Saudis and Yemenis versus jihadists

A bloody border

Nov 5th 2009 | CAIRO
From The Economist print edition

Trouble on the frontier between Saudi Arabia and Yemen is getting out of hand

TWO separate incidents underline the growing shakiness of Yemen’s government and the increasing fear of Saudi rulers that their own fairly successful campaign to quash Islamist terrorism may be undermined by neighbouring Yemen’s feared descent into chaos. On November 3rd suspected al-Qaeda fighters ambushed a Yemeni government convoy in the remote Hadramawt region, near the border with Saudi Arabia, killing three senior security men. A day later Yemeni rebels at the other end of the country crossed the frontier into Saudi Arabia, killed a Saudi officer and claimed to have captured a strategic mountaintop inside the kingdom. The very next day, Saudi aircraft were reported to have bombed rebel positions in Yemen.

In the first attack the Yemeni officers were targeted in what may be an emerging strategy by al-Qaeda’s resilient local branch to hit local security forces rather than symbols of “crusader” influence, such as Western embassies. The attack on Saudi Arabia, by contrast, was a spillover from the civil war in northern Yemen between government forces and rebel tribesmen loyal to a powerful local clan, the Houthis. The government accuses Shia Iran of backing the Houthis, most of whose supporters are Zaydis, a Yemeni branch of the Shia faith, whereas the rebels say Sunni Saudi Arabia is backing the government’s ferocious counter-insurgency.

With its rugged topography and fiercely tribal society, Yemen has historically proven as hard to rule as, say, Afghanistan. But seldom has the government in Sana’a, Yemen’s capital, faced so many troubles at once, including not just the Houthi rebellion in the north and occasional al-Qaeda attacks in the east but also a brewing independence movement in the south, which was a separate country before Yemen’s two parts united in 1990.

Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, has kept his country together since taking power in 1978 by co-opting, balancing and sometimes coercing its tribes and factions. But with his government mired in corruption and oil revenue dwindling fast, his skilful juggling has become trickier to sustain. The Houthis, for instance, accuse him of recruiting fanatical Sunni supporters of al-Qaeda to join the government’s jihad against them. Some al-Qaeda leaders, meanwhile, have endorsed south Yemeni calls for independence.

Yemen’s increasing lawlessness outside shrinking zones of state control around the main cities is one reason why, earlier this year, al-Qaeda’s Saudi branch announced it was moving across the border and merging forces with its brethren in Yemen. The joint operation, calling itself “al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula”, known in intelligence circles as AQAP, has carried out sporadic attacks inside Yemen, where tacit agreements with the government appear to have broken down. But its main target still appears to be Saudi Arabia.

In August Saudi officials announced the arrest of 44 suspected jihadists and the discovery of large arms caches, including one containing hundreds of bomb detonators and timing devices. Two months later Saudi police near the Yemeni border stopped a suspicious vehicle, sparking a gunfight that killed two suicide bombers, disguised as women. Earlier this month Saudi authorities said that interrogations of the jihadist suspects had led to another arms cache, in the capital, Riyadh, containing 281 AK-47 rifles and piles of ammunition. The arms, they said, came from Yemen.

A fortnight after the arrest of the 44 suspects, an AQAP man nearly pulled off a coup. Claiming to have repented of past jihadism, he said he had returned from Yemen and wished to meet Prince Muhammad bin Nayef, the Saudi deputy minister of interior, who led a clampdown on terrorism that has brought relative calm. Security screening failed to detect a bomb concealed in the man’s rectum, which exploded as the prince greeted him. The prince suffered minor injuries.

Income per head in Yemen is barely a tenth of Saudi Arabia’s. The country has long been a conduit for arms, drugs, illegal immigrants and liquor smuggled into the puritanical kingdom. But growing troubles on the border suggest that the old smuggling networks may now serve political groups as well as commercial interests. In any event, Yemen’s government is struggling to defeat the Houthi rebellion, which has displaced 250,000 civilians, and is failing to squash al-Qaeda. So Saudi leaders may be poised to intervene in earnest.

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