U.S. Meddling in Yemen offered opportunity to Northern Shiite Huthi rebels, a new truce signed
SANAA (AFP) – Yemen’s Shiite Huthi rebels, who signed a UN-brokered peace deal Sunday after seizing key institutions, only recently began extending their influence beyond their northern highland stronghold.
The rebels belong to the Zaidi sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam which makes up approximately a third of the Sunni-majority country’s population. Zaidis are the majority in the northern provinces bordering Sunni powerhouse Saudi Arabia, and are widely accused of receiving support from Shiite-dominated Iran.
The north was a Zaidi imamate until a 1962 coup turned Yemen into a republic ruled by a government long considered illegitimate by the rebels.
…
As an Arab Spring-inspired uprising against then president Ali Abdullah Saleh swept through Yemen in 2011, the Huthis reached out to the opposition in Sanaa and joined protest camps there. It was their first major show of influence outside their strongholds in Saada and Amran provinces.However, the rebels rejected a Gulf deal brokered by Saudi Arabia, which fought them between 2009 and 2010 after a border incursion. Under the deal, Saleh, himself a Zaidi who ruled Yemen since 1978, was replaced as president by Abdrabuh Mansur Hadi in 2012 and a consensus government was formed.
The rebels rejected the new government and repeatedly accused it of corruption.
Yemeni authorities have repeatedly accused Tehran of backing the Huthi rebellion, and during protests the rebels chant Iran’s famous Islamic revolutionary slogan “Death to America! Death to Israel!” Their public discourse also appears heavily influenced by Hezbollah, Lebanon’s powerful Shiite militia that is backed by Tehran.
- ○ Yemen: Birthplace of Osama and Roots of Al Qaeda
○ Saleh orders stay of execution for Amina al-Abduladif by DuctapeFatwa | May 2005 |
