Free Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes by Victoria Clark

some who argue that a four-way fragmentation of the state on the simple basis of economic viability is the most likely scenario: Sanaa, the northern highlands and northern Tihama with the port of Hodeidah would continue to be run by the Saudi-subsidised northern highlander tribes; Hadhramaut would be bankrolled by Saudi Hadhramis; the wealthy southern Yemeni diaspora in the Gulf States - people like my friend, Dr al-Affifi - would subsidise Aden and its hinterland; Yemen’s only industrial giant, the Taiz-based Hayel Saeed conglomerate, powerful both as an employer and as a source of charity, would effectively underwrite the central southern highlands.
    In the late summer of 2009 the sixth Saada war broke out. Sanaa’s launch of the unambiguously named Operation Scorched Earth‘ began with the collapse of the year-old ceasefire Salih had announced and a rocketing of Abdul Malik al-Huthi’s headquarters in Saada. At last the complicated and obscure conflict began registering on the Richter scale of international news, thanks to international aid agencies’ warnings that the Saada situation was a humanitarian disaster in the making, as well as to counterterrorism agencies’ opinings that Yemen’s increasingly hospitable chaos was guaranteed to attract jihadists from all over the Middle East, Pakistan, Afghanistan and East Africa. By November the conflict had spilled over into Saudi Arabia with Saudi jets obliging Sanaa by bombing al-Huthi-held villages. Fears of the obscure domestic insurgency escalating into into a dangerous regional proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran looked increasingly justified. The regime in Sanaa irritated its counterpart in Tehran by renaming the capital’s Iran Street after Neda Agha Soltan, the young girl student killed at a rally to protest against the outcome of Iran’s June elections, while Iran retailiated by naming one its thoroughfares The Martyrs of Saada Street. Against the looming background fear of Iran’s imminent acquisition of a nuclear weapon, the United States and all the GCC were at pains to reiterate their support for Yemen’s integrity under Salih’s rule, and overlooked his highly dubious presentation of both al-Huthi and southern insurgencies as additional fronts in the old ’War on Terror’.
    Alarmed that Tariq al-Fadhli was emerging as the de facto leader of the Southern Mobility Movement, Sanaa was accusing him of inciting his Fadhlis to open fire on the motorcade of the chief of the PSO in the south. Tariq, heading the ministry of the interior’s most wanted list, had been given two choices, either to surrender or to leave the country.
    My attempt to visit Tariq in Zinjibar in October 2009, in the company of his cousin Ahmad’s youngest son, the banana farmer Haidara al-Fadhli, ended in predictable failure. After the chief of Aden’s tourist police deeply regretted that he could not take responsibility for issuing me with the tasrih I would need to pass any checkpoint, I found myself paying a second visit to the city’s central security establishment opposite the Aden Hotel. There the polite northerner in charge kindly explained to me that even if I had been a friend of the Fadhlis for five years, even if Walid al-Fadhli the mercenary was preparing a lunch in my honour, even if Tariq al-Fadhli would obviously not dream of harming a hair on my head, he could not guarantee my safety. I quite understood; he would have had to provide me with an armed escort, while knowing perfectly well that such an entourage would be a red rag to the bull, if not of Tariq’s Fadhli tribesmen followers, then of the area’s assorted other jihadist groups who were also restive.
    From Haidara, who was supporting Tariq (unlike his brother Walid the mercenary, who remained a supporter of the government) and who had seen Tariq the day before, I was able to ascertain that none of the family had been injured but that the third floor had been burnt out and that one of his four wives