"Mr Saleh has played a delicate game with the Islamist radicals. He sponsored the dispatch of mujahideen to Afghanistan in the 1980s and enlisted jihadist help in his own campaigns against southern separatists in the 1990s and allegedly also against the Houthis, many of whom practise Zaydi Islam, a Shia version that the Sunni jihadists abhor. But he has also co-operated, sometimes closely, with Western anti-terrorism efforts. If such collaboration brings useful foreign aid, it also risks a nationalist backlash that helps the
jihadists." (thanks Sultan)