Yemen’s Tribes Step-up Pressure on US Ally Saleh

Two warring tribes in Yemen have frozen hostilities and joined the growing movement to topple long-time US military aid benefactor President Ali Abdullah Saleh. The Abeeda and Murad tribes, both from Ma’rib governorate - Yemen’s most central province, announced this week that they have joined together with the thousands of anti-government demonstrators camped out in Sanaa’s al-Tagheer Square.

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While the move appears to have signaled an end to the 30-year standoff that has locked both tribes in a long-running campaign of revenge killings, it is as politically calculated as it is meaningful. On the ground, there are reports of both peaceful and armed tribal groups vying to fill the many power vacancies created by Saleh’s sweeping withdraw of security forces from flash point districts. It has been suggested that Saleh is deliberately engineering political chaos in these territories, seeing the instigation of a nation-wide civil war as his best hope of convincing the West that without him Yemen can’t be unified. In response, reconciliation is quickly becoming a strategically necessary move for opposition tribes hoping to sustain their defiance of Saleh’s rule. As more factions see Saleh’s ouster as key to both their short and long-term goals, the more profitable a political ploy the pretense of unity will become. Given these notions, the endgame in Yemen could see Saleh’s gamble on instigating national fragmentation completely backfire. If he can’t keep rivaled-tribes fighting, or, alternatively, hand over political power to an interim secular government, Yemen looks poised for failed-state status. If this occurs, given both the mushrooming presence of al-Qaeda in its South and Yemen’s complicated ethnoreligious geography, it could very well end up looking a lot like the Northern boarder regions of Pakistan’s tribally governed districts.