President Saleh’s government is also wrestling with three big political problems. A Shi’a Zaidi sect in the north - that Sana’a has accused of conspiring to replace local elected councils with an Islamic imamate government - has been clashing with state-backed forces.

Hundreds of people have been killed there since 2004, and thousands more have been displaced.

In the southern governorates, an increasingly vocal - and violent - secessionist movement has created a national crisis over the past few months. In the largest show of unrest since 2006, several hundred thousand people held protests there in March to commemorate the outbreak of civil war in 1994. Many southerners say the central government has marginalized them economically and politically, and one of President Saleh’s former allies, an influential southern sheikh, recently declared his support for the southern-secessionist cause.

Sana’a is taking the situation seriously enough that it recently sent troops and tanks to southern towns. In May, the Ministry of Information also closed down eight Yemeni newspapers that had been covering the sometimes violent rallies, sparking criticism from press freedom groups. President Saleh has also promised new government reforms to allay southern protesters.

“Yemen, Allah forbid, will not divide into two partitions, south and north, but into villages and small states,” Saleh warned at a rally on Apr. 27, in an attempt to diffuse the crisis. “People will be fighting with each other from door to door and from window to window.”

Last but not least, al-Qaeda an-nounced in January that it’s consolidating regional operations on Yemeni soil. Thanks to Riyadh’s success at banishing al-Qaeda from the kingdom, and stoked by extremist fighters returning from Iraq, Yemen is “becoming terror central on the Arabian peninsula,” says Kamran Bokhari, director of Middle East analysis at Stratfor, a US-based global intelligence firm.

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