Saudi Arabia’s four-month old bombing campaign against Houthi rebel forces in Yemen has had mixed results beyond devastation in the region’s poorest country. The insertion of Saudi-trained Yemeni ground forces that support exiled president Abd Rabbah Mansour Hadi led last month to the capture of the port city of Aden from the rebels.

The Yemen war and the prominent role of Saudi Arabia’s powerful defence minister, Mohammed Bin Salman, have nevertheless, sparked unease among some members of the Saudi ruling family. Saudi Arabia’s intervention in Yemen has also brought to the fore cracks within the kingdom’s ruling family at a time that fissures are also becoming public among rulers of the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Critics of the Yemen civil war within the Saudi royal family worry that even if the Houthis can be driven back to their northern redoubt of Saada, they will be embittered and likely to pose a continued threat to Saudi border towns populated by non-Wahhabi Muslim communities and tribes. Indeed a number of Saudi princes are said to have questioned the wisdom of the bombing campaign launched by King Salman’s son, Defence Minister Mohamed.

… James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies as Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, co-director of the Institute of Fan Culture of the University of Würzburg and the author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer, and a forthcoming book with the same title.