WASHINGTON — Only months ago, American officials were still referring to Yemen’s negotiated transition from autocracy to an elected president as a model for post–revolutionary Arab states.
Now, after days of factional gun battles in the Yemeni capital that left the president a puppet figure confined to his residence, the country appears to be at risk of fragmenting in ways that could provide greater opportunities both for Iran and for Al Qaeda, whose Yemeni branch claimed responsibility for the Paris terror attack earlier this month.
The latest Yemen crisis raises the prospect of yet another Arab country where the United States faces rising dangers but no strong partners amid a landscape of sectarian violence. Although the Houthi rebels who now effectively control the state are at war with Al Qaeda, they are also allied with Iran and with Yemen’s former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh. The Houthis’ rise to a dominant position may set off local conflicts in ways that would give more breathing room to Al Qaeda’s local branch, which has repeatedly struck at the United States. Yemen’s elected president, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, is a stalwart American ally but has almost no domestic support.
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In Taiz, Yemen’s third largest city, the local governor has taken over the military and intelligence quarters, and is effectively governing a city-state. In southern Yemen, which was a separate country from 1970 until 1990 and fought a brief civil war against the north in 1994, many have similarly seized on the Houthi ascendancy as an opportunity to break away. Those aspirations have fueled fears of a wider breakdown that could benefit Al Qaeda, which ejected government officials across a wide swath of the south in mid-2011 and declared an Islamic emirate that lasted about a year.
Shuaib al Mosawa reported from Sana, Yemen, and Kareem Fahim from Baghdad. Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.
