A bitter home-coming for Yemen's exiled government

By NP

RIVALRY between Iran, a Shia power, and its Sunni Arab neighbours has long echoed across the Middle East. It has been loudest of late in Yemen, where a coalition led by Saudi Arabia intervened in March with a relentless bombing campaign to stop the advance of the Houthis, a Shia rebel group they see as a cat’s paw for Iran. The result has been a messy stalemate. But on July 14th, just as Iran clinched a deal in Vienna to end global sanctions, its Gulf neighbours joined a motley group of forces loyal to the exiled Yemeni government to launch a bold assault on Aden, the port at the southern tip of Arabia that is Yemen’s second-biggest city.

Defying a just-agreed ceasefire, the joint force, backed from the air by coalition warplanes and on land by thinly disguised Saudi and Emirati commandoes, soon recaptured Aden’s airport. By Eid, the festival to celebrate Ramadan’s end three days later, the Gulf-backed loyalists claimed to have taken the city’s port and commercial centre. “From Aden we will regain Yemen," said Abed Rabbuh Mansour Hadi, the president-in-exile.