“In a harbinger of things to come, a UNICEF employee told me that the only way he could get supplies to Saada was by partnering with the Islah Charitable Society (ICS), a local aid agency tied to Yemen’s largest Islamist party. He complained that ICS was padding the books and inflating the numbers of people who had been displaced to gain resources for its wider evangelical work…… It was in ways like this that the Saleh regime manipulated the “sectarian” politics of Northern Yemen, seeking to ensure that the two groups were too distracted by each other to turn their attention elsewhere……….So, why think of this as sectarian war? The Houthi’s march on Sanaa in September cannot be easily glossed as “sectarian” just because they are Zaydi Shiites, and most (though not all) Islahis are Sunnis…………”
So the Islah are as corrupt as anyone else in power in Yemen, which makes sense. Islah means “reform” in Arabic, clearly a misnomer now. Very Orwellian use of language in this case, as in most cases in Arab politics.
The Houthis were the rustic country folks who did not have the slick region-wide organization like the Muslim Brotherhood (or the Persian Gulf Salafis) to support them. They could not have taken Sanaa so easily if the ret of Yemenis were not fed up with the Islah corruption and the impotent president General Ab Rabu Hadi Al Zombie, the former vice president of Mr. Saleh, who was given the job by the princes and potentates of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi and Doha. Of course the Yemeni scene is more complicated than that: AQAP and the Southern (Aden) independence movement complicate the mix.
These Gulf worthies and princes are now screaming their old tried and true tactic: they are crying “sectarian”. But then, nobody is as responsible as these same potentates for the current rabid sectarianism in our region.
Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum