, when, as a result of a popular uprising, he had to give up power.

Until the second half of the 1990s, Islamic radicalism in Yemen did not particularly manifest itself. However, after the unification of the Soviet vassal state - the southern People's Democratic Republic of Yemen and the northern Yemeni Arab Republic (in fact - after the absorption of the PDRY by the "brothers" from the north), regional and tribal contradictions continued to tear the country apart. In 1994, she survived a brief civil war as the south tried to secede from the north. In addition, Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda have become happy to use Yemeni territory, virtually uncontrolled by anyone but tribal leaders, for their operations in the Arabian Peninsula. The fact that the bin Laden family comes from Hadhramawt, a province in southern Yemen, apparently also played a role in this. At the same time, the radical Shiite movement of the Hussites, not without the help of Iran, gained real military and political weight.

President Saleh has helped the United States fight al-Qaeda for more than a decade, with some success. However, Yemeni fatigue from his years of rule and corruption led to a popular uprising. Saleh was forced to leave, but remained in the country. He did not accept the loss of power. Being himself a Shia, he, according to some sources, sponsored the current Houthi uprising - along with the Tehran regime.

In fact, Yemen has become a battlefield between Saudi Arabia and Iran, the two main regional political players. After the Houthis captured the country's main city, Sana'a, the number of flights from Tehran to the capital's airport rose from zero to more than twenty a week. They are clearly not transporting tourists.

For Iran, control over Yemen is another step in the process of expanding influence in the Middle East. It is already significant in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq. Iranian control of Yemen will mean constant headaches for Saudi Arabia. There is little doubt that the mullah regime in Tehran will use such a magnificent springboard to destabilize the main US ally in the region. After all, a significant part of the Saudi-Yemeni border is simply absent - it is a desert. The military operation of Riyadh and its allies in Yemen is a desperate attempt to prevent the development of events in such a scenario.

The problem is that the only force with the real potential to stop the Iranian clientele in Yemen is al-Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State militants. Sunni radicals hate the Shiites, who are considered heretics, and will ruthlessly destroy them. At the same time, they do not give up the struggle for a world caliphate. Any outcome of the Yemeni war will most likely be deplorable for both the West and the Arabian monarchies. Poor, poor Yemen.