More than six months after the streets of the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, caught the scent of the "Jasmine revolution," Yemen looks like a powder keg ready to explode. Observers of Yemen are now talking more about the risk of Yemen's descending into Somali-style anarchy than about the hope of a post-revolutionary democratic Yemen. The peaceful social intifada against the Yemeni regime has been eclipsed by widespread violent confrontations among military units, tribal forces and militants in different locations across the sole republic in Arabia. In Sanaa, roadblocks and checkpoints have been erected all over the city. Some of these checkpoints are manned by pro-government military units, others by anti-government military units or tribal militia. In the rest of the country, militant jihadists have taken control of a number of towns in the southern province of Abyan. Armed dissidents have seized control of most of Yemen's second-largest city, Taez, while the Houthi rebels in the northern province of Saada, at the border with Saudi Arabia, who have been fighting the Sanaa government since 2004, have taken full control of Saada and appointed a well-known Yemeni arms dealer as governor. In addition, violent confrontations and counterattacks between pro-government military units, anti-government protesters and armed tribes are being reported in the eastern and southern provinces.

On June 4, the chaotic situation became even more dangerous when Yemen's embattled president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, was flown to Riyadh for treatment for burns and shrapnel injuries suffered in an attack on his life. The assassination attempt brought to the surface one of the tragic features of Yemen's political arena: occupying the highest political office leads to either assassination or exile. Of the four previous presidents of North Yemen, two were exiled and two were assassinated within a nine-month span. Saleh, however, has managed to stay in the presidential hot seat for so long that almost 75 percent of Yemen's population has been born after he came to power in 1978.

The wounded president left for Riyadh leaving behind him a fractured country locked in a power struggle and on the verge of disintegration. Yemen will not go quietly, however. It is too steeped in conflict and instability to break apart without causing mayhem beyond its borders. Yemen, just south of Saudi Arabia, is strategically located between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, at the access point to the vital maritime shortcut of the Suez Canal. This geostrategic advantage is threatened by the fact that Yemen is the homeland of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the most dangerous branch of al-Qaeda in the Middle East. Chaos in Yemen could trigger, therefore, an avalanche of regional and international threats both to world energy supplies and to the security of many nations.