• 3 April 2015
• From the section Middle East 
• The Romans had a name for Yemen.

They called it Arabia Felix - Happy Arabia - because of its lush, rain-fed mountain scenery.
Today that epithet sounds tragically inappropriate.
Already the poorest country in the Middle East, wracked by soaring unemployment, dwindling oil and water reserves and home to the most dangerous branch of al-Qaeda, now Yemen is being torn apart by war of many sides.
The Saudi-led air strikes began last month, raining down precision-guided missiles on a rebel group called the Houthis who swept down from their mountain stronghold in the far north six months ago, taking town after town, and pushing out the UN-recognised President Hadi.
That alarmed the Saudis and the other Gulf Arab states, especially as they suspect the hand of Iran as being behind the Houthis' spectacular blitzkrieg.
How else, Saudis keep saying to me, could an impoverished group of tribesmen get the training, the weapons and the money to take over half the country?
There's a sectarian angle here too. The Houthi rebels are Zaidi Shias, representing about a third of the population. The Saudi rulers are suspicious of Shias, many of whom look to Iran for spiritual leadership.
Saudi Arabia is a predominately Sunni Muslim country and the Saudis are starting to think they're getting encircled by proxies of Iran wherever they look: in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and now Yemen.








Enough, they said, drawing a line in the sand. At a secret summit in a Saudi palace last month they threw together a 10-nation coalition in a belated and possibly doomed Gulf Arab attempt to turn back the Houthi takeover of Yemen and restore their ally to power.

Change of presidents

But in fact the Houthis largely owe their military success to someone much closer to home. They've formed an alliance of convenience, a sort of pact with the devil, with the very man who tried to bomb them out of existence five years ago.
Ali Abdullah Saleh ruled first North Yemen, then a unified Yemen, for 35 years, until he was forced out of power by the Arab Spring protests.
He refused to believe that Yemen was better off without him. So he set about wrecking the peaceful political transition of power that Yemen's friends had worked so hard to engineer.
Whole units of the Republican Guard remained loyal to him, bombs went off and towns were fought over.
President Hadi who replaced him, an elderly, genial southerner, has been no match for Saleh's machinations. He must be rueing the day he agreed to let his predecessor stay on in Yemen.
I interviewed Saleh once, in his fortified palace in the capital, Sanaa. It did not go well.
Speaking in Arabic without a translator, I asked him what he wanted his legacy to be.
The unification of North and South Yemen, of course, he replied, this was his crowning achievement. I thought I would soften him up by asking what benefits this had brought, but the way I said it in Arabic came out as 'well what was the point of that?'