A return from part of the damage: the intervention in Yemen

The intervention in Yemen, led by Saudi Arabia and carried out with the participation of ten countries including the Gulf states and Pakistan, is truly a late but fitting intervention. In Yemen, where the Arab Spring process unfolded in the most interesting way at the outset and where, after Abdullah Saleh's withdrawal, the transition was managed by a dialogue council that functioned for better or worse, counter-revolutionary operations or interventions of the same kind as in the other Arab Spring countries had been carried out.

The attempt of Saudi Arabia's previous administration to push Abdullah Saleh back onto the field by strengthening him again, against the Islah Party, which had grown considerably stronger in the process and begun to have a say in running the country, together with Saleh's collaboration with the Houthis, had produced open disappointment and even, to some extent, regret. Saleh had calculated a bid for power by stacking the support he got from Saudi Arabia on top of that of the Houthis, but in this way he both burned himself and dragged the country into complete chaos.

As for the Houthis, their attempts, along the path Abdullah Saleh had opened, to establish dominion over all of Yemen, far beyond their strength and representative capacity, seemed likely to drag the country gradually into a civil war environment. Faced with the open occupation movement that emerged in response to the alliance of Abdullah Saleh and the Houthis, the Islah party chose not to stand against it but to remain a passive spectator to what was happening. Because at a certain stage it had no trust at all in those who demanded of it the resistance expected from it, and because it saw the danger of being declared terrorist or being completely eliminated as a result of any resistance it might undertake, it held back from taking a role as an actor. In this way it preserved its existing presence without showing it, but for now this also cut off its path to having a say over the country's future.

Since this intervention in Yemen is against the Houthis, it is not very unfair to see it as a Sunni defense or a sectarian conflict. Unfortunately, it has come to be seen, in a way that will create great disappointments in the Islamic world, that Iran's whole priority with its policies in Iraq, Syria and Yemen is Shiitization. It is reported that the Iranian Qasem Soleimani, who organized the Shiite militias that have turned into machines of massacre in Iraq and Syria, said with pride that "they have brought four capitals of the Sunni Arab world (Sanaa, Baghdad, Beirut and Damascus) under Shiite dominion."

The fact is that each of these four capitals that have somehow come into Iran's sphere of influence is in ruins. More grave than its having established dominion over them is that Iran looks at the state of these cities and feels a cause for pride in it. Was this the message the Islamic Revolution of 1979 was to give to the world and the Islamic world?

We have said it before. It is said that Iran has come out very much the winner in this struggle for influence through the regions and the influence it has captured, but no one says how deadly a gain this is, that in the end it has destroyed the sympathy toward Iran and its entire positive image. Yet before the counter-revolution process of the Arab Spring began, Iran enjoyed, for better or worse, a degree of sympathy in the whole of the Islamic world. By capturing the capitals of Iraq, Syria and Yemen at the cost of ruining them, it lost hearts completely everywhere in the Islamic world except in some Shiite regions.

This must have become an urgent situation requiring Iran's rulers to put their turbans in front of them and think. In the Islamic world, from now on, no one can any longer be convinced that it represents and strengthens a front against the Zionist evil alliance. No Zionist attack has done, or can do, the damage Iran has so far done to the unity, morale and spirituality of the Islamic world.

Turkey has never had a sectarian stance, either toward Iran or in its policy in the Middle East. On the contrary, it rejected from the outset, and rejects now, every kind of sect-based tension and conflict. While Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, Libya's Gaddafi, Tunisia's Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, or Yemen's Abdullah Saleh were being overthrown by the will of the people, Turkey was never gripped by a concern of "these are Sunni!" The fact is that all of them were Sunni, but this could not have any importance, because the sect of a bloody-handed dictator could have no value. Just as we did not look at what Assad's sect was when he stained his hands with the blood of his own people. Yet the sectarian accusation against Turkey began precisely because of its attitude toward Assad, whereas its attitudes in the earlier cases fundamentally refute this accusation.

Iran, which claims to be an Islamic Republic, would have been expected to remember Islam's values at least a little and to remain loyal to those values at least a little.

The intervention in Yemen by the Islamic countries led by Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, should be welcomed as a mechanism of sanction that the Muslim world set in motion against a negativity within itself, without needing a foreign intervention.

WHERE DOES SISI STAND IN THE COALITION?

It is said that Egypt is also in the coalition for the intervention in Yemen. Truly, what Egypt's contribution will be is a serious question mark. That Sisi also invited Assad to the summit in Sharm el-Sheikh and tried in this way to provide him legitimacy, and that he is trying to hold all these initiatives as a kind of trump card against the Gulf Countries by meeting with the Houthis and Russia as well, are read as developments that shake trust in him, and for this reason the matter of his contribution to the coalition is being left vague. The same Sisi's refusal to grant visas to the Syrian National Coalition for the meetings to be held in Cairo sounds like open support for the Assad regime, which is seen as the enemy of the coalition forces. Sisi's untrustworthiness has been thoroughly confirmed with this incident. Therefore it should be noted that there is a serious reservation about his participation in the coalition.