In recent months, southern demands for secession have swelled and anti-government protests have become more violent. Dozens of people have been killed or wounded when troops fired on demonstrators. Some 200 secessionists have been imprisoned.

Much of the south and the eastern part of the country, where al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula have sanctuaries in tribal areas, is in ferment. Clashes are becoming more frequent and widespread.

There have been attempts to assassinate government ministers and even President Ali Abdullah Saleh Saleh's motorcade has been attacked.

The control of the central government in the northern city of Sanaa, never particularly effective anyway, is seen in some quarters to be evaporating.

For Saleh, a northerner, the mounting insurrection in the south and the region's possible secession is an existential threat to his regime.

This has been largely built on patronage, tribal alliances and control of the military rather than any effort toward nation-building.

Saleh has used oil revenues -- largely from southern fields -- to sustain his regime. But the oil is rapidly depleting, exposing the system's inadequacies and iniquities and the economy itself is collapsing.

This, and the regime's heavy-handed response to the southerners, has only fueled the demand for independence and encouraged the disparate southern groups to come together.

What was once an inchoate, fractured movement without any formal shape or central organization is becoming more cohesive and articulate in voicing southern grievances, land seizures, the exclusion of southerners from northern patronage networks, rampant corruption and economic marginalization.

A new breed of leaders is emerging. Among them is Tareq al-Fadhli, who comes from a family that once ruled in southern Abyan province. He fought with the Islamist mujahedin against the Soviet Army in Afghanistan in the 1979-89 war there.

Osama bin Laden, whose family comes from Yemen, also fought there and later formed al-Qaida.

In Yemen's 1994 civil war between north and south, al-Fadhli was a leader of Islamist fighters, many of them Afghan veterans, that Saleh recruited to help defeat the outgunned southern rebels.

Al-Fadhli married into the Saleh regime but became disillusioned with it and joined the secessionists in April 2009, two years after the formation of the principal faction, the Southern Mobility Movement. That consisted largely of military men from the south who were dismissed by Saleh after their defeat in the 1994 conflict.

The south, embracing the provinces east and south of Sanaa, always was a distinct entity. While the north was an independent imamate, the south was ruled by Britain from 1839 to 1967, when it became the Marxist People's Democratic Republic of South Yemen.

That lasted until May 1990, when it united with the Yemen Arab Republic in the north, which Saleh had led since 1978.

In recent weeks, speculation has grown that Saleh will eventually unleash a military offensive against the secessionists, as he did against Shiite Houthi rebels in the north in 2009.

The Jamestown Foundation, a Washington think tank that monitors global security, noted in a June 24 analysis that a military push in the south "would likely cause Yemen's stability to deteriorate drastically.

"Although southern leaders have so far rejected offers of support from AQAP leader Nassir al-Wahayshi, the two groups could conceivably join forces if the Saleh regime were to engage the southern movement militarily under the guise of a 'counter-terrorism' initiative."

The analysis concluded: "Yemen's future therefore hinges largely on whether or not Saleh decides to finally address the grievances of the south.

"If he instead opts for a massive military response to the movement, the potential for the country to become violently torn apart through civil war is alarmingly plausible."

Amid the chaos, al-Qaida would undoubtedly thrive and gain strength to unleash a new campaign of terror in neighboring Saudi Arabia, the world's foremost oil producer and one of the political leaders of the Arab and Muslim worlds.

If al-Qaida secures a safe haven in Yemen, where the Middle East and the Horn of Africa intersect, it would be able to consolidate links with jihadist forces in Somalia, across the Gulf of Aden.

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