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Why the fall of Yemen’s government is a huge problem for Saudi Arabia

The takeover of the capital Sanaa by the Shiite Houthi rebels has been viewed as the expansion of Iran’s influence in the Arabian peninsula and the diminution of Sunni influence in the region. The presence of Al-Qaeda in the war-torn country is raising alarm bells for the country to fever pitch.

Friday marked the death knell of the internationally-backed post-Arab Spring order in Yemen, whose parliament and government were finally dissolved by the Iranian-allied Houthi rebels who took over Sa’ana in late 2014.

The ousted president, Abd-Rabbouh Mansour Hadi, was a highly reliable US anti-terror ally, and the UN had dispatched a special envoy entrusted with shepherding the country’s fragile transitional process. These efforts failed to prevent the full-on state collapse that Iranian-backed Houthi rebels finally completed on Friday.

But the biggest loser from the Yemeni government’s fall is Sa’ana’s wealthy, powerful, and perpetually insecure neighbor to the north: Saudi Arabia. In recent years, Saudi policy towards Yemen has been built around the need to stabilize the government in Sa’ana while sealing off the two countries’ over 1,000-long and minimally policed frontier.

Saudi Arabia was a major financial supporter of the transitional government. The country’s monarchy feared that a collapsed Yemen would exacerbate the threats posed by both Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the powerful Yemen-based Al-Qaeda branch, as well as the Houthis, Shi’ite militants allied with Iran, which is still Riyadh’s top geopolitical rival.

But Riyadh never had much confidence that Yemen could ever be stabilized beyond doubt. Since 2003, Saudi Arabia has been intermittently working on a border barrier with the objective of physically separating Saudi territory from the chaos lurking on the other side. The urgency of the efforts picked up after the security situation in the country began to deteriorate in 2013.

Saudi Arabia didn’t always take this fortress-like approach. In 2009, the Saudis launched an expedition against Houthi militants that penetrated into the other side of the Yemeni border. The operation triggered a brief conflict in which 200 Saudi troops were killed, an embarrassment that convinced the stability-minded kingdom to take a more defensive approach.

Even so, the Saudis are under little illusion as to what the Houthi dissolution of the Yemini government means in the larger sense. They are likely to view regime change in Yemen as a worrying victory for their opponents in Tehran.

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http://www.businessinsider.in/The-fall-of-Yemens-government-is-a-huge-problem-for-Saudi-Arabia/articleshow/46151736.cms

 

 

 

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