SANAA/RIYADH: Weeks after seizing Yemen’s southern port, Aden, members of a Saudi-led military coalition and the local fighters it supports say they are poised to oust Iranian-allied Houthi forces from the capital Sana’a.
But Al Qaeda militants appear to be using the coalition’s gains against the Houthis in the south to entrench their position, as fractures start to show between local groups of fighters with the departure of their common enemy.
The prospect of returning exiled President Abd-Rabbu Mansur Hadi remains distant, five months after an advance on his Aden bolthole by the Houthis, who overran the capital a year ago from their northern base, triggered the Saudi-led intervention.
At stake is not just who will rule Yemen, which regional power will hold sway and whether its persistent jihadist threat can be ended, but its future as a single state after centuries of tribal disputes and regional divisions.
Saudi Arabia and its allies want to maintain the state created in 1990 by the merger of the old north and south Yemen, say informed diplomats, but as anger grows over the humanitarian cost, the possibility of division appears to be growing.
“In the absence of a political settlement the battle for Sanaa will be long, brutal, and deadly with no obvious winner. A failure to retake Sanaa by Hadi’s camp is likely to lead to a de facto partition of Yemen,” said Ibrahim Fraihat, senior political analyst at Brookings Doha Centre.
Such a settlement still looks elusive, with each side attempting to escalate the fighting since the fall of Aden.
Reuters
