U.S.-backed Yemeni president resigns

Yemeni President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi.(Photo: Natalia Kolesnikova, AFP/Getty Images)Yemen's president, prime minister and Cabinet resigned Thursday amid a standoff between powerful Iran-backed Houthi rebels who control the capital and the embattled U.S.-backed president, who had been held captive in his house for two days.President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi submitted his resignation to parliament rather than make further concessions to Shiite rebels.The leadership crisis puts a question mark over U.S. efforts to combat al-Qaeda's powerful affiliate in Yemen and raises the specter of a sectarian conflict between the Iran-backed Shiite rebels and Sunnis allied with al-Qaeda.Hadi's resignation comes four months after President Obama cited Yemen as a terrorism success story in a speech in September outlining his strategy against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, which involves targeted U.S. strikes on militants with the cooperation of a friendly ground force. Obama called it an approach "that we have successfully pursued in Yemen and Somalia for years."In Washington, the State Department said Thursday night that the U.S. Embassy remains open and will continue to operate as normal, although with reduced staff. The U.S. continues reassessing the situation there.The resignations mark the collapse of an internationally backed transition that compelled former autocratic ruler Ali Abdullah Saleh Saleh to resign in 2012 after months of Arab Spring protests."People who know Yemen fear the consequence is the kind of sectarian conflict you saw in Iraq in 2004 or 2005," said Stephen Day, who teaches Middle East studies at Rollins College in Winterpark, Fla., and wrote the book Regionalism and Rebellion in Yemen. "I hope that's not the direction Yemen is headed, and I don't think it is."Day said the Houthis don't recognize the authority of parliament, because it consists of loyalists to Saleh, who ruled for three decades before stepping down. The Houthis have pressed for a reconstituted presidential commission to rule the country.The rebels are anti-American — their slogan includes "Death to America" — but they are also sworn enemies of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which has ramped up attacks against the Houthis in recent weeks.The Houthis have generally lived in peace with Yemen's Sunnis, but their rise, which comes during a very militant Sunni al-Qaeda insurgency in the country, "may change that," Day said.Though Yemen is politically divided and the danger of sectarian warfare exists, the country has a distinct national identity and has resisted such pressures in the past, said Danya Greenfield, deputy director of the Middle East Center at the Atlantic Council."When they've been on the brink of civil war in the past few years, the desire to avoid civil war has been very profound, and people have pulled back from the edge," Greenfield said.Yemen's political turmoil came as the United Nations envoy to the Arab world's poorest country met with Houthi representatives and other political factions to try to implement a deal reached Wednesday to end the crisis.Under the agreement — struck while the rebels confined Hadi in his private home — the group's militias were to withdraw from the presidential palace and key areas of the capital they have overrun in recent days in return for political concessions.The Houthis have been unwilling to speak to American officials, said Katherine Zimmerman, a research analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think-tank."It seems as though the Houthis are maintaining their anti-American stance," she said. "But they've always done that from the standpoint of opposition. Now that they're in power, the United States would want to reach out to them."Contributing: The Associated PressIslamic State threatens Japanese hostages in new videoJan 23, 2015