Dubai - With its campaign against Yemeni rebels at full throttle, Saudi Arabia has spared Al-Qaeda which has capitalised on the chaos, but experts say Riyadh will have to hit them eventually.
Faced with the Shias rebels' march on Aden, President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi's southern refuge, Riyadh assembled a Sunni-Arab coalition that launched a campaign of air strikes on March 26.
Since then, coalition warplanes have pounded Huthi positions and those if its allies across the country, as Sunni tribesmen joined the fight against the rebels.
"The growing confessional nature of the conflict definitely gives the extremists on both sides a bigger margin for manoeuvre, so fighting Al-Qaeda might not seem like the most urgent priority," said Elie al-Hindy, political science professor at Notre Dame University in Lebanon.
This might explain why Riyadh did not react when Al-Qaeda on April 2 seized Mukalla, the capital of Hadramawt province.
Experts have spoken of an adverse effect of the military intervention, evoking a "circumstantial alliance" between Riyadh -- cradle to the austere Wahabism school of Islam -- and Al-Qaeda, which considers Shiites to be heretics.
Saudi Arabia has been in war with Al-Qaeda for more than a decade, hitting what it calls the "deviant group" with an iron fist.
"A de facto alliance can be ruled out," Hindy said.
AFP
