Forgotten Middle-East Update - Yemen and Libya

In Syria, Bashar Al-Assad is consolidating control, while Iranian influence is being rolled back from the Syrian-Israeli border and Trump wants to withdraw - meanwhile in Iraq, anti-American Shi'ite cleric Muqtada As-Sadr has won the largest number of seats in the election and is set to make a coalition government with Haider Al-Abadi's party.

As the known conflicts in Iraq and Syria continue to deescalate, other conflicts are escalating.

The Saudi-led coalition in Yemen is poised to start an offensive to take port Hodeida from Houthi control, a move which would cripple northern Yemen's already dwindling food supplies. Meanwhile, Al-Qaeda continues to thwart the US-anti-terrorist strategy in the country's southeast, while in the north the terror group is flourishing in the absence of effective government. Yemeni President Hadi is only nominally in control of Yemen, while Houthis, Al-Qaeda, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and the Southern Movement control different parts of the country.

In Libya, though the As-Sirraj government and the Libyan National Army headed by Haftar Al-Khalifa have agreed to hold elections, the situation in Libya is exacerbating. Haftar's forces have surrounded the city of Derna - Derna being a city like Iraq's Fallujah: a city that even in the days of the dictator was hard to control.

Meanwhile, the situation in Libya's Tripolitania is made tense by the growing rift between the Sirraj government and the militias in control of various parts of the region. It may be that the coming elections will force any legitimate government out of Tripolitania altogether and propel the militias into effective control, much as the Syrian Opposition has tried to do in Syria's Idlib. But, like Syria's opposition forces, the Libyan Shura councils and militias have links to groups as extreme as Al-Qaeda and ISIS - and, with the Syrian conflict winding down, many Islamists will continue to see Libya as the ultimate destination for establishing Shariah and waging jihad.

If such regional explosion in north-western Libya were not troubling enough, the conflict in the country's south is threatening to create space in which ISIS may rise in Libya for a third time. After being defeated in the cities Derna and Sirte, ISIS has fled to the south of the country and largely fallen silent. But the resentment of African Libyans in the south against their Arab counterparts in the north may be exactly the sort of thing ISIS needs to make a comeback in the country.

Though this in itself may be troubling, more troubling still is that the tribes in southern Libya are linked to other tribes across the region, such as in northern Chad, northeastern Niger and northwestern Sudan. Should ISIS succeed in winning the protection of tribes in the south of Libya, this protection would spread and ignite a regional explosion - one which would mean that ISIS would once again be breaking borders, this time between Libya, Chad and Niger, with assistance from terror groups Boko Haram and Ash-Shabab.

As Iraq and Syria continue to recover from years and years of war, Libya and Yemen continue to worsen. The instability in the region is not gone - it has only shifted.