Yemeni President is Toast

This is certainly the end of his rule.  Forty percent burns are awfully close to the blast and recovery will take months depending on how deep the burns are.  I cannot imagine that he can be brought up easily to communicate at all.  The head wound also means a swelling brain and likely an induced coma while they wait for everything to stabilize and settle down.  The point of all this is that he is no longer running the country and his underlings are trying to bluff their way past that in the hopes of his return.

As usual we have been fed a lot of misinformation and the only thing we will get now is a death notice or in a few months his reappearance.  It likely will not matter.

Someone will have to stand up as his replacement as soon as possible.

The much maligned ‘Arab Street’ has learned that they have real power to challenge a thug regime and to make it buckle.  They are now learning that it sometimes takes weeks of pain but in time they will still buckle.

The toughest nuts remain Syria and Iran.  The fall of Yemen will encourage those revolts.

Yemen leader President Saleh suffered 40 per cent burns, say USA

The president of Yemen was far more seriously injured in an attack on his palace in the capital, Sana'a, than previously stated and suffered burns to 40 per cent of his body with bleeding inside his skull, according to US officials.

By Adrian Blomfield, Middle East Correspondent

11:27PM BST 07 Jun 2011

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/yemen/8562615/Yemen-leader-President-Saleh-suffered-40-per-cent-burns-say-USA.html

The statement, which was accompanied by a call from Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, for "immediate transition", dealt a significant blow to loyalist hopes that Ali Abdullah Saleh would resume office after a period of convalescence in a Saudi Arabian hospital.

As he recovered from two operations to remove shrapnel and reconstruct his skull, Mr Saleh's hold on power slipped further on Tuesday after fighters from the Sharab and Same tribes, both led by senior military figures, took control of most of Taiz, Yemen's second city.

Mr Saleh's forces shelled residential areas, killing a number of people, including children.

Despite deploying tanks and being reinforced from the air, they were beaten.

Unless pro-regime forces stage a major fightback, Mr Saleh, 69, if he were to return, faces the prospect of a Libya-style situation in which the government controls only a portion of the country with revolutionary forces holding sway in cities such as Taiz.

Senior officials in Mr Saleh's government, including the vice-president, have insisted that he will return to Yemen within days.

But it is now thought likely that Mr Saleh will not recover for months.

He was wounded, along with a number of senior officials, in an attack last Friday on his palace.

His injuries were initially thought to be caused by shellfire but US officials said the attack was a bomb, pointing to insider involvement.