The conflict in Yemen between the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels and forces led by President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi took a deadly turn last week, as suicide bombs in the Yemeni capital, Sana’a, killed 150 people.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia has been launching airstrikes against the rebels and Yemeni troops who had changed sides. Riyadh has faced “intensifying international pressure to stop airstrikes that were killing a growing number of civilians”, says The New York Times, but there are already signs that they have restarted. And Saudi is likely to continue “intervention by other means, like financing proxy troops”.
“The bitter rivalry between the more fanatical adherents of Sunni and Shia Islam has now emerged as the region’s defining conflict,” writes Con Coughlin in The Daily Telegraph. “Nowhere is this… dispute more keenly felt than in Yemen, a nation that holds the unwelcome distinction of being the Arab world’s poorest state.” The Houthi gains are “a major setback for the Saudis, who have a 1,000-mile porous southern border with the Yemenis to protect”.
The risk is that a proxy war might “one day escalate into an all-out nuclear war between Sunnis and Shias”. It’s certainly made people in the region less positive about the “Arab Spring”, says Simeon Kerr in the Financial Times.
The message from recent surveys is that many Arab citizens “have become disenchanted with the prospect of democratic change in the region as the euphoria of the Arab uprisings has mutated into fear of violent Islamist extremism”.