Foreboding About the Future in Yemen

Within days of Yemeni President Ali Abdallah Salih’s departure in January to Germany for medical care, the regime’s next most prominent personality, Sheikh Abdallah bin Hussein al-Ahmar, left for Saudi Arabia. At the Sanaa airport, al-Ahmar, speaker of the Yemeni parliament, head of Islah, the country’s most popular opposition party, and paramount sheikh of Yemen’s most influential tribal confederation, pointedly announced that he was “leaving [Yemen] to Ali Abdallah Salih and his sons,” according to a source close to his family. Al-Ahmar’s words signaled that the alliance between him and the president, the cornerstone of the political status quo for nearly three decades, is close to coming undone. “He is smart,” says one local analyst. “He sees the regime’s problems and knows when to start to move independently.”

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