Yemeni generals join opposition

CAIRO – Yemen’s political crisis spiraled further toward chaos Monday, as five key generals defected to join anti-government protesters, further weakening longtime President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s tenuous hold on power.

The generals, who lead much of the nation’s armed forces, broke from the president after government loyalists killed more than 50 protesters Friday during demonstrations in the capital, Sanaa.

Talk of a coup swirled in the strategically situated nation, with tanks rattling through the streets of Sanaa as soldiers loyal to one of the defecting commanders joined protesters while those siding with Saleh took positions around the presidential palace.

After decades of manipulating tribes and political opponents to remain in power, Saleh has seen the clamor for his ouster spread from the streets to the ruling elite, including a respected tribal leader, who in recent days has stood with protesters.

The protests have shifted from a carnival-like enthusiasm – with tribesmen with traditional daggers around their waists dancing alongside students in T-shirts – to battlefield somberness.

“Saleh is clearly on his way out. There is no turning back,” said Barbara K. Bodine, U.S. ambassador to Yemen from 1997 to 2001 and a diplomat in residence at Princeton University. “His government has left him. The defections have now become a flood.”

Yemen is at the strategic crossroads of the Middle East and the Horn of Africa. U.S. and Western officials have long feared that a political meltdown with chronic unemployment, malnutrition and drought would ignite further instability. Saleh, who once described Yemen as dancing on the heads of snakes, no longer has the tight grip on the country he once had.

The mercurial ruler’s predicament is one in the series of revolts that have gripped the Middle East, toppling the presidents of Egypt and Tunisia. It is uncertain what chaos would unfold if Saleh were no longer ruling a nation already is facing a rebellion in the north, a secession movement in the south and the highly active al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula.

Although regarded as brutal and corrupt, Saleh is a U.S. ally against the Islamic militant network that in the past two years has staged bloody attacks across Yemen and has taken credit for unsuccessful attempts to blow up American airplanes. His departure would also trouble neighbor Saudi Arabia, which sent troops into Yemen in 2009 to contain Houthi rebels in the north and to seal its border from al-Qaida operatives.

“I think we have to be very concerned” about Yemen, said Rep. C.A. “Dutch” Ruppersberger of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. “It’s a problem even as we speak, whether he falls or not, because it’s a very weak government. What concerns me is it’s a training ground for al-Qaida.”

In recent weeks, an awkward alliance of opponents – Islamists, reform-minded college students, socialists and tribal sheiks – have participated in a series of massive protests in Sanaa, their common goal to dislodge Saleh but their visions for the future diametrically different.

The five generals who defected Monday include Maj. Gen. Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, a distant relative of Saleh’s and commander of the 1st Brigade in the country’s northwest.

“The state, represented by the president, is totally responsible for the blood that was shed,” al-Ahmar told Al-Jazeera news channel, noting that his defection was “an answer to the developments in the streets.”