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Saudi Arabia is increasingly active among Sunni Arab tribes in Iraq, accelerating their involvement in the uprising against Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad. Gulf financiers – with some US support – are trying to outflank Baghdad’s own attempts to woo the tribes.

A suicide bomber killed senior Yemen military commander Major General Salem Ali Qatan in Aden on 18 June.

The presence of a major Al Qaeda affiliate to the east is another factor that could make a full-fledged jihad in Syria more likely. Yet there has been surprisingly little evidence of Iraqi involvement in the conflict.

The war in Syria is spreading to Lebanon and fitting increasingly neatly into the narrative of a broader Arab-Persian cold war, with Sunni fighters in Syria and Lebanon using the language of a sectarian ‘clash of civilisations’.

With UN envoy Kofi Annan’s peace effort on the verge of collapse, Sunni Arab and Turkoman opponents of the Assad regime are becoming ever more radicalised, and foreign jihadists are looking to add to Syria’s poisonous blend of communal and factional conflicts. A multifaceted conflict is unfolding which could push Syria into a full civil war, with the capacity to spread sectarian conflict that is filling an increasingly polarised region with alarm

Lebanon is a second major source of Sunni fighters after Syria’s home-grown and returning jihadists in the current conflict. In another example of ‘blowback’, the Syrian regime is now paying for its fostering of Sunni terrorist factions within northern Lebanon.

On 16 February, US director of national intelligence James Clapper told the Senate Armed Services Committee there were signs Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) fighters may already be fighting in Syria. There is growing evidence to support this view, and growing concern that the conflict in Syria could merge with violence in Iraq to form a single, transnational conflict zone reaching from the Iranian border to the eastern Mediterranean.

There appears to have been a rise in Al-Qaeda activity in Yemen since Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi became president in February (GSN 918/1). Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and the related Ansar Al-Sharia group have claimed responsibility for a number of major attacks, and seem to have expanded their operating arena.

Summary The US has been talking up Iranian involvement in Yemen, suggesting Tehran is involved not only in the northern conflict between Houthis and Salafis, but also in the southern separatist movement – a view many analysts approach with caution, saying support is most likely to be in the form of money or influence, rather than military.

Saudi Arabia has taken a strong line on Syria, publicly expressing support for arming opponents of President Bashar Al-Assad. While there is no indication Riyadh is arming the Free Syrian Army (FSA), sources in the private security industry say charter flights carrying Saudi-funded communications equipment have already headed to Turkey, where the FSA is said to be training.

Iran has assured Kuwait it will not try to close the Strait of Hormuz, according to Kuwait’s Emir Sheikh Sabah Al Ahmed Al Jaber Al Sabah.

The Syrian crisis is providing another arena for increasingly aggressive covert operations campaigns in the region, which have drawn both on subsidised proxies and on the Gulf’s fast-developing special forces capabilities. GSN analyses the GCC’s revived taste for covert activity

Like Saudi Arabia, the UAE has acted to counter purported Iranian influence in Yemen’s Houthi uprising.

As Riyadh takes a tough line on Syria, GSN reviews Saudi foreign policy as a whole in the wake of the Arab Spring. Despite widespread suggestions of a pattern of counter-revolutionism, many analysts agree that decisions continue to be more reactionary than strategic, and largely driven by the battle with Iran for regional supremacy