This War's Gone on for Far too Long.

Yesterday two suicide bombers attacked the Shia Badr Mosque in the south of Yemen's capital Sana'a. A short time later another two suicide bombers attacked the Shia al-Hashoosh Mosque in the north of Sana'a. Both attacks took place due the peak Friday prayers.

Although I gather they've now shut down the cell this type of suicide attack against Shia Mosques has almost been a daily event in Iraq's capital Baghdad since the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) over-ran large swathes of the country back in August 2014. As a result I've come to analyse these attacks amongst numerous acts of violence without them really registering.

It was only as I was going to bed last night that it struck me that 143 people had been killed in the Sana'a attacks making them particularly bloody. The attacks in Iraq only tend to average around a dozens deaths each.

Despite the brutality of yesterday's attack it doesn't really indicate anything new about the political situation in Yemen. For roughly the last 1000 years Yemen has been run by the Houthi tribes. As the Houthis practise the Zaidi form of Shia Islam they are not particularly susceptible to the Salafi/Whabbists form of Islam that the al-Saud family that have ruled neighbouring Saudi Arabia since the 1930's use to repress their population.

As a result the al-Saud's had the government of Yemen overthrown in 2011 with the backing of the United Nations in order to replace it with a Sunni regime that was more responsive to Saudi control. One of the first tasks of the Saudi puppet regime was to use the US to mount a coup within the local Al Qaeda group (AQAP) so Al Qaeda members who are opposed to the al-Saud's and their extreme distortion of Islam could be replaced by ISIL members who are effectively the al-Saud's shock troops.

A key figure in this transition has been Ibrahim al-Asiri a Saudi who is considered a master bomb maker. The way that the bombs used in yesterday's attacks were disguised as plaster casts is very much a signature of al-Asiri. The supposed threat of al-Asiri has frequently been used to trick the US into attacking the supposed "Khorasan Group" rather then ISIL in Syria which is largely seen as a threat to Syria's predominately Shia government.

Yesterday's bombings were claimed by ISIL which seems to indicate that AQAP have given up on the deceit and are now formally admitting that they are part of ISIL rather then Al Qaeda. The US responded to this by withdrawing its forces from Yemen and now appears to be formally backing ISIL to once again overthrow the Yemeni government.

17:05 on 21/3/15 (UK date).