When the armed Houthi movement, Ansar Allah, took over Sana’a on September 21, 2014, it was almost inconceivable that they would still be holding the Yemeni capital six years on. Look ahead to six years from today, however, and current trajectories seem to foreshadow the group and its leaders being only further entrenched in power at the head of a…

The battle for Marib governorate, a Yemeni government stronghold for most of the war, dominated attention in Yemen during September, with Houthi forces seizing territory in several areas, particularly in the northwest and south. Yemeni government-allied tribes, especially the Murad and Bani Abd, struggled to slow the Houthi advances, which highlighted the weakness of the Yemeni government armed forces..

The devastating explosion at the port of Beirut, Lebanon, in August should instill a sense of urgency among all stakeholders in Yemen regarding the gigantic floating bomb just offshore of Hudaydah governorate, officially known as the FSO Safer oil terminal. Like the thousands of tons of highly explosive ammonium nitrate that had been stuffed into a warehouse at the east…

Focus on the threat of an environmental disaster related to the FSO Safer, the decrepit oil terminal offshore of Yemen’s west coast, increased for the United Nations and other stakeholders in Yemen in the first six months of 2020 and continued to sharpen through July and August. International attention was raised earlier in the year with United Nation Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 2511 in February calling for UN officials to be given access to “inspect and maintain” the 45-year-old oil…

Yemeni President Abdo Rabbu Mansour Hadi is doing his best to prevent an end to the conflict in Yemen. Ensuring that last year’s Riyadh Agreement – meant to mend divisions with his rivals in southern Yemen – never gets implemented is only his latest venture in this regard. Hadi’s tenure has been a case study in parasitic statesmanship, in which…

On June 20, the secessionist Southern Transitional Council (STC) seized control of the island governorate of Socotra, overthrowing the Yemeni government-backed local authority. The Yemeni government, which is also battling with the separatist forces in Abyan, labeled the STC’s takeover as yet another coup. The two sides are involved in a power struggle in southern Yemen, which escalated with the STC’s declaration in late April that it would institute self-rule in governorates that were part of the former South Yemen. 

There is a confluence of humanitarian and economic woes bearing down on Yemen that evoke the image of tidal waves cresting upon tidal waves, and average Yemenis have been left terrifyingly exposed. The United Nations estimates that 16 million Yemenis may ultimately be infected with the COVID-19 virus. Simultaneously, the warring parties’ response, or lack thereof, to the pandemic’s arrival…

There is a confluence of humanitarian and economic woes bearing down on Yemen that evoke the image of tidal waves cresting upon tidal waves, and average Yemenis have been left terrifyingly exposed. The United Nations estimates that 16 million Yemenis may ultimately be infected with the COVID-19 virus

For the past few years, women have been abducted in northern Yemen, disappeared, tortured, raped, forced into false confessions of prostitution, and left traumatized and stigmatized, their punishment for publicly contradicting Houthi authorities

Yemen announced its first official cases and confirmed deaths from COVID-19 in April, with the coronavirus cases emerging in Hadramawt, Aden and Taiz. The pandemic’s spread to Yemen heightened fears of how devastating the weeks ahead will be, given the country’s failing health system, people's weakened immunity and warring parties' inability to pause fighting and respond together to the threat.