A boy sits at the site of an air strike at a residential area near Sanaa Airport March 26, 2015. Saudi Arabia and Gulf region allies launched military operations including air strikes in Yemen on Thursday, officials said, to counter Iran-allied forces besieging the southern city of Aden where the U.S.-backed Yemeni president had taken refuge.KHALED ABDULLAH/Reuters
Dozens of Yemenis have been killed in the past few days from a furious bombardment by a Saudi-led coalition of Arab states that on Monday blew up rebel munitions depots, flattening scores of homes. The reverberations may be felt worldwide.
The coalition is trying to uproot a Shia Muslim rebel group called Ansar Allah – more popularly known as the Houthis, after the name of their late leader. The group has staged a coup and taken charge of the country's three largest cities.
The Saudis insist that the rebels are being encouraged and armed by Iran and must be stopped from spreading Tehran's Shia influence in the Arabian Peninsula the Saudis dominate.
The Houthi rebellion and the violent Saudi response have left in shambles Yemen's recent program of badly needed reforms. The transitional President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi was forced to flee to the Saudi capital of Riyadh. Hopes for policies to end corruption and implement an international assistance program went with him.
The Houthis have their own set of grievances they want remedied and have been joined in their fight against the Hadi government by forces loyal to former dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh, who had been ousted by a popular uprising in 2012 and replaced by the transitional authority. Now people in Yemen fear a return to the corruption of the Saleh era.
What a shame. These reforms had been ushered in because of the courage of young men and women such as Tawakol Karman who carried out their version of the so-called Arab Spring and rose up against the dictator Saleh. Ms. Karman won the Nobel Peace Prize for her leadership that now has little to show for it.
The very first day I was in Yemen I could tell it wasn't going to go well for this country.
It was early January, 2010, just days after a young man flying from Yemen had attempted to blow up over Detroit an airliner carrying 290 people. The man was carrying plastic explosives hidden in his underwear, but failed in his efforts to detonate the charge.
I made my way quickly to Yemen to report on the group that dispatched the bomber – they called themselves al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula – on what was motivating the people who joined the group and what the government of Yemen was doing about it.
Wanting to immerse myself among the powers that be, I asked an influential businessman to introduce me to a gathering of a dozen of his most powerful friends. The group – heads of corporations, deputy ministers, senators, a general – met every Thursday at one of the members' homes. They discussed important issues, but mostly they chewed qat, a mildly narcotic plant native to Yemen and Somalia.
This was not just like a group of Western corporate and civil-service leaders having drinks together. For these Yemeni men and for the millions of men all over the country who gathered in their own cliques every day, it was the qat they came for – chewing the small leaves, swallowing the juice and packing the pulp into their cheeks. After a couple hours of chewing, a person feels decidedly mellow.
To think that every day almost all the men in the country spend their afternoons doing this went a long in explaining why Yemen was such a mess. (Work ends at 12:30 to permit the custom.)
Worse, one of the men in this powerful group of chewers was none other than the head of Yemen's internal security – the man charged with the responsibility for ending the threat posed by the terrorist al-Qaeda group. There he was, sitting on the floor, eyes glazed, both cheeks filled to capacity. A green stream of saliva spilled from his mouth when he greeted me.
This powerful general and many others in this group also joined the country's president once or twice a week for the qat chews he hosted every afternoon.
This is a country with more than 40-per-cent unemployment; a population that doubles every 20 years; 50-per-cent illiteracy; a GDP per capita of $2,500 a year (making Yemen 175th of the countries in the world); not to mention the rampant corruption and the threat posed by al-Qaeda.
Yet this kind of qat chew is how people choose to deal with it – even the leaders wallow in a narcotic state and nothing changes.
A well-intentioned deputy finance minister – who does not chew qat, nor attend any chews – described to me a 10-point plan he had devised that could point Yemen in a better direction. It included bringing in 100 of the most educated, experienced Yemenis from around the world to take over the reins of government from the entrenched, corrupted officials; eliminating the subsidy from diesel fuel that consumes 35 per cent of the national budget; and cracking down on the officials themselves who buy the fuel at a 10th of the real cost, then sell it abroad at near market value, pocketing the money.
The plan called for neighbouring states to hire 100,000 Yemenis, whose income would support many more people back home, and bring law and order to parts of the country where al-Qaeda is strongest.
He said, however, that none of this would work if the country continued to make qat its priority. Not only does the drug reduce people's productivity but it robs the land of places to grow vegetables, corn and grain – people make more money selling qat.
His plan was well-received in Europe where he presented it that year, though there was to be no assistance, they told him, until the corruption was eliminated.
As events would have it, a popular uprising in the spring of 2011 pushed Mr. Saleh out (with the help of half of the military and the Saudis) and the successive transitional authority began implementing reforms that would help make this plan work.
It was that authority the Houthis have overthrown.
This weekend, Yemeni government forces and Saudi aircraft battled rebels in the country's two largest cities, while Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif called for a halt to the fighting and the implementation of a peace plan proposed by Tehran.
What's left of the Saudi-backed government rejects the idea of a ceasefire, arguing it would only reward the Iranian-backed rebels who control much of western Yemen and restore to power the dictator Saleh.
Meanwhile, as attention was focused on the Houthi-Saudi battle for control of the country's major cities, the rapidly growing al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula overran a military base of a mechanized army unit in eastern Yemen and now is in possession of a large number of armoured vehicles including tanks. The group has solidified its hold on the provincial capital of Mukalla.
The United States has dispatched several warships to the area, to provide intelligence to the Saudi-led coalition and to launch attacks on AQAP.
What Yemen needs most, however, is to alleviate the poverty and give hope to the people. Less than a year ago, the country looked like it was on the verge of such a breakthrough.
Now, however, it appears that when the detritus of this punishing civil war is cleared away the only winner will be al-Qaeda.