^{Originally published under the title, "Yemen Joins List of Collapsed Mideast States."}

Houthi rebels stationed at an entrance to Yemen's presidential palace on January 22

This week in Yemen, an Iran-backed Shia militia captured the presidential palace. The president has since resigned. It was the latest stage in the slow advance of the Houthis, who entered the capital Sana'a in September of last year.
The latest Houthi victories do not bring the Shia rebels undisputed control of the country. They do, however, ensure the undisputed presence of the Iranian clients in the central government.

The situation in Yemen exemplifies in acute form most of the phenomena which are currently tearing much of the Middle East apart: the fragmentation and weakness of central governments; growing sectarian divisions; the presence and power of a strong, Iranian backed political-military force; the importance of local and tribal power structures; Saudi support for the Sunnis; and the existence of a powerful Sunni Jihadi organization, committed both to local struggle and to terrorism against the West.

The latest Houthi victories ensure the undisputed presence of Iranian clients in the central government of Yemen.

The uprising of the Houthis was launched in 2004. The movement derived its popular support from the 30% or so of Yemenis who belong to the Zaidi Shia community, concentrated in the north of the country.
While protesting undoubted discrimination against the Shia, the evidence of Iranian backing for the Houthi militia — officially known as "Ansarullah" (fighters of God) — was apparent from the outset. The stance of the Houthis is reflected in the group's unambiguous slogan: "God is Great, Death to America, Death to Israel, a Curse on the Jews, Victory to Islam."

The physical proof of Iranian aid is also apparent. On January 23, 2013, the Yemeni coast guard apprehended an Iranian ship — the Jihan 1 — which was carrying weapons, explosives, and other military equipment from the Revolutionary Guards Corps intended for delivery to the Houthis.
As of this week, the Houthis have an accepted role in the government of Yemen. After fighters of the militia surrounded the presidential palace, President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi confirmed the terms of an agreement signed after the Houthis entered the capital last September.

The disputed terms relate to a new constitution, to which the Houthis are demanding amendments. This is less important, however, than the now demonstrated fact that the Shia, Iran-backed militia is the real force in the capital, able to bend the president to its will after killing a number of his guards and threatening his palace.

Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula remains the most formidable local franchise of the global al-Qaeda network.

The Houthis are not, of course, the only militia force active in Yemen. Further south, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) remains the most formidable local franchise of the global al-Qaeda network. It claimed responsibility for the recent terror attack on the offices of the Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris.

Strong in southern and central Yemen, al-Qaeda has launched a campaign of violence against the Houthis. It also strikes at government and military officials. Operating under the name of Ansar al-Sharia, AQAP now effectively controls a number of provinces in the south and east of the country.
The presence of the Houthis in the capital and the Sunni jihadis in the lawless territories to its south is compounded by the weakness and corruption of the central government, which barely exists outside of Sana'a, and now only exists within it by the grace of a pro-Iranian Shia militia.

The central government barely exists outside of Sana'a, and now only exists within it by the grace of a pro-Iranian Shia militia.

There are no easy solutions in Yemen. As of now, the U.S. is continuing with pinpointed strikes against AQAP, while largely preferring to ignore the no-less-potent threat of the Houthis. This relates, presumably, to the Obama administration's larger policy of outreach to Iran. But in practice, there is probably little the U.S. or any other outside force can do.

The issues at stake in Yemen are the product of the profound failure of the Arab state which underlies all that is taking place in the Middle East today. The U.S. experience in the 2003-11 period in Iraq shows that nation-building from the outside is not going to succeed.

Fascinatingly, it is the Arab state, not the Middle Eastern state, which is in a process of eclipse. Israel, Turkey, and Iran, in their different ways, are functioning sovereign entities. Kurdish Northern Iraq is also increasingly coming to resemble a successful semi-sovereign concern. The Kurdish enclaves in the northeast are the most peaceful and best administered parts of the former Syria.

But from the Mediterranean coast, via Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and now down to Yemen, there is a single line of non-functioning (or in the Lebanese case, barely functioning) territories, in which the state has given way to wars between rival successor entities, usually organized on a sectarian basis. The Houthis and AQAP are the local Yemeni variant of this.

The Arab states which have not collapsed are ones which are homogenous in sectarian terms and/or possessed of a powerful, dictatorial central government. There are two states — Egypt and Jordan — where a real chance existed of jihadis gaining a foothold in the way that they have in Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon, but where this has not yet taken place. In both cases, an authoritarian central government at the head of a strong state apparatus has prevented the jihadis from establishing their mini-emirates (though in Sinai, the battle is surely still on).

Can these authoritarian regimes be a model for the future of the region, or are they simply a guarantee of its further stagnation? Perhaps the latter. But for the moment and for the foreseeable future, the choice is between leaders like Sisi, or situations like that of Yemen. Authoritarian clients, or the Houthis and al-Qaeda. No third way has yet made itself apparent.

Jonathan Spyer is a senior research fellow at the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, and a fellow at the Middle East Forum. He is the author of The Transforming Fire: The Rise of the Israel-Islamist Conflict (Continuum, 2011).

Labels: Al- Qaeda, Islamism, Jihad, Shiites, Yemen

posted by Pieface @ Sunday, January 25, 2015

Obama said only that the strategy under preparation won’t be ready before next month.

debkafile’s counter-terrorism sources note that until then, and until Kerry’s coalition of nations comes together and decides what to do, Al Qaeda’s IS’s campaign of bloody atrocities and conquests will remain unchecked. And so will the spread of what the British Prime Minister David Cameron called, in a special news conference Friday, “the poisonous ideology of Islamist extremism.”

Cameron warned that, while there was much talk about the threat to Europe of returning home-grown Islamists, “IS is already here.” The return of at least 500 people from fighting in Syria and Iraq "for Islamic State extremists attempting to establish a caliphate” represented a "greater and deeper threat to our security than we have known before.”

New laws, said the British premier, would make it easier to take passports away from people traveling abroad to join the conflict.

Announcing the elevation of the UK terror threat from “substantial” to “severe,” Cameron cited the example of the British Islamist who took part in the beheading of the American journalist James Foley on Aug. 18.

He also confirmed that Al Qaeda’s Islamic State perpetrated the May 24 attack on the Jewish Museum of Brussels, in which the Israeli couple, Emanuel and Miriam Riva, was murdered  - as further evidence that Islamist terror was already loose on the streets of Europe.

He was the first prominent world leader to assign the Brussels attack to Al Qaeda, which Israeli officials have so far avoided doing.

The "severe" threat level was imposed in the UK only twice before: in 2006 after the discovery of liquid bombs aimed at airliners and when, the following year, extremists attempted to bomb Glasgow Airport and London's West End.

Friday, IS released another indescribable video showing the beheading of a Kurdish soldier among 15 captured Peshmerga in orange boiler suits, who were grouped before a Mosul mosque. It was labeled “2nd Message to America” and threatened to execute the entire group if Iraqi Kurdistan continued to cooperate with the United States.

Just a few hours earlier, footage was shown of the mass execution of 300 Syrian soldiers forced to run through the desert in their underwear. They were said to have been taken prisoner at the Syrian air base of Tabqa.

Those barbaric scenes were flashed across the world by international media.

Less noticed was the video tape released on Thursday, Aug. 28, by Al Qaeda’s Sinai branch, Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis, which showed the beheading of four local citizens and their admission that they had collaborated with Israeli intelligence to identify targets for Egyptian and Israeli air raids. This tape runs 30 minutes.

Egyptian security sources said the four had been abducted Tuesday near the northern Sinai town of Sheikh Zuwaid.

And not far away, in the Gaza Strip, Hamas last week summarily executed 29 alleged collaborators with Israeli intelligence, three of them women, and seven in a public square.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has characterized Hamas as belonging to the same family of murderous extremists as the Islamic State. Israel did indeed fight a limited, inconclusive war on the Palestinian fundamentalists, but no order has gone out for an operation to rescue the 43 Fiji members of the UN Disengagement Observer Force, who were abducted by the Syrian Al Qaeda Nusra Front just 150 meters from its Golan border.

UNDOF policed the Golan buffer zone for 40 years until it was overrun in the fighting between Syrian insurgents including Islamists and the Syrian army. So far there have been no executions, but the danger to the observers is ever present.

Saturday, Saudi sources reported that Qatar had undertaken to broker their release from Nusra on behalf of the UN. Israel, which spurned Qatar in the role of middleman for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, now finds the emirate, which champions Islamist terrorists in the Middle East, assigned a task in its northern back yard. An IDF rescue operation would have prevented this intervention, as well as delivering a timely, preemptive blow to Al Qaeda fighters sitting on Israel’s borders.

It would also have gone far toward muting the many Israeli critics of their government’s decision to curtail the 50-day Gaza operation by a truce, before Hamas was finished off for good.

Bur after the IDF campaign against Hamas, the Israeli prime minister was ready to line up with Western leaders, who make speeches about the horrors of the Islamist extremists and shore up their defenses, while at the same time avoiding putting their hands in the wasps’ nest and their boots on the ground, for tackling them in their Middle East lairs. “Coalitions” and “allies” are assigned the brunt of this mission.

Hoping against hope to jerk them into action, Saudi King Abdullah Saturday issued a wake-up call. He asked Western foreign ambassadors summoned to his palace in Jeddah to convey an urgent message to their leaders: Terrorism at this time is an evil force that must be fought with wisdom and speed," said King Abdullah. "And if neglected I'm sure after a month it will arrive in Europe and a month after that in America."

Labels: Al- Qaeda, Defence, ISIS, Islamists, Israel, Middle East, Security, Terror, United States

posted by Pieface @ Saturday, August 30, 2014