With allegations that Iran and Libya are backing the rebels. "Clashes in Yemen kill more than 100," by Ahmed al-Haj for AP:
SAN'A, Yemen - Ongoing clashes between the Yemeni army and followers of a Shiite rebel leader in the north of the country have killed more than 100 people in the past five days, military officials said Monday.
About 90 of the dead were in the Yemeni army, including six killed on Monday, an army official said.
Government forces have fired artillery bombardments over the areas where followers of Abdel-Malek al-Hawthi are believed to be hiding out in Saada, about 112 miles north of the capital San'a, said the official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
Close to 200 army and police officers have been killed in clashes in recent weeks.
There are no official statistics on rebels casualties, but tribal officials have estimated that more than 100 have been killed since the clashes broke out in late January.
Last week, members of the Yemen Supreme Defense Council voiced concerns, saying the Shiite rebels were receiving funds and assistance from outside countries, according to one of the council's members.
The member, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, did not name the countries. But state-owned newspapers have reported that the government suspects Iran and Libya are backing the rebellion.
[...]
The rebels are part of a Shiite Muslim group known as "The Young Faithful Believers" that accuses the government of being corrupt and too close to the West.
Yemen, the ancestral land of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, has largely allied itself with the United States in the war on terror.
The government has been fighting the rebels since June 2004 when rebel Shiite cleric Hussein Badr Eddin al-Hawthi — the brother of the current leader — led his forces in an uprising.
Okay, I know that Syria, being Alawite, tends to be pro Shiite, but how about Libya? In the 1980s, they first supported Iran, and towards the end of that conflict, switched sides. So what determines which side they support?
Also, can these reports stop describing these countries as allies? It's bad enough that the Saudis, Paks and Egypt are described as allies; it's worse when that word is used to describe Yemen. One of these days, they'll have a pro-US faction of al Qaeda, the way they are going.
Hearing Robert speak on tv put words and more importantly verses from the islam book to the generaly uneasy fealing I've gotten when thinking about world affairs. It is painfully clear he believes his words. That being said I do too.
Robert are you hear to live peacefully and coexzist with kaffers, or are you bound by islam to forwarn the people you plan to conqure?
In my so humble opinion , any one who thinks ONLY their way of life should exzist should them selves be thrown apon their blades.
To arms countrymen! To not fight for the freedoms so many before us have died for would be a travesty.
ahhhh, the ever faithful Religion of Peace. More Muslims killing Muslims...Whenever there is a shortage of Christian or NonMuslims in the area, The Muslims will just kill anyone who moves....This nonsense is coming to your neighborhood....Ban Muslim Immigration....
Yemen...
The excruciatingly limited Mike Schuster of NPR has apparently just discovered the existence of Sunnis and Shi'a and a little contretemps among them -- one which he still can't fathom, nor that he can't quite place in time and space -- but Yemen hasn't yet appeared as one of the places that is affected by this Sunni-Shi'a split, and he still hasn't the faintest what it all means, or how it could and would play out, if the Americans were to withdraw, now, right now, from Iraq.
The nearly-even balance between Sunni and Shi'a in Yemen is never mentioned in any of this. Nor is the behavior of Saudi Arabia, its worry about Yemen, its booting out of a million Yemeni workers, its support in the past for this or that faction. Nor is there ever mention of the proxy war fought by Nasser and the Al-Saud in the Yemen.
Why? Why is there no attempt to understand things in advance? Why was there no understanding, no mention, of the Sunni-Shi'a split until late in the third year of America's presence in Tarbaby Iraq? Why did Bus wonder aloud about the existence of Sunnis and Shi'a --"I thought they were Muslims in Iraq" -- and why is such idiocy permitted to continue from those who have the power to decide about the lives of others, othres who might know these things, others in many cases more intelligent than they?
If you wanted to find out about the Sunni-Shi'a split, its depth and duration, and how Yemen would be one of those places affected by it, you could read here.
And right now you can google as follows: "Jihad Watch" and "Posted by Hugh" and "Sunni" and "Shi'a" and "Iraq" and "Pakistan" and "Bahrain" and "Saudi Arabia" and "Lebanon" and "Kuwait" and --- don't forget -- "Yemen" and find out all about it in previous JW postings. archives.
Why learn, most imperfectly, and few years late, by listening to NPR or reading the newspapers that tell you, in such confused fashion, what it is you need to know and others need to know in order to fashion policies that make sense?
From an article up just the other day, this excerpt:
"And it is only in the last few months that the mirror-image of Schuster and of NPR, the Bush Administration, has begun to understand that there is this Sunni-Shi'a split. But it still does not demonstrate in any way that it has any idea of the depth, and duration, and obvious consequences of that split.
A good example of the continuing failure of the press in this matter is how this bombing was covered. In all the reports, no explanation is offered as to who the Baluchis are, or what their grievances might conceivably be, and so on. Nor has one read a single article -- outside of many at Jihad Watch -- explaining, country by country, exactly how that Sunni-Shi'a split has grown, even in the absence of Shi'a (as in Egypt, or Jordan), and how it can be found up and down the western littoral of the Persian Gulf, in the Eastern Province (Al-Hasa) of Saudi Arabia, in Dubai (where many Iranian Shi'a now live, and where they own many tens, and possibly hundreds of billions of dollars of property), in Kuwait, and in Yemen. In Yemen, the two groups are almost even in population, and in the past, it was, curiously, the Shi'a tribes that were supported by the Saudis against the "Marxist" -- they wore their Marxism lightly -- people in the south.
But it's complicated. It requires a few weeks of study. Who wants to do that?"
Keep Yemen in mind. Not because it is so very powerful or rich, but because it is so very populous, and so many Yemenis go in and out of Saudi Arabia, and if the Saudi government, which has in the past had to worry a good deal about Yemen, "Nasserist" Yemen or "Marxist" Yemen, were to behaving unpleasantly toward Shi'a in Al-Hasa, and had to worry about the reaction of armed Shi'a to its south, very hard to control, very hard to monitor -- then would that be a good thing or a bad thing for the Western world?
We know what it would be for Saudi Arabia. But that's not what I asked.
Would a Saudi Arabia that felt under threat, under possible besiegement, so that it might have to listen to Infidel demands on all sorts of things, beginning with the 100-billion-dollars spent over the past two decades, on funding for mosques and madrasas, and campaigns of Da'wa linked to them, all over the Western world, and have further been paying armies of Western hirelings (they are all over London, all over Washington -- many of them former diplomats, intelligence agents, high government officials, jouralists, businessmen, traitors and swine of plausible aspect, selling their "contacts" and their "expertise" while the countries of which they are supposedly loyal citizens suffer, and suffer not only as the Saudis continue unchecked in pushing their Islam everywhere, but also, especially in Washington, the failure ever since 1973 to understand oil, and the inevitable use to which oil revenues would be spent, and the inability, even now, right now, to put a tax on gasoline, to support with government money nuclear, solar, wind energy, and to do everything possible not only to save us from Islam, but to save us from irreversible environmental damage. In large part, for that blame the hirelings of Saudi Arabia.
So let me repeat the question: Would a widening and deepening Sunni-Shi'a split, in Iraq, and with spillover effects that should (but apparently are not) obvious, be a Good Thing or a Bad Thing for Infidels?
There.
That wasn't such a hard question, was it?
Ah our good friend Mooey Ghaddafi Khaddafi still murdering allah's moonbeam children. As an alert, watch for this snakes viper son who is heir apparent. He is going to make the old man look like a saint.
Libya is going to be a major player and problem in the Sea for Europe.
" . . . question: Would a widening and deepening Sunni-Shi'a split, in Iraq, and with spillover effects that should (but apparently are not) obvious, be a Good Thing or a Bad Thing for Infidels?"
--Hugh
Good.. A good thing, that. But sell that to the people who are sending more troops over there to "heal the rift; heal Iraq."
In the meantime, American troops over there feverishly concentrate "on the mission." What else can they do? Being led by numbskulls? Theirs is not to reason why, theirs is but to do and . . .
It is maddening.
{I know the question that you posed Hugh, was rhetorical.}
With Shia fighting Sunni do you think that could cause the middle east to erupt into all out civil war? and do you think it would have any negative effect on the western world.
Sorry,a bit off topic I know.