Yemen is just part of Iran's Mideast master plan
Analysis: Israel has spent five years warning that Iran seeks Shiite domination of the Muslim world, and the Gulf States know by now not to rely on the Obama administration.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4641659,00.html
Sixstrings wrote: btw -- there are now FOUR regional wars going on over there, you've got Libya and Syria and Iraq and now Yemen.
You were on both sides of the Iran-Iraq war. That worked out great.Plantagenet wrote:Sixstrings wrote: btw -- there are now FOUR regional wars going on over there, you've got Libya and Syria and Iraq and now Yemen.
Even more amazing then that is that the US is on different sides in different wars!
Obama is helping the Shia Islamic Republic fight the Sunni Islamic State in Iraq, and simultaneously helping the Sunni Saudis fight the Iranian supported Shia Houthi in Yemen.
I guess if the US is on both sides, then we can't lose!
Brilliant!
autonomous wrote:Note the concentration of Shiia in the east and southwest portions of Saudi Arabia. As you can see, it's rather complicated. No countries are purely Sunni or Shi’ite. Most have an interwoven patchwork of these sectarian communities — a village here, a city there.
Subjectivist wrote:That map doesn't make any sense, Christians in Egypt do not even show on the map but if you read the stats on the right you will see there are three times as many Christians as Shia in Egypt. The Shia are clearly shown, but Christians are not. The impression left by the map is that there are very few Christians in Egypt but many Shia. Most people are visually oriented and will take the map at face value without analyzing the statistics that supposedly went into making it to double check its accuracy.
President Bush met with three Iraqi exiles and appeared unaware that Iraq contained within it Sunnis and Shias. An Arab leader confirmed to me that in his meetings with the president, it was clear that Bush did not understand that there was a difference between the two sects.
kublikhan wrote:Not just oil shortages coming down the line, I wonder how many future conflicts will be fought over more basic commodities like water?Postcard From YemenI am in the Yemen International Hospital in Taiz, the Yemeni city in the central highlands that is suffering from such an acute water shortage that people get to run their taps for only 36 hours every 30 days or so. They have to fill up as much as they can and then rely on water trucks that come through neighborhoods and sell water like a precious commodity. I am visiting Mohamed Qaid, a 25-year-old laborer from the nearby village of Qaradh who was struck the night before in the hand and chest by three bullets fired by a sniper from Marzouh, the village next door. The two villages have been fighting over the rapidly dwindling water supply from their shared mountain springs. Six people have been killed and many more wounded in clashes since 2000 that have heated up of late. One was killed a night ago. Qaid is in pain, but he wanted to tell people about what is happening here. I have one question: “Were you really shot in a fight over water?” He winces out his answer: “It wasn’t about politics. It wasn’t about the Muslim Brotherhood. It was about water.”
Yemen is just a decade or so ahead of Syria and Egypt in terms of the kind of human development crisis this whole region will face. Yemen has 15 aquifers, and only two today are self-sustaining; all the others are being steadily depleted. And wherever in Yemen you see aquifers depleting, you have the worst conflicts.”
One of the most threatened aquifers in Yemen is the Radaa Basin, he added, “and it is one of the strongholds of Al Qaeda.” In the north, on the border with Saudi Arabia, the Sadah region used to be one of the richest areas for growing grapes, pomegranates and oranges. “But they depleted their aquifer so badly that many farms went dry,” said Eryani, and this created the environment for the pro-Iranian Houthi sect to recruit young, unemployed farm laborers to start a separatist movement.
“Yemen suffered from two drugs: qat and easy oil money,” says Eryani. Qat drank all the water, and the easy oil money seduced the rural manpower into leaving for unskilled jobs. But now that most of the Yemeni workers have been sent home from Saudi Arabia, they are finding a country running out of water, with few jobs, and a broken public school system that teaches more religion than science. As a result, what Yemen needs most — an educated class not tied to an increasingly water-deprived agriculture — it cannot get.
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