By Safa Al AhmadOn Sept. 11, 2001, I was between jobs and living in Washington, D.C. I woke up a few minutes before 9 a.m. and, as I always did, I turned on the television to watch the news. Still drowsy, I stared at the looping videos from New York on my screen, trying to make sense of what I was looking at. When the third plane struck the Pentagon half an hour later, I was jolted out of my stat ...

By Helen LacknerWell into the seventh year of war in Yemen, Hans Grundberg, the former EU ambassador to Yemen, took up the UN special envoy position on 5 September. This is a difficult time, as the warring parties show little sign of weariness and Yemen remains the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.More than 20 million Yemenis need humanitarian assistance. Grundberg’s predecessor, Ma ...

Saleh Ahmed, a resident of Sanaa, wants to celebrate Eid Al Adha and shows joy on this occasion. It gladdens him to see his children smile, wear new outfits, and play joyfully. Eid Al Adha is an important annual religious festival celebrated in Yemen and elsewhere in Muslim nations. It happens on the tenth day of the last (twelfth) month of the Islamic Lunar Calendar.While Ahmed cherishes the spe ...

Jamala Ali lay screaming in agony on the crowded main street of her village in southern Yemen's Al Dhalea province.Her leg was smashed by a hit-and-run driver, but no one stopped to help until people from her ethnic minority – known as Al Muhamasheen, or "the marginalised" – arrived."A young man driving a motorcycle crashed into me while walking in the main street and escaped," said ...

Muneera Ahmed Al-TyarThe suffering of the Yemenis doubles, and their successive crises multiply day by day. While the sixth year of war comes to an end, poverty keeps rising in Yemen, and the opportunities for a decent living are getting slim for the majority of Yemenis. The livelihood has become a ghost that haunts citizens, and a daily concern that troubles the breadwinners of families who str ...

Yemen's government and the United Arab Emirates are supposedly on the same side in the country's long-running conflict. But the government is now accusing the UAE of killing dozens of its troops in a series of airstrikes this week. And that's left the Saudi-led coalition that was formed to fight the Houthi rebels in disarray.The government claims UAE aircraft bombed its troops amid another surge ...

The increased use of drones by Iran and its allies for surveillance and attacks across the Middle East is raising alarms in Washington.The United States believes that Iran-linked militia in Iraq have recently increased their surveillance of American troops and bases in the country by using off-the-shelf, commercially available drones, U.S. officials say.The disclosure comes at a time of heighten ...

By Hollie McKay- Fox NewsThe future of Yemen is shrouded in speculation amid reports this week that the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are abruptly withdrawing their troops from the Saudi-led onslaught on the neighboring nation.Since early 2015, the UAE has served a key ally to Saudi’s efforts to dislodge the Iran-backed Houthi rebels from large swaths of the nation – providing thousands ...

. By Austin BodettiMired in political violence since 2015, Yemen has often struggled to assert itself on the international stage. Before Iran-allied Houthis seized the Yemeni capital of Sana‘a in 2014, Yemen harbored geopolitical ambitions. Ali Abdullah Saleh, the country’s former strongman, hoped to join the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), yet current events stopped Yemen’s ...

Dr Mustafa FetouriIs Saudi Arabia losing its military campaign in Yemen despite being the stronger party enjoying the support of its many allies? The Saudi-led coalition includes countries like Egypt, Bahrain, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Sudan, Jordan and Morocco, as well as Qatar before it fell out with Riyadh. Major countries like France and Italy help by providing arms while the US suppl ...

By Sudarsan RaghavanCAIRO — The Islamic State and al-Qaeda are waging a deadly contest for territory, recruits and influence in Yemen that is dividing tribes and deepening instability in the Middle East’s poorest nation, according to tribal leaders, security officials and analysts.Clashes are occurring regularly in central Al Bayda Province between Yemeni tribal forces aligned with t ...

Muneer Binwaber Despite its relatively small size, Yemen is one of the most populous areas in the Arabian Peninsula, with a population of over 28 million. The number of people affected by the war in Yemen is correspondingly large: according to some estimates, more than 20 million people need humanitarian assistance and protection, half of whom are only steps away from famine. This urgent situati ...

David Wearing Monday night’s Channel 4 documentary, Britain’s Hidden War, exposed the depths of the UK’s complicity in Saudi Arabia’s bombing of Yemen. The testimony of various interviewees confirmed what I and other expert observers have been saying for some time: that Washington and London could have pulled the plug on the Saudi campaign at any point over the past four y ...

On the fourth anniversary of the War in Yemen, this brutal and ongoing onslaught has taken the lives of more than 60,000 Yemenis and left half the population—14 million people—on the verge of famine. What began as a civil war in Yemen escalated into what the United Nations calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Yemen became an international killing field, with Saudi Arabia ...

By Bruce RiedelThe Saudis are increasingly desperate to find a way out of the Yemeni quagmire. They apparently believe Yemen's ex-dictator, their longtime enemy Ali Abdullah Saleh, can help.A Russian medical team flew into Sanaa on Oct. 11 with the approval of the Saudis, who control Yemeni airspace. The Russian surgeons then performed a life-saving procedure on the 75-year-old Saleh. Some repor ...

Yemen is currently in the midst of a cholera outbreak that, by the World Health Organisation’s latest count, has killed 2,167 people since the end of April and is suspected to have infected 841,906.In June, as the disease killed one person an hour and the WHO deemed its spread “unprecedented”, the International Coordinating Group – the body that manages the global stoc ...

By Hamid Al-ShabiraPatriotism is not slogans for consumption or pointless allegations or words. Patriotism is greater and more sublime than the hollow claims and exaggeration.Patriotism briefly means deeds ahead of words, and behavior translated into facts and reflected in reality. Otherwise it is a false claim and deception that cannot fool anyone.It is not Patriotism to plunder the nation's r ...

SAFE behind multiple walls of sandbags at his airbase on Yemen’s coast, a United Arab Emirates army commander points at a map of southern Yemen liberally covered in red. It indicates, he says, the reach of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in March 2016. A second map, dated six months after his men marched ashore that month, has just a few red blotches left.In a four-pronged attack, ...

Yemen's southern governorates are currently witnessing political and security unrest after Aden's sacked governor, Aidarous al-Zubaidi, announced the formation of a transitional council for the region.This development was viewed by many analysts as a new step towards the process of separating south Yemen from its north.Such a move is not new in southern Yemen.The Southern Movement, also known a ...

When U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis greeted Saudi Arabia's foreign minister at the Pentagon last month, the first thing he did was joke about the time "the Iranians tried to murder you."Mattis' reference to a foiled 2011 plot, denied by Iran, was a telling sign of how much more aligned President Donald Trump's administration is with Gulf allies about what they perceive to be the Iranian threat ...