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Turmoil in Aden over the past few weeks has underlined the existential crisis confronting Yemen. The alliances that have been at the center of the three-year-old civil war—the Hadi government and its Saudi-led coalition of supporters versus the Houthi alliance with former President Ali Abdullah Saleh—have fractured.

Moreover, as a number of recent studies have highlighted, the Houthi-Saleh assault on the Hadi government is only one aspect of a much more complicated story of Yemen’s splintered society.

With the conflict still stalemated and the UN-led political process frozen for the past eighteen months, Yemen’s survival as a unified country appears in doubt. Yet the international community does have a vital interest in ensuring that Yemen survives.

Photo: STRINGER/AFP/Getty Images


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