Al Qaeda's chaos strategy at work in Yemen

NY Times:

For almost seven weeks, Khasan Muhammad Abdullah and his family cowered in their house in northern Yemen while a war raged outside and their food slowly ran out. He could hear government fighter jets screaming across the sky, and he knew the Houthi rebels by their distinctive logos and headbands. But he could not understand what the two sides were fighting about.

“What do they want, what are they thinking?” Mr. Abdullah said wearily, sitting on a friend’s floor here a week after escaping the war zone, along Yemen’s remote northwestern border with Saudi Arabia.

Those questions are being asked across the Arab world and beyond. More than two months of fierce fighting have left thousands dead. Whole villages have been pounded to rubble. The conflict has forced tens of thousands to flee their homes, fueling a humanitarian crisis and worsening the chaos that has already made Yemen a new haven for Al Qaeda and other militant groups.

Yet this mysterious war seems to have more to do with the crumbling authority of the Yemeni state than with any single cause. The Houthi rebels, after all, are a small group who have never issued any clear set of demands. They have been fighting the government on and off since 2004, and it is not clear why President Ali Abdullah Saleh decided in August to force an all-out war.

Many in Yemen’s own government say the conflict is less about controlling terrain — always a tenuous prospect in this tribally splintered country — than about Mr. Saleh’s struggle to reassert his military powers, in the face of widening insurgencies and intensifying political rivalry in the capital.

“Saleh started this war mainly because he wants his son to succeed him, and many in the military and government do not accept this,” said one high-ranking Yemeni official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, echoing an analysis that is often heard here. “With a war, people rally around him, even the United States, because they fear chaos in Yemen if he falls.”

Yemen’s foreign minister, Abu Bakr al-Qirbi, dismissed that view as idle speculation. He said the Houthis had forced the government’s hand by terrorizing the population in the north, assassinating local leaders and rearming, in violation of a cease-fire reached last year. He added that the war had a regional and sectarian dimension: the Houthis belong to an offshoot of Shiite Islam known as Zaydism, and he said they received support from Shiites across the region, including in Iran. (The Houthis have denied all this in their official statements.) Yemen is mostly Sunni.

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Al Qaeda's main strategy is to create chaos in the hopes that its forces will be able to come in and force its despotic and weird religious beliefs on the survivors. It has pursued that strategy in Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan. For al Qaeda a war is about creating chaos that allows them to operate and be perceived as the answer to the chaos they create. That appears to be what they are doing in Yemen right now.