YEMEN - The Political/Security Prospects For Yemen.

The poorest country in the Arab world, Yemen faces serious security threats on several fronts. A gunman opened fire in a mosque in north Yemen on May 30, killing eight people and wounding dozens of others in the town of Kohal in 'Omran Province, north of the capital San'a'. An escalating war between

Attacks on civilians have been rare in the war between the government and the Houthi rebels, Zaidi Shi'ites backed by Iran. On May 2 a bomb rigged to a motorcycle exploded outside another mosque in the northern city of Sa'da, killing at 12 worshipers. The government accused the Houthi rebels in that attack. After the May 30 mosque attack in Kohal, 160 km south of the Sa'da bombing, Yemeni security officials said they had captured the killer.

Two katyusha rockets were on May 30 fired at an oil site in the southern port of Aden, though there was no word of casualties. The attack was the latest of a series believed to have been carried out by the Yemeni wing of al-Qaeda. On May 29, Yemeni security officials said they had arrested 11 Qaeda members in San'a'.

Foreign embassies and the UN have reduced their staffs in San'a' after mortar attacks in March and April near the US Embassy, a residential compound where Westerners lived, and the Italian embassy. Al-Qaeda in Yemen has claimed credit for the attacks in Internet postings.

There has been unrest in the south, where a series of massive demonstrations fuelled by unemployment and high food prices have turned into riots, with some protestors flying the old flag of south Yemen for the first time since the unification of North and South Yemen in 1990.

The most serious threat for the moment is the Houthi rebellion in north Yemen. This rebellion began in 2004, and in April fighting flared up after a period of relative quiet. The conflict gained a sectarian and international dimension after the Yemeni government accused the Houthi rebels of receiving support from Iran's Shi'ite theocracy.

Yemen's Sunni Arab neighbours - especially Saudi Arabia - are deeply concerned about Iranian influence. The Houthis' Zaidi sect, an offshoot of Shi'ism, comprises about 25% of Yemen's population but represents the majority in the north-west. The Houthis and the government signed a truce in February in Qatar, the latest of several in the intermittent war. But fighting started again in April, and quickly grew worse after the mosque bombing in Sa'da on May 2.

Al-Qaeda leader 'Usama bin Laden, a Sunni/Neo-Salafi, says Yemen is "one of the best Arab and Muslim countries in terms of its adherence to tradition and the faith...[its] topography is mountainous, and its people are tribal and armed..." Yemen is the site of his family's origin and he has often praised his family's Kindah Tribe. The bin Ladens hail from the village of al-Rubat in the Hadramaut region; he took his fourth wife from there.

Bin Laden refers to Yemen's religious importance, noting the Prophet Muhammad's high regard for it because of its quick adoption of Islam after the faith's founding and because he believed that from Yemen "would come 12,000 [fighters] who would support God and His Prophet, and they are among the best of us".

Affection, however, is overruled by the requirements of war-fighting in bin Laden's mentality and Yemen has long figured prominently in the conduct of his jihad in terms of manpower and geographic importance. Yemenis, for example, have had significant representation in al-Qaeda since its founding: Tareq al-Fahdli, from south Yemen, fought alongside bin Laden against the Soviets and was on Yemeni President 'Ali 'Abdullah Saleh's senior council; Nasir Ahmad Nasir al-Bahri (Abu Jandal), who was the long-time chief of his bodyguards, is from Yemen.

After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, bin Laden and his aides sent guns, money and Arab veterans of Afghanistan into Yemen to fight alongside the Saleh-led insurgents who eventually defeated the communist regime of south Yemen to reunify the country in 1994.

Al-Qaeda's first anti-US attack - against US troops on the way to Somalia - was in Aden in December 1992. More recently, 80% of those involved in the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole were Saudis of Yemeni origin. The members of the al-Qaeda cell the FBI dismantled in Lackawanna, New York in 2002 were all Yemenis.

A big number of the non-Iraqi mujahideen fighting US forces in Iraq are Yemenis. In late 2007 the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Hamzah al-Muhajer, called specifically on the Yemeni Islamists to provide more fighters to support the Iraqi mujahideen. On Nov. 29, 2007, al-Qaeda's chief in Yemen, Nasir al-Wihayshi (Abu Basir), publicly said he would immediately send more fighters to Iraq.

Beyond "the extended manpower fighting for God in happy Yemen", bin Laden has always valued "the strategic depth" Yemen affords. While bin Laden and his Qaeda were based in Sudan in 1991-96, they had a "naval bridge" allowing the flow of guns and fighters between Yemen and Port Sudan in support of Hassan al-Turabi's Islamist regime in Khartoum. Bin Laden sent al-Qaeda operatives from Port Sudan to Yemen and from there infiltrated them into Saudi Arabia and into Oman.

Bin Laden cultivated ties with President Saleh and prominent Islamist shaikhs - including Shaikh 'Abdul-Majid al-Zindani, head of the Yemen Reform Party - and by doing so facilitated the growth of substantial al-Qaeda infrastructure across the country. Al-Qaeda's presence in Yemen also brought it into closer contact with the Egyptian Islamist groups based there: the Gama'a al-Islamiyah and Ayman al-Zawahiri's Egyptian Islamic Jihad; the latter in 1998 merged with al-Qaeda.

Some of Qaeda's Yemeni members are of great assistance in inserting Neo-Salafi operatives into East Africa, the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific, because of the Yemeni diaspora was established centuries ago in those regions by Yemeni sailors and traders. For al-Qaeda, Yemen provides a pivotal, central base which links its theaters of operation in Afghanistan, Iraq, East Africa and the Far East; it also provides a base for training Yemeni fighters and for the rest.

Today, Yemen appears to be a safe haven for Somali Islamist fighters and the leaders of the Union of Islamic Courts who fled their country after the late-2006 invasion of Ethiopian forces. Some of these Somali fighters - after having regrouped and rearmed - have returned to Mogadishu from Yemen and are contributing to the growth of the Islamist insurgency there.

Al-Qaeda in Yemen has stabilised after governmental suppression which followed the November 2002 death of its leader Abu 'Ali Harithi. Under Abu Basir - who escaped from a Yemeni prison in early 2006 - al-Qaeda in Yemen is becoming more active. In late June 2007, for example, Abu Basir issued a warning that al-Qaeda would attack in Yemen if its members were not released from prison; on July 4, 2007, al-Qaeda attacked, using a suicide car bomb to kill seven Spanish tourists at an ancient pagan temple east of San'a'. On Jan. 13, it again warned it would attack if the Saleh regime did not release imprisoned al-Qaeda members; on Jan. 19, al-Qaeda killed two Belgian tourists and their drivers in Hadramaut.

Abu Basir's group is showing al-Qaeda's sophistication elsewhere: targeting the tourism and petroleum industries which earn Yemen foreign exchange; making threats and then making good on them; and improving international communications by using the Internet. Al-Qaeda in Yemen published the first issue of its Internet journal Sada' al-Malahim (The Echo of Battles) on Jan. 13.

Attacks by al-Qaeda in Yemen continue at a level which does not lead to an all-out confrontation with Saleh's regime - enough to persuade Saleh that it is best to curtail his efforts to destroy the group and allow it to operate relatively freely in and from Yemen as long as no major attacks are staged in the country. In an article published on Feb. 7, 2008, Michael Scheuer (a CIA operative for 22 years to 2004 who headed the bin Laden unit in 1996-99), said: "Indeed, such a modus vivendi may be in the works as San'a' officials have experimented with putting imprisoned Islamists through a re-education process that shows them the error of their ways and then releases them on the promise of good behavior. This almost certainly equates to a license for the militants to do what they want, where they want, as long as it is not in Yemen".

Scheuer added: "Possibly signaling a growing rapprochement between Saleh and the militants, al-Qaeda in Yemen spokesman Ahmad Mansur recently claimed that the government had solicited al-Qaeda's support in fighting Shi'ite [Houthi] rebels in the north in return for 'easing the persecution of our members'. Finally, Yemen has long been regarded by Western and Muslim commentators as a possible refuge-of-last-resort if bin Laden ever has to flee South Asia - bin Laden also has stated such a possibility - and for this reason al-Qaeda must seek to maintain a viable presence in the country".

Al-Qaeda is particularly strong in the petroleum-rich regions of Ma'rib and Hadramaut - most occur there - and both share a remote, mountainous topography which is much like that of Afghanistan. The two provinces are inhabited by deeply conservative Islamic tribes - Ma'rib alone has four powerful tribes with over 70 clans. As in Afghanistan, the mores of these tribes cause their members to think they must do their duty to protect those who are in need for protection whatever they have done. This feeling becomes even stronger if those who need protection are religious people, because the tribesmen there are greatly affected by religious discourse.

Al-Qaeda in early April 2008 claimed credit for a rocket attack on a residential complex housing executives and the HQ of Yemeni-owned Safer E&P Operations Co., which operates the Ma'rif oil and gas fields. The attack occurred two days after the arrest in San'a' of al Qaeda operative, 'Abdullah al-Rimi, sought by the FBI. Rimi has been identified as taking part in attacks in Riyadh in 2003 and on the USS Cole in 2000 in Aden, which killed 17 US sailors and injured many. In the previous week, the Qaeda-linked Jund al-Yaman Brigades claimed credit for two operations carried out in Hadhramaut, including a March 27 bomb attack on a pipeline belonging to Total in the Sah Valley and a March 29 mortar attack on a Chinese oil firm operating in al-Khish'a.

Security forces in February 2008 foiled an attempt to blow up the 155,000 b/d pipeline carrying crude oil from Safer oilfields in Ma'rib to the Hudeida export terminal on the Red Sea. The pipeline was damaged by a bomb blast in November 2007. Al-Qaeda has been blamed for such attacks.

Yemen and Djibouti are to be linked by a causeway across the Red Sea in a project announced on June 2, 2008, by a Dubai-based company owned by Saudi construction tycoon Muhammad bin Laden, a half-brother of 'Usama. This will connect the Arabian Peninsula to Africa.