• Listen to this segment

Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest nation, could become the next frontline in the so-called War on Terror. Last week a series of bombings targeted suspected Al Qaeda training sites. While the US was initially blamed for the attack, Yemen’s government took responsibility. The New York Times reported that the US had given the greenlight however, and supported the strikes with intelligence and hard ware. Yemen sits just south of Saudi Arabia, the US’s richest and most oil-rich Arab ally, and just north, across the Gulf of Aden, from Somalia, one of the world’s poorest and most conflict-ridden nations. Yemen’s government has been facing an increasingly strong Shiite rebellion in the North, and a secessionist movement from Southern Yemenis. Earlier this year, militant Saudis and Yemenis announced they were uniting under Al Qaeda’s banner and would use Yemen as a base of operations, according to Reuters. Al Jazeera is reporting that in November the northern Houthi rebels attacked and killed two Saudi border guards in a cross-border skirmish. Last week’s air strikes were the strongest expression of government retaliation in recent months. Over the weekend, an air strike in Yemen allegedly by the Saudi government is reported to have killed dozens of people including women and children once more with strong US support in planning and execution. But with the governments of Yemen, Saudi Arabia and the US saying nothing about the strikes publicly, information has been difficult to verify. According to aid organizations, 150,000 people have reportedly been displaced from the Northern region of Yemen since 2004.

GUEST: Steven Zunes, Associate Professor of Politics at the University of San Francisco and writer at www.fpif.org.