Sunni/Shi'ite Jihad Update from Yemen. The Shi'ites have backing from Iran. "Two Yemeni Soldiers Killed In Ambush In South," from Reuters, October 25 (thanks to Maxwell):
ADEN, Yemen (Reuters) - Two Yemeni soldiers were killed and three others wounded in an ambush by gunmen in the south, where separatist sentiment is running high, a local news website said Sunday.The gunmen opened fire at the soldiers' vehicle as they were accompanying the body of a fellow soldier killed in the government's fight against a rebellion in the north, independent website Yemen News reported, citing Mahmoud Awas, the head of a local security unit.
Protests and attacks in the south coincide with a war in Yemen's far north which broke out in August between the army and insurgents of the Zaydi Shi'ite sect.
Sunni Saudi Arabia, the world's top oil exporter, and its ally the United States, fear the unrest in Yemen may play into the hands of al Qaeda, which has become more active in Yemen and could exploit instability to carry out attacks....
I don't think this is a case of Shi'a-Sunni violence, as in the north, where the Houthis (Zaydis), Shi'a who don't care to take orders from the central government (whose President happens to be Shi'a, though the government itself is otherwise Sunni-dominated). In the south, it is the old marxisant, or pretend-Marxists, of what formerly was South Yemen (think of Mad Mike Hoare, think of Aden town, think even of that Jewish trader in Aden, Antoine Besse, whose bequest was responsible for the founding of St. Anthony's College, Oxford, for years under Albert Hourani a diploma-mill for young Arabs, no courses and no waiting with a D.Phil. on, say, the "construction of Palestinian identity").
The title to the piece is thus misleading. News of the general mayhem in murder in Yemen, as in Somalia, as in many other parts of the Muslim world, however, is always instructive.
Two more for the body count. If think it's up to 270 million and 2..........