Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s recent statement that he ‘rejects power’ and will step down in the coming days has become somewhat of a common refrain in recent months. Yet, has the situation on the ground reached the point where, presidential resignation or not, Yemen is headed for civil war?

The geopolitical significance of Yemen is often understated in mainstream media. Situated between Saudi Arabia and Somalia, it occupies the north shore of the crucial Gulf of Aden. It also has the second-highest rate of gun ownership in the world- coming in behind the unbeatable gun-loving behemoth that is the United States. Thus, a breakdown of Yemeni stability could in turn lead to a destabilization of Saudi Arabia in the north just as easily as it could feed into the expanding sphere of al-Shabab influence across the Gulf of Aden. In other words, it would turn into yet another hot zone in the global terror game of ‘whack-a-mole’ that Western military planners are engaged in- and one that would be extremely hard to ‘fix’ using a military option.