Wrapping Your Head Around Current Events in Yemen

There's been a lot going on in Yemen lately. Here are some articles that can help you get caught up on what's been happening.

Foreign Policy: Washington’s $232 Million Question in Yemen

War is Boring: Rebel Putsch Is Trouble for America’s War in Yemen - But the Houthis are also fighting Al Qaeda

Long War Journal: AQAP releases infographics detailing attacks

Long War Journal: President Obama's 'successful' counterterrorism strategy in Yemen in limbo

Al Jazeera: Yemen on brink of collapse, but does anyone care?

AFP Yemen upheaval deals blow to US fight against AQAP

Kuwait Times: Drone targets 'Al-Qaeda' forces in crisis-hit Yemen - Washington to pursue strikes despite unrest

Long War Journal: US drone strike kills 3 suspected AQAP members

BBC: Yemen crisis: Power vacuum puts future into peril

For anyone who's a complete novice on Yemen, here are a few things to know.

Yemen has had a very complex history in the last twentieth century. Modern Yemen dates back to 1990, when the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen and the Yemen Arab Republic were unified.

British forces fought a counterinsurgency campaign in South Arabia/the Aden Protectorate from 1963 to 1967, which came to be known as the Aden Emergency. The British withdrawals from Aden (1967) and Bahrain (1971) emboldened the Marxist rebels, who established the People's Democratic Republic of (South) Yemen in 1967, and began actively supporting and agitating the Dhofari rebels in neighboring Oman in 1970.

Yemen's former autocratic ruler, Ali Abdullah Saleh, was a Western ally who was ousted as a result of the Arab Spring. Yemen was in rough shape before the Arab Spring, and hasn't really recovered from any of the turmoil of 2011 and '12.

Yemen is fairly resource-poor, with modest and declining oil reserves. Yemen is also water-poor, and much of its water (about forty percent) is dedicated to the cultivation of khat, a natural amphetamine that's chewed like tobacco.

Yemen has a massive population for its size - around twenty-three million, compared to thirty million for neighboring Saudi Arabia, and between three and four million for neighboring Oman. Nearly all Yemenis are Muslims, sixty-five percent being Sunni Muslims and the remainder being Shiite. Sectarian divides tend to align with political divides, particularly in the case of the Houthis.

The Houthis, who are Shiites, are alleged to receive support and agitation from Iran. While both of Yemen's land neighbors keep close tabs on what's happening in Yemen, the Saudis have actually mounted air strikes against Shiite rebels (in addition to al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.) And let's not forget that Aden was the site of the USS Cole bombing in late 2000. In his indispensable (albeit dated) 2006 book, Imperial Grunts, Robert Kaplan writes of his visit to Yemen. A lot has changed since Kaplan's visit as documented in the book, but a lot hasn't changed. Like I said, it's dated, but Kaplan's entire book is worth reading.

Longtime readers of my writings will know that I keep very close tabs on Oman, and have dedicated much of the last three years to the study of recent Omani history, and particularly the 1970-1976 Dhofar Rebellion in Oman's westernmost governorate. The Houthi rebels took a senior Yemeni official hostage, and Oman brokered his release. I was corresponding with a former co-worker last week as well, and in response to his question about Omani-Yemeni relations, I wrote the following:

It sounds like things as normal in Oman. The Omani media is notoriously sanitized – even though there are four or five news sources in English, I only ever skim a couple of them, and even those ones are usually pretty sterile. I suspect that the border crossing with Yemen will have been pretty tightly controlled for quite a while now, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the SAF and ROP have coagulated along the Yemeni border. This is from a 2005 publication from the Congressional Research Service:

“Oman has experienced more evident tension with Yemen than with any other neighboring state; these tensions have led to brief armed border clashes on a few occasions over the past two decades. On October 1, 1992, Oman and Yemen ratified a border demarcation agreement that ended a 25-year border disagreement between them; the demarcation was completed in June 1995. Under the pact, Oman relinquished its claim to a vast area bordering its western Dhofar province.”

I hadn’t heard that Yemen had ballistic missiles, but I looked it up and it looks like you’re right – Scuds. The Houthi grievances seem to be more political than religious, though there are rumblings that they, like most other agitated Shiites, are being stirred up by Iran. Yemen is an aspirant member of the GCC, and the Saudis have intervened in Yemen in the recent past, and the Saudis have been agitating Iran by driving oil prices down, so I wonder if this latest Houthi uprising stems in part from Iran trying to jerk the Saudis’ (and Americans') chain(s).

Many will boo and hiss (and perhaps rightly so), but if you're interested in the history and shifting geography of Yemen, you can peruse the following articles from Wikipedia, the undisputed and infallible source of all knowledge: Hadhramaut, Colony of Aden, Aden Protectorate, State of Aden, Yemen Arab Republic, South Yemen, Federation of South Arabia, and Protectorate of South Arabia.