Cover Story : Yemen Crisis : Struggle for Supremacy

Intro: The tussle for power between Shia-ruled Iran and Sunni-ruled Saudi Arabia, which shares a long border with Yemen, can have implications for the region and the security of the West.

Clichés are often based on stray facts and cannot be just wished away. But occasionally they get so distorted in re-telling that they have very little relevance to the truth. There is the Saudi led multi-country armed intervention using aerial attacks and naval bombardments in Yemen in support of the beleaguered President, Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi, who has recently fled the country, against the Iran supported Houthi Shia rebels who have taken over the capital Sana’a and threaten to overrun most of the country. This is being portrayed by the Saudis subtly as a Sunni defence against Shia attempts at supremacy. This standard myth of Shia-Sunni struggle is a grossly exaggerated version of what is actually playing out. But ever so often, myths have a tendency to have life mimic them so that the former prevails and the cliché gets vindicated. If this sounds confusing, this is because the conflict in Yemen is even more complex and confusing than is the norm in a region that has been the quagmire of many empires and empire-builders.

The norm of complexity in West Asia is the Syrian situation. Both the US and Assad want to stop the Islamic State (DAESH-Arabic acronym for Islamic State); in fact the US sees DAESH as a bigger challenge than al-Qaeda but the US will not make common cause with Assad because the Saudis want Assad to go, seeing him as an ally of Iran, who the Saudis see as their sworn enemy. And the USA does not want to alienate the Saudis just when the former are on the verge of concluding a nuclear deal with Iran that may well see a US-Iran detente. As an observer noted, in Syria and Iraq, the enemy of my enemy is my enemy, not my friend. Yemen is, by comparison, far more complicated.
How did the Yemen Crisis Begin?
The rise of the Houthis of North Yemen against the government, in recent times, started when the previous President, Ali Abdullah Saleh was in power. Saleh, an extremely corrupt and vicious ruler, was seen as an ally of foreign powers like the US, who were happy to assist him financially and militarily in return for allowing them to use Yemen as a base for the drone operations against al-Qaeda. The Houthis are Zaydi Shias, like Saleh and the current President, Hadi. Unlike the Iranians, who are ‘twelvers’ Shias believing in the 12 successors to Prophet Mohammed, the Zaydis are ‘fivers’, limiting their allegiance to the first five caliphs only. Both sects see the other as heretics, and the ‘fivers’ are quite close to Sunni Islam, coexisting for centuries in Yemen without any sectarian dispute.
In fact, during the civil war in the 1960s when Arab nationalism inspired by President Nasser of Egypt gripped the Arab world, the Imam, a Houthi from North Yemen who was the traditional ruler, was militarily supported by the Saudis against the ‘modernist, secular, nationalist’ forces of the South, who Egypt supported.
At one time, 70,000 Egyptian troops were fighting in Yemen, almost one third of the Egyptian army. It was the stinging defeat that Israel inflicted on the Arab armies of Egypt, Jordan and Syria in 1967 that ultimately led to the withdrawal of Egyptian forces from Yemen in 1968, and a peace agreement that abolished the 600 year old Imamate and established the Republic.
The Arab Spring of 2011 helped Yemen get rid of Saleh, who as part of the Saudi brokered agreement, moved to Riyadh and was replaced by Hadi, but the new government struggled to establish itself in the face of the rising power of al-Qaeda of the Arab peninsula. The failure to stabilise the situation was aggravated by the lack of inclusiveness in the political set up. The Houthi rebellion is direct fallout of both these factors, with the al-Qaeda identified as their primary target. In an interesting turn of events, exiled President Saleh reached out to the Houthis and brought his supporters from the Yemeni army to form a joint front against President Hadi. But the circle has not been squared yet. According to a UN report, Saleh as President negotiated with the al-Qaeda to hand over the Sayban province to them, so that he could use the al-Qaeda threat to get greater assistance from the US.
With so many players involved in Yemen – the US, al-Qaeda, Saudis and their Sunni Arab allies like UAE, Qatar, Egypt, Kuwait and Oman – the Iranians too entered the fray in support of their fellow Shiites. Lately, the Houthis have received arms and ammunition from Iran, which supply route has been the first target of the Saudi-led intervention. The US has directly supported the Saudi intervention by lifting the arms embargo it had imposed on Egypt, after the military-led violent coup defeat that overthrew the democratically elected President, Morsi of the Moslem Brotherhood. Since the coup, Egypt which faced political isolation and financial meltdown has become a virtual client state of Saudi Arabia that came to its rescue by rushing billions of dollars from its own, and that of fellow oil-producing Arab countries.
Qatar is the most surprising component of this unusual alliance. Long at loggerheads with Saudis and their allies over support to Islamic terror groups and extremists like al-Qaeda, Taliban, Hamas etc., with the nadir in relations reaching with the overthrow of President Morsi, Qatar too sees Iran as a primordial enemy that must be checkmated. This is reflected on its Syria too, where it has led the chorus on the need to overthrow President Assad by any means. Paradoxically, none of the anti-Assad brigade acknowledges that is their strategy to arm the anti-Assad that converted the Syrian situation into a Shia-Sunni conflict instead of just a desire by an oppressed people to replace the despot with a more representative political set-up. This allowed the Iranians space to move in by supporting Assad, thereby escalating the levels of violence and displacement. Worse, that it was the ensuing security vacuum and the easy availability of arms and ammunition that led to the creation and rise of the Islamic State.
No discussion on the role of foreign powers in Yemen is complete without reference to the ‘Garrison State’ Pakistan that sees itself as the defender of the ‘Islamic’ countries against unbelievers being the only nuclear power among them. Pakistan is facing tremendous pressure from Saudi Arabia, its regular economic benefactor, to send its armed forces to participate in the Yemen conflict. The Saudis have announced that Pakistan is on board, and have leaked reports that the Pakistan air force have participated in aerial assaults. On the other hand, the Pakistanis have been more circumspect, saying that they are considering the request. Very smartly, the Pakistani army has quietly moved into the background and left the onus on decision-making to the political ‘masters’, an unusual situation for the civilian government which is otherwise hostage to the army’s wishes in relations to all strategic matters, e.g. relations with India, Afghan policy, nuclear issues etc.
Saudi Arabia enjoys a special place in the Pakistani scheme of things, besides economic. Its rulers are the Custodians of the two Holy mosques, who regularly sit down and sort out internal and external issues. Millions of Pakistani work in Arab countries and send back billions in remittances that helps keep the country afloat. Saudi princes are exempt from Pakistani domestic laws when it comes to hunting rare and protected species. The Pakistani army has been deployed enough times to uphold domestic public order and to impose Saudi diktat in neighbouring countries, e.g. Jordan (1970), Bahrain (2011) etc. Nawaz Sharif owes his release from Musharraf’s imprisonment to Saudi intervention. Saudis hosted him in exile and re-injected him into the Pakistani political system, overruling Musharraf and the US. Thus it is not a surprise when an observer called the Pakistani army as ‘an army on hire’, and lately referred to Pakistan as ‘a country on hire’.
Yet it is difficult for Pakistani to intervene directly against Iran. The two countries share a long and unruly border, and an estimated 20 per cent of the Pakistani population is Shia. The Pakistani army sponsored Laskar-e-Taiba (LET) refuses to get into the Shia-Sunni dispute though there are other Sunni terrorist groups that target Shias. Shia groups in Pakistan look to Iran for moral support. Iran has, in fact, sent its intelligence cooperatives deep inside Pakistan to abduct anti-State Jundullah activists, who are all Sunnis from Sistan-Balochistan province of Iran.
Yemen itself is seeing increased violence. While the Houthis and their Yemeni army allies had captured the capital Sana’a some six months ago, lately they have swept southwards, reached Bab el-Mandeb at the mouth of the Red Sea and are now on the verge of taking over the historic port city of Aden. Local resistance has picked up as the Houthis are now in unfamiliar environment. The Saudi-led aerial attacks and naval bombardments is reportedly leading to considerable civilian losses, with hospitals and factories targeted, even as it has failed to stop the Houthi advance. The resultant stalemate is unlikely to be resolved soon. The Saudi claim that their action is defensive as the Houthis are a threat to them seems far-fetched. The Houthis show no inclination to look northwards towards the Saudi ‘empty quarter’, and their agenda is very much domestic, which is to be a part of a Yemeni state, that has so far excluded them. They also lack the capacity to disrupt shipping in the Red Sea, which is more of an access to the world for them, particularly Iran for the supply of arms and ammunition.

What then could be behind the recent escalation, specifically the Saudi-led unilateral intervention? Saudi panic at conflict spreading to the Red Sea shipping lanes is understandable to a point. The Arabs understand that there can be no military resolution to the conflict. Qatar has offered to hold peace talks of all Yemeni factions, which the Houthis have not rejected. An Indian observer, Kavil Mohan, based in the Gulf feels that while it may sound far-fetched at present, the raising of stakes in the Yemen conflict may be a precursor to a quid pro quo between the Iranians and the Saudis. In this scenario, Iran would back out from supporting the Houthis and the Saudis would lower the temperature on the Iran nuclear deal, and look at a political solution with Assad, once DAESH is neutralised. Presently Iran provides the only boots on the ground in the fight against DAESH. After all the Iranian nuclear deal would not just be about reducing the number of centrifuges or reducing Iran’s bomb-making capability, it would lead to many more deals in the broader West Asia region.
The question is–is India positioned to take advantage of possible realignments that potentially suits its strategic and economic interests, mainly lower oil prices, more business opportunities for Indian entities and more employment opportunities for skilled Indian workers? Clearly, India needs to engage more substantially with Iran, Saudi Arabia, other oil producing Arab states and different stakeholders so that it could both benefit from a restructured West Asia and itself become a stabilising factor in the region.
Shakti Sinha (­The writer is a retired civil servant and Director of South Asia Institute for Strategic Affair)