Yemen’s Shiite Muslim Houthi group is boosting ties with Iran shortly after Sunni Gulf Arab monarchies moved their embassies to a southern port city to back the government of Yemeni President Abdurabuh Mansour Hadi.
An Iranian flight carrying medical supplies arrived in Sana’a, the capital controlled by the Houthi movement, on Sunday, al-Masirah television reported.
Saleh al-Sammad, an official with the group, is also leading a delegation to Tehran to discuss political and economic cooperation.
Yemen is emerging as the latest ground for a proxy confrontation between Saudi Arabia, the world’s top oil exporter that backs Hadi, and Shiite Iran, where officials have expressed support for the Houthi group.
The two countries are on opposite ends of the civil war in Syria, with Saudi Arabia backing the mainly Sunni rebels against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who has Iranian support. Saudi Arabia classifies the Houthi movement as a terrorist organization.
If the conflict between Yemen’s political groups is not resolved peacefully, the country “will become a zone for proxy war between Iran and the Saudis” and that would be “very bad news for Yemen,” Nadwa al-Dawsari, nonresident senior fellow at Project on Middle East Democracy in Washington, said in an e-mail.
The Houthis, who say they have been victims of government discrimination for decades, advanced from their northern base to capture Sana’a last year. Since then, al-Qaeda and Sunni tribal fighters have stepped up attacks against the group throughout the country. Talks sponsored by the UN have failed to defuse the crisis, which worsened after the Houthis put Hadi under house arrest.
The president fled the capital last month and has sought to rally domestic and international support for his government in Aden, a southern port city. Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) nations, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, said they have moved their embassies there.
“Yemen is effectively split,” said Charles Schmitz, a Yemen expert at Towson University in Maryland.
For Iran, building ties with the Houthis, who follow the Zaydi branch of Shiite Islam, expands its influence in the Arab world, with allies spanning Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, said Kamran Bokhari, an adviser for Middle Eastern and South Asian affairs at Texas-based consulting firm Stratfor.
“What really worries the GCC states is this Iranian geopolitical expansion in the region comes at a time when the Arab world is in turmoil,” he said in a telephone interview.
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