INSS Insight No. 164
The recently announced ceasefire between the Yemeni government and Shiite rebels will ideally end what has been the largest military mobilization in the Arabian Peninsula since the 1991 Gulf War. To many observers, the war was no less than a regional front line between Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia. The ending or at least the slowing of the conflict might spell some relief for the Yemeni government, which is concurrently battling al-Qaeda and an active secessionist movement.
Although Sana'a has been fighting the rebels intermittently since 2004, the latest round was the most bloody of the past six years. The conflict intensified last summer when Sana'a launched Operation Scorched Earth.
Saudi Arabia stepped deeply into the fray in early November when rebels seized a strategic mountaintop inside Saudi Arabia, occupying a few villages and killing two Saudi soldiers in the process. While the Yemeni army was attacking the rebels from the south, the Saudis attacked from the north, in a classic pincer movement.
The well-equipped Saudis used infantry and artillery as well as European-made Tornado and US-made F-15 fighters in an attempt to crush the rebellion deep inside Yemeni territory. They also enforced a partial naval blockade in the northwest corner of Yemen to cut off any potential arms supply lines to the Shiite rebels from Iran - the same route Yemeni smugglers use to transfer arms from Iran to Hamas in Gaza.
Although reporters have been barred from the war zone and Riyadh and Sana'a imposed a media blackout, numerous reports have indicated that the population suffered tremendously and that atrocities were committed by both sides. According to some reports the death toll of Yemeni rebels and civilians is in the thousands, and aid agencies claim that up to a quarter of a million people have fled their homes since the conflict started. During the fighting the Saudis didn't hesitate to use non-proportional force. In one case it was reported that a few hundred rebels were shot at by Saudi jets after refusing to evacuate a border era: "They didn't respond so we killed them all," said an assistant to the Saudi secretary of defense
The rebels, numbering around 7,000 fighters, turned the conflict from an ideological revivalist movement into more of a classic insurgency capable of guerrilla warfare in the region's mountainous areas. The Yemeni government waited to negotiate until the rebels were weakened so as to talk from a position of relative strength. Under the ceasefire agreement, the rebels have agreed to release captured soldiers and property, withdraw from strategic positions in Saudi territory, abide by the constitution, and remove all roadblocks, but it is unclear if there was any commitment to stop fighting Saudi Arabia.
Indeed, after more then three months of fighting it is not clear if the Saudis were able to attain their goal of a rebel-free zone (akin to Israel's former "security zone" in Lebanon) extending 10 kilometers inside Yemeni territory. Despite their advantage in firepower the Saudis lost more soldiers and military equipment than they anticipated (133 dead at last count), and some 240 villages in Saudi Arabia have been evacuated. The rebels also claimed that they had shot down a few Yemeni MiG fighter aircraft and a Saudi Apache attack helicopter supporting ground troops.
Although the goal of Saudi Arabia's intervention was purportedly to defend the "territorial integrity" of the Kingdom, its true purpose was to stem the perceived Iranian influence at the Saudi doorstep: "The real accusation is that Iran is interfering in Yemen's internal affairs," said Saudi foreign minister Saud al-Faisal in response to Iranian president Ahmadinejad, who denounced what he called "Saudi military intervention" against the Shiites.
Iran seems to have benefited from its alleged connection to the conflict by having a third party demonstrate its growing regional power and military reach. The parallels to Iranian involvement in Lebanon and to a lesser extent in Gaza are noteworthy, and the Iranian use of proxies has not gone unnoticed. US secretary of state Hillary Clinton directly accused Iran of acting against the Saudis, and in a recent visit to Saudi Arabia she charged that "Iran has funded terrorists that have launched attacks within other countries, including the Kingdom."
To be sure, the US and Yemeni governments have very different sets of priorities. For the US, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) is the number one concern; for its part, the Saleh government's focus in on staying in power. This means defeating the Shiite rebellion and putting down the southern secessionist movement. Saleh will fight al-Qaeda seriously only if convinced that AQAP poses a threat to his rule. Complicating matters further, he is reported to have been recruiting experienced al-Qaeda operatives to help fight the Shiite rebels.
So far the fighting has not significantly changed the regional balance of power, but there are fears in Riyadh that Yemen's deteriorating stability presents an opportunity for further meddling by Iran, Saudi Arabia's regional nemesis. If Iranian involvement thus far has not been as massive as claimed by the Saudis and Yemenis, Iran, given its track record, undoubtedly would be tempted to increase its involvement in the wake of the Saudi military intervention, realizing what became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
After the ceasefire came into force there were reports on more clashes, which suggests that without resolving the fundamental grievances that started the conflict in the first place, most of them not related to Yemen, in the near future the country will be used again as a battlefield in the proxy war between Shiite-Iran and Sunni-Saudi Arabia.
The Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) is an independent academic institute that studies key issues relating to Israel's national security and Middle East affairs. Through its mixture of researchers with backgrounds in academia, the military, government, and public policy, INSS is able to contribute to the public debate and governmental deliberation of leading strategic issues and offer policy analysis and recommendations to decision makers and public leaders, policy analysts, and theoreticians, both in Israel and abroad. As part of its mission, it is committed to encourage new ways of thinking and expand the traditional contours of establishment analysis.
