Posted on 03/25/2015 9:15:56 PM PDT by Citizen Zed
Yemen's crisis is getting worse and then some.
Saudi Arabia has started bombing rebel positions inside Yemen, and said the Sunni Kingdom will do "anything necessary" to deter the Iran-backed Shiite rebels who are taking over its neighbor.
Meanwhile, the rebel Houthi fighters looted American intelligence files, which contained details of US operations in the country, Brian Bennett and Zaid Al-Alayaa of the LA Times report.
Some of the files were reportedly "handed directly to Iranian advisors by Yemeni officials who have sided with the Houthi militia," which has successfully dismantled Yemen's government since marching into Sana, the capital, in September.
As Yemen's conflict becomes increasingly sectarian and multi-sided — with military and pre-Arab Spring regime elements jostling for control against Iranian-assisted Shiite Houthis who are in turn fighting Al Qaeda and perhaps also ISIS-linked Sunni extremists — Saudi Arabia responded to the chaos by increasing its military presence along its southern border.
And the US is losing influence very fast: Yemeni President Abd Rabbah Mansur Hadi, a cooperative US counter-terror partner who had resigned, un-resigned, and then retreated to the coastal city of Aden over the past two months, fled the country by boat on March 25th. Yemen's internationally-recognized head of state left just 5 days after simultaneous suicide bombings killed 130 people in Sana. ISIS claimed responsibility for the bombings, and just a week later, Houthi rebels took over the airport in the key coastal city of Aden.
Saudi Arabia believed it could keep Yemen harmless (to Riyadh, at least) by subsidizing its government, maintaining a heavy intelligence presence, and constructing a separation barrier along its border. With Yemen breaking down along geographic and sectarian lines and morphing into an Iranian strategic frontier, that calculus might not hold much longer.
There's also no obvious sense of what comes next.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
The Sunni-Shia proxy war has spread from Syria and Iraq to Saudi Arabia’s backyard - of course they have to act.
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