Yemen clashesInsecurity plagues poorest Arab state

The poorest Arab nation faces economic hardships aggravated by a lengthy political crisis, a southern separatist movement, a growing threat from al Qaeda militants and a long-running but intermittent conflict in the north.

Mass protests began in early 2011 demanding the end of President Ali Abdullah Saleh's 33-year rule and these, combined with growing violence by Islamist and tribal militants, meant the government lost control of whole chunks of the country.

Tens of thousands of people have been displaced in southern, central and northern areas.

Public services in most of the country had stopped by mid-2011, the U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR) said.

The unrest also created severe fuel shortages and dramatically pushed up the price of food.

The number of malnourished children under the age of five nearly doubled to 750,000 as a result of the political turmoil, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in February 2012.

Acute malnutrition affects as many as 30 percent of children in some areas – similar to levels observed in famine-struck south Somalia, and twice as high as the internationally recognized emergency threshold - the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said in January 2012.

With nearly 60 percent of children stunted, Yemen has the second highest rate of chronic malnutrition among children in the world after Afghanistan, UNICEF said. Stunting – when a child’s height is too low for their age – is a sign of longer-term hunger.

Malnutrition is the main cause of death among young children, according to UNICEF.

Each year, tens of thousands of people make the treacherous journey across the Gulf of Aden to Yemen. In 2011, a record 103,000 refugees and migrants made the journey, double the previous year, according to the UNHCR.

More than 200,000 refugees, most of them Somali, are in Yemen, UNHCR said in December 2011.

The country is heavily dependent on dwindling oil supplies, and has high levels of unemployment, rapid population growth and diminishing water resources.

Mass protests

Since the start of 2011, Yemen has been paralysed by countrywide mass protests against outgoing President Ali Abdullah Saleh's three-decade rule.

Some of Saleh’s top aides, military commanders, cabinet ministers and diplomats defected to the protesters’ side.

In some areas, government forces have shot at protesters and stopped medical services from reaching protest sites, Human Rights Watch said. 

Weakened by the protests, the government lost control of whole chunks of the country. Northern rebels carved out their own domain in the north, and al Qaeda militants seized towns in south Yemen.

Fighting involving government forces and rebels, Islamist militants and rival tribesmen has affected several parts of the country, mainly the capital Sanaa, and the country’s southern and northern regions.

In Maarib province near Sanaa, tribesmen attacked and closed the main oil pipeline in the oil-producing Maarib province in March, and blew up an empty pipeline in June. They blockaded the area, costing the government millions of dollars a day in lost exports and sparking a severe fuel crisis, power outages and soaring prices.

After surviving an assassination attempt in June 2011, Saleh went to Saudi Arabia for medical treatment. In November he finally agreed to hand over power to his deputy, Vice President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, and a unity government was formed.

The deal brought some calm to Sanaa, but violence continued in many other parts of the country, especially the governorates of Sa'ada and Hajjah in the north, and Abyan and Aden in the south.

In January 2012, parliament granted Saleh full immunity from prosecution.

Presidential elections are due to be held in February, with Hadi as the sole candidate. He is expected to lead Yemen for a two-year interim period leading to parliamentary elections.

Many Yemenis, as well as the United States and Saudi Arabia, hope the presidential poll will pull the country back from the brink of civil war.

But protests against the November agreement continue across Yemen daily, with people demanding complete regime change and a transitional council to guide the shift to a parliamentary system, the United Nations said in a January 2012 report.

The northern rebels, southern separatists and Islamist militants are refusing to take part in the poll.

Southern violence

Al Qaeda-linked militants seized several towns in Abyan province in 2011, including the provincial capital Zinjibar in May 2011.

Since then, Zinjibar has been nearly destroyed in clashes between government forces and the Islamist militants. Tens of thousands have fled to other parts of Abyan, the neighbouring Lahj province and the southern port city of Aden.

The government said militants took advantage of Saleh's absence in 2011 to step up operations in Abyan.

But opposition parties say the government reduced security in Abyan to allow militants more sway and bolster Saleh's argument that al Qaeda would gain a bigger foothold in Yemen if he was pushed out.

When the situation in Abyan worsened, local tribes began to turn against the Islamists and joined government forces in an effort to push them back, the International Crisis Group (ICG) said.

It’s unclear who the militants are, but some experts say they are linked to al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) which was formed when the Saudi and Yemeni branches of al Qaeda merged in January 2009, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. It is based in Yemen.

AQAP apparently joined forces with local militants and foreign al Qaeda fighters in a group called the Ansar al-Sharia (Partisans of Islamic Law), according to ICG.

The defence ministry set up a security belt around Aden, which sits near the entry to a shipping lane that channels some 3 million barrels of oil daily.

The United States has been launching drone strikes against the Islamist militants.

Approximately 100,000 southerners are displaced, OCHA said in February 2012. Some say they want to return to Abyan, but conditions there are volatile because of ongoing fighting and the presence of landmines and unexploded ordinance.

Displacement figures are difficult to verify, because aid agencies are unable to access many internally displaced people in Abyan and Lahij, and because many IDPs are living with relatives or host communities.

Meanwhile, separatists are seeking to revive a southern socialist state that Saleh united with the north in 1990. They initially joined the anti-Saleh protesters in 2011, but the two sides have since grown apart.

Yemen’s unity was troubled from the start and resulted in a short but bloody civil war in 1994. After that many southerners viewed the north as an occupying force, and their sense of marginalisation by the government eventually resulted in a popular protest movement in 2007, which later made calls for separation, ICG said.

Northern insurgency

A conflict in Yemen’s northern provinces between Abdul-Malik al-Houthi's Shi'ite rebels and the government has raged on and off since 2004, despite ceasefires and pledges of reconstruction.

Fighting escalated in August 2009, raising the total number of displaced by early 2010 to some 250,000 – most of them in Saada province near Saudi Arabia, to which outside access was restricted.

Despite a shaky ceasefire deal with the government in February 2010, most of the displaced were reluctant to return home because of continued insecurity, a fear of reprisals and a lack of basic services.

The majority moved into camps. In an arid, drought-prone region, providing water is one of the main tasks for aid agencies.

In October and November 2009, the conflict briefly spread to Saudi Arabia where rebels clashed with Saudi forces, accusing the government there of supporting the Yemeni government in attacks against them. The Saudi government denies the charges.

The weakening of government control caused by the 2011 protests helped the rebels to seize the governorate of Saada, which borders Saudi Arabia.

The World Food Programme is giving food aid to about 500,000 displaced and war-affected people in the north, the U.N. agency said in October 2011.

More than 300,000 people are still displaced, UNHCR said in December 2011.

An unknown number of people have sought refuge with friends, relatives or other households in nearby cities or moved away from the region completely. Some of them had to pay smugglers to get them out.

Negotiations between aid agencies and the Houthis have improved humanitarian access to Saada governorate, OCHA said in February 2012.

Thousands more have been forced to flee fighting in nearby Hajjah province, which broke out in November 2011 when tribesmen clashed with the Houthis, accusing the rebels of trying to grab more territory.

The rebels are adherents of the Zaydi branch of Shi'ite Islam and a strongly tribal minority in mostly Sunni Muslim Yemen. They oppose Yemen's close ties with the United States and say they are defending their villages against government oppression.

Sunni Muslims dominate the government and make up most of Yemen's 19 million people. The Zaydis, the closest Shi'ite sect to mainstream Sunni Islam, make up most of the rest.

The rare murder in July 2009 of three foreign aid workers kidnapped in Saada province gave the government a jolt over an apparent resurgence of al Qaeda in the same northern area.

The Houthi rebels have no known links to al Qaeda, which follows a strict brand of Sunni Islam. And tribesman, disgruntled over marginalisation, have often abducted foreigners – usually tourists – but have rarely killed them.

But the insurrection in the north underlined Western and Saudi fears that instability may spiral out of control and allow al Qaeda militants to entrench themselves in the ancestral home of the network's late leader, Osama bin Laden.