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Battle lines drawn for a civil war in Yemen

18 February 2015 22:15 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Hundreds of Sunni tribesmen in the central Yemeni desert parade in pickup trucks toting heavy machine guns and singing martial songs to raise morale, APA reports quoting Reuters.

They have pitched camps on the edge of the country's oil-rich Marib province, determined not to let their home turf fall as a prize to the Shi'ite militia that now rules much of Yemen.

Having almost miraculously avoided civil war for four years after being rocked by Arab Spring protests, the impoverished Arabian Peninsula country awash with weapons now appears to be leaning toward the kind of conflict that has ravaged other countries in the region.

A fight for land and power has spread since the Houthi rebels overran the capital Sanaa in September, taking on a sectarian stripe that may embroil regional powers Iran and Saudi Arabia and strengthen Yemen's powerful al Qaeda branch.

(For a graphic showing extent of Houthi control, click on http://link.reuters.com/fec24w)

"Traditional Yemeni political actors used to find middle ground and didn't let their clashes lead to a full-blown civil war. The Houthis don't seem to be interested in compromising," said Nadwa Dawsari, an expert and researcher on Yemeni tribes.

"They mix a lack of experience in politics with, as their own leader has said, limitless ambitions. The fact that Iran is involved aggravates things and brings in a regional dimension that makes a conflict harder to avoid," she told Reuters.

A decade of on-off government offensives against the Houthis devastated their homeland in Yemen's impoverished north, flattening villages and pulverizing Saada city - the ancient centre of Yemen's Shi'ite sect which ruled the country for a thousand years until a republic was founded in 1962.

But after street protests ousted veteran president Ali Abdullah Saleh in 2011, national dialogue talks on Yemen's future foundered and the divided military could no longer hold off the aggrieved militants' advance.