Yet Another Mideast Country on the Edge of Revolt
Quick: You’re a newspaper editor or tv producer trying to decide which big story to lead off with. Libya under attack? Tokyo trying to quell a nuclear disaster? Headline events are overtaking each other so fast that the 9,000-and-climbing death toll from Japan’s tsunami and the revolutionary changes in Egypt and Tunisia are back-page news.
That’s why you may have missed this item: Another long-standing Middle Eastern government—a key American ally in the fight against al Qaeda—looks ready to fall.
This is big. The implications are dramatic. This event, in addition to being a blow to America and a potential boon to terrorists, would likely challenge the region’s balance of power by pitting its two biggest powers—Saudi Arabia and Iran—against each other all the more.
The country is Yemen.
Remember Yemen? Just about a year ago, this country on the southern rump of the Arabian Peninsula received heavy coverage for its growing terrorist activity. Al Qaeda, on the run in Iraq, has turned it into its new home base. The cia now lists al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch as America’s most urgent security threat. The Fort Hood shooter had ties in Yemen; the Christmas 2009 “underwear bomber” was trained there. More recently, last October Yemenis were behind some parcel bombs sent to American synagogues.
Washington has sent hundred of millions’ worth of security and humanitarian aid to Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, for help in combating these terrorist elements—and Saleh has obliged in spite of how it has hurt his reputation locally. A few months back, when WikiLeaks released a cable showing he had given the U.S. permission to bomb al Qaeda targets and said he would claim Yemeni forces were doing the bombing, it rocked his already deteriorating standing among his people.
As revolutionary forces have swept the region in recent months, the pressure on Saleh’s government has intensified. In late January, protesters began calling for the president to leave, and quickly grew into crowds of tens of thousands. Like Hosni Mubarak, Saleh first tried to appease them by making concessions, promising reforms, raising military salaries, and agreeing not to run for office again. But the protests only grew, and government forces began to push back. Demonstrations turned increasingly violent.
By the beginning of this month, the crowds had swelled into the hundreds of thousands. After accusations emerged that government forces were firing at protesters, a trickle of officials within the ruling party began to resign. Ugly tit-for-tat violence continued to ramp up—until, last week, it exploded in what some have called the “Friday massacre.” Snipers—Saleh claims he knows not who—opened fire on antigovernment protesters, killing about 50 unarmed people and wounding over 200.
This brutal show of force looks like it will mark the end of President Saleh’s 32-year reign.
Friday’s bloodbath inspired a torrent of high-level defections among Saleh’s ruling party, including three ministers, over 40 members of parliament, and a handful of ambassadors and diplomats. More ominously, a number of military leaders have switched their allegiance to back the revolution, including three of the country’s five military zone commanders. The most powerful is Brig. Gen. Ali Muhsin al-Ahmar, the country’s strongest military figure after the president. Until Monday, he commanded the First Armored Division and the northwestern military zone. Now, he has joined the revolution.
Many of Yemen’s armed forces are now squaring off with security forces loyal to the president. Suddenly the country is in serious danger of erupting into full-scale civil war.
The consensus is that Saleh must go. But who or what will take his place? That is truly a troubling question.
Yemen is a mess—plagued with a failing economy, an oil infrastructure in decline, epic unemployment and widespread poverty. It is deeply divided along tribal lines. The Shiite uprising in the north is mirrored by a secessionist movement in the south. No single person or party appears capable of garnering any kind of consensus support, and it seems all possibilities for future governance threaten to shift the country further toward chaos or radicalism. Ali Muhsin, for example, has a strong Islamist history, and the expectation that he will make a push to lead the country has many observers alarmed of the direction he would take it. Other tribal leaders have designs on more power and could make the transition to a new government even messier.
Underlining all of that is this unpleasant reality: Saleh was virtually Yemen’s only restraint against both al Qaeda and the Shiite revolt. When he is gone, both of these movements are almost certain to expand, even flourish.
And evidence shows that both have been aided, encouraged and underwritten by Iran.
The drama playing out in Yemen must be viewed in light of how much the unrest throughout the region is playing into Iran’s hands, aiding its goal for regional supremacy. When the smoke clears, Tehran stands to gain a valuable ally in Egypt; it looks to end up with a favorable outcome in Libya; it is playing the situation in Bahrain beautifully to its advantage. A surge in radicalism within Yemen—which would likely occur even in the event of a power vacuum—would represent a formidable quartet of strategic losses to American and Western interests, and gains, to one degree or another, for the Islamic Republic and the forces of Islamic extremism. Proof abounds within each of these theaters of Iran influencing and manipulating events to serve its own purposes.
Factor in Iran’s significant leverage in Lebanon, Syria, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Iraq and Afghanistan, and you have to hand it to the mullahs: They are on the march, and no one looks prepared to stop them.
Amid the flurry of earthshaking headlines, keep an eye on Yemen! It is vividly highlighting the Bible’s prophecy of the Iranian “king of the south” pushing its way into a war that will engulf the whole region—and eventually the world.
