US maintains limited Middle East role despite chaos in Yemen

US president Barack Obama, in selling his military strategy to beat Islamic State fighters in Iraq and Syria in September to the American public, held up US operations in Yemen and Somalia as the kind of strategies that had been "successfully pursued . . . for years".

That statement is hanging darkly over his administration now as Yemen, the poorest country in the region and a key US counterinsurgency ally, descends into chaos.

As Iranian-backed Shia Houthi insurgents seize the capital Sanaa from the Sunni-led Yemeni government, the Obama administration’s Middle Eastern strategy of seeking a diplomatic nuclear deal with Tehran while fighting violent extremists with “responsible” local actors on the ground is being seriously questioned.

Desertion

The tensions come in a week when sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, the US soldier who left his base in

Afghanistan

in 2009 and was held captive by the Taliban for five years, was charged with desertion, leading to the criticism of the US president for his decision to swap five Taliban detainees at Guantanamo for the alleged deserter.

The capacity of the Americans to conduct counterterrorism operations in Yemen has been greatly weakened, raising concerns in the US that the country could become another uncontrolled vacuum to be filled by a mix of radical international fighters from where they could plan and launch further attacks on Western targets.

The area has already served as a launching pad and radicalising territory for foreign jihadists. Yemen is the home of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and the country was the base of the slain American-born radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki whose pro-jihadist messages influenced militants such as the French-Algerian Kouachi brothers who attacked the Paris offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January and the Chechen-American Tsarnaev brothers who bombed the Boston Marathon in April 2013.

Bomb-making

American fears about AQAP are well founded given the group’s sophistication in bomb-making. The al-Qaeda unit was behind plots to blow up a Detroit-bound aircraft on Christmas Day 2009 with an underwear bomb and to ship explosive-filled printer cartridges in air cargo from the Middle East to addresses in the US in 2010.

The coordinated suicide attacks on Shia mosques in Yemen last week by an IS affiliate showed that that group, which the US is striking from the air in Iraq and Syria supporting local combat fighters, can export its deadly sectarian unrest elsewhere in the region.

Still, despite heightened tensions, the US is not shifting from its stated policy. It is providing intelligence support to the Saudi-led coalition’s airstrikes to help the Yemeni government as Shia Houthi rebels, al-Qaeda Sunni militants and IS extremists jockey for power.

Safe haven

White House

spokesman

Josh Earnest

said that US policy “should not be graded against the success or the stability of the Yemeni government” but on making sure Yemen “cannot be a safe haven that extremists can use to attack the West and to attack the United States”.

To that end, the US strategy of limited intervention, avoiding another costly full boots-on-the-ground invasion, remains the preferred option.

Complicating matters in Yemen are US relations with Iran as nuclear talks head toward a key March 31st deadline for a deal and Tehran is helping the US combat IS in Iraq and Syria.

"The US is really in a bind in negotiating this increasingly complex relationship with Iran," said Max Abrahms, a politics professor at Northeastern University in Boston and an expert in terrorism.

Juggling so many competing interests in the region, Mr Obama is holding firm on his strategy despite stinging criticism from Republican hawks such as Lindsey Graham and John McCain at home.