Battle lines | 19 March 2011

It’s tribal and religious divisions that really shape the Middle East – and that account for the Saudi intervention in Bahrain

I once got lost in Asir, the mountainous region on Saudi Arabia’s southwestern border with Yemen. This was the home of many of the terrorists on September 11, from the million-strong al-Ghamdi tribe. But the strangest thing, to me as a westerner, was that I seemed to be the only person who cared which country I was in. I met an elderly man with a garland of flowers in his hair, and asked if I was in Yemen. ‘It’s all the same to us down here,’ he mumbled.

The idea of border police — or, indeed, central government — becomes more blurry the further away from the region’s capitals you head. In Saada, a town on the northern Yemeni border, one can find open-air arms markets where machine guns, hand grenades and even surface-to-air missiles are laid out like fruit and vegetables.