The Yemen Correction.

Between roughly 960AD and 1960AD the territory that makes up modern day Yemen has been run by the Houthi tribes that practice the Zaidi form of Shia Islam. In 1967 following the Aden Emergency the British Empire withdrew leaving Qahtan Muhammad al-Shaabi - a Zaidi but not a Houthi as President. He was replaced by Haidar al-Attas another Zaidi who ruled until 1994. In 1997 Abdullah Saleh another non-Houthi Zaidi was elected President and remained in office in 2011.

As I explained in the Hebdo Matrix the al-Saud family in neighbouring Saudi Arabia have used an extreme form of Salifi Islam known as Wahhabism to maintain their grip on power. Although the Salifi/Sufi split cuts across the Sunni/Shia split so you can get Salifi-Shias and Sunni-Sufis the fact that Shias believe that the Prophet Mohamed is just the latest and therefore the most important in a succession of Prophets the tend not to fall into the trap of Salifi absolutism quite so easily. So when the people of Tunisia and Egypt overthrew their dictators in 2011 the al-Sauds suddenly became very alarmed by an arc of Shia power running through Syria, Iraq, Bahrain, Yemen and their own oil-rich eastern province.

So in Bahrain and their own eastern province the al-Sauds sent in the troops to brutally crush any suggestion of political reform. In Syria and Yemen they sent in Sunni-Arab insurgents to attack the Shia-Arab governments. They then got the international community led by the US and the UK to lie about these insurgencies and instead condemn the Shia-Arab governments on false allegations of brutality. In Syria this has led to the rise of the Islamic State of the Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

However in Yemen it forced President Saleh out of office to be replaced by Abdullah Rabbug Mansur Hadi - a Sunni-Arab who acted as an envoy of the al-Saud family. One of his main roles was to trick the US into using its drone program to wipe out the traditional Al-Qaeda members of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) so they could be replaced by Saudi operatives. Apart from the recent attacks in Paris, France AQAP's main duty for the al-Sauds has been to build up al-Shabaab in neighbouring Somalia in order to destabilise East African nations such as Kenya and Uganda.

In September 2014 Hadi announced that he would be going back on an agreement with the Houthis and introduce a constitution which gave him and therefore the al-Sauds all the power. Since then the Houthis have gradually been increasing the pressure on Hadi to change his mind and today Hadi and his puppet government stepped down resigning from power.

We are now waiting with baited breath to see whether the international community will support Yemen's right to self-rule or double down on their mistake. Well I say waiting, the Al-Jazeera arm of Qatar's Sunni-Arab Royal Family are positively frothing at the mouth.

20:05 on 22/1/15 (UK date).

Edited at around 11:40 on 23/1/15 (UK date) to add;

Last night it was announced that Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud had died. Although it is not clear how old King Abdullah actually was he was certainly older then the nation of Saudi Arabia and is believed to have been around 90 years old. Towards the end of the December 2014 and the start of January 2015 he developed pneumonia and had to be placed on a ventilator. This procedure normally involves the patient being heavily sedated so it is unlikely he was aware of the panic that has gripped Saudi Arabia due to its plan for Yemen unravelling.

It seems likely that King Abdullah was actually far more ill then was being admitted to publicly and was not only on a ventilator but was actually on full scale life support. This created a significant power problem within Saudi Arabia with the titular King still attracting support whilst the Crown Prince was actually making the decisions

As such it seems likely that the resignation of their envoy in Yemen prompted the Saudis to turn off King Abdullah's life support in order to allow them to respond in a uniform way. After all even before the death of King Abdullah was announced his 80 year old half-brother Crown Prince Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud had already been crowned King and Muqrin bin Abdulaziz Al Saud named as the new Crown Prince.

Plus the death makes Saudi Arabia the centre of attention at a time when much of the international community would prefer not to be talking to them. US President Obama has already delivered a mournful farewell to his master and dispatched Vice President Joe Biden to a funeral that has already taken place. It must be said though that non-Crowned heads of state are not under any obligation to acknowledge the event in any way shape or form.