An email in Yemen and fears of Islamic State

Last week, Fathi Bin Lazraq, a 54-year-old newspaper editor from Yemen’s port city of Aden, received an email from Al-Qaeda.

Addressed to Lazraq and 300 other Yemeni journalists, the email included a statement announcing the formation of a new Islamic organization in Yemen: “Supporters of the Islamic State in the Arabian Peninsula.”

The statement was not signed by al-Qaeda’s leaders. Lazraq has doubts about its authenticity. Still, news of the announcement spread like wildfire.

“The Islamic State has reached Yemen,” one newspaper read, splashing a copy of the statement next to AQAP’s black flag logo across its front page.

“This is the beginning of the end, a new sectarian war,” a Yemeni activist tweeted.

Battling Iraqi ground troops, Kurdish fighters in eastern Syria and, more recently, US fighter jets, the war waged by Islamic State, has been predominantly local.

But in Yemen, hundreds of miles from the Iraq-Syria border, there are growing fears that Sunni extremists sympathetic to the Islamic State are seizing on unrest and sectarian tensions which have plagued the country since the fall of President Ali Abdullah Saleh in 2012.

Last month Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the group’s Yemeni branch considered by the United States to be its most dangerous affiliate, declared war on the Houthis, a powerful Shiite rebel group who have overrun the capital and several cities in northern Yemen.

On Monday, AQAP claimed responsibility for a suicide bomb that killed 50 people at a Houthi rally in Sana’a and vowed to fight the Shiite rebels in defence of Yemen's Sunni majority.

As the Houthis, who al-Qaeda labels Iran-backed infidels, push West and east into central Yemen, the two groups are vying for control of territory in a bloody conflict that Yemenis fear is growing increasingly sectarian.

“I think it’s inevitable that the Islamic State will enter into this,” said Saeed al-Rajmi, an engineering student at Sana’a University. “ISIS feeds off anger, hunger and sectarian division. Nowadays we have all that in Yemen. If they come they will thrive here, I’m sure,” he said.

A statement released by AQAP on Friday that recognised the Islamic State as “brothers” in a war against the US-led coalition and urged attacks against Americans, underscored al-Rajmi’s fears of sectarian spill over into Yemen from Syria and Iraq.

AQAP urged "all Muslims to back their brethren, with their souls, money and tongues, against the crusaders."

The Al-Qaeda statement, shared widely on social media, called on militant Islamist groups across Iraq and Syria to unite against the coalition, it called “crusaders”, a sign of how US intervention in Iraq’s vicious insurgency is serving to unite a once fractured militant movement.

Violence flares

Explosions and gunfire were heard in cities across Yemen on Friday as Houthi fighters clashed with Sunni tribesmen and al-Qaeda militants in violence that left 20 people dead, officials said, further increasing fears of outright sectarian warfare.

Most of Friday’s fighting centred the predominantly-Sunni provincial capital Ibb which the rebels overran earlier this week.

#Houthi militants of shelled Ibb Radio today. Public outrage in Ibb & Taiz against Houthi intrusion. #Yemen pic.twitter.com/N2CVH023Xx

— Yemen Updates (@yemen_updates) October 17, 2014

The Houthis came under rocket-propelled grenade fire from tribesmen in the surrounding countryside, witnesses said.

“Yemenis are not sectarian by nature, Sunni and Shia pray side by side. But our country has become a battleground now for other people’s wars,” said Said Abimi, a Yemeni analyst who runs a conflict mediation NGO. “Our territory is an open arena for Sunni and Shia extremists who want to eliminate our politics, and take us back a hundred years.”

Military sources had previously warned that the rebels were looking to take control of Hudeida and to extend their presence to the narrow Bab al-Mandab strait, which leads to the Suez canal.

Bab al-Mandeb, only 40 kilometres (25 miles) across the water from Africa, carried an estimated 3.4 million barrels of oil a day in 2011, according to the US Energy Information Administration.

On Wednesday, groups of rebels advanced on the route linking Hudeida with the commercial seaport of Al-Mukha, just north of Bab al-Mandeb, security sources said.

In the east of the country, the Houthis are eyeing Yemen's oil and gas reserves in Marib.