The Sana’a Center Editorial

The Riyadh Agreement, signed one year ago, has failed in almost every aspect of its implementation. As its promise to act as a unifying force in Yemen continues to fade into the past, the de facto partition of the country is coming evermore into focus on the horizon.

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 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…

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…

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…

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

‘Operation Decisive Storm’ was a moniker meant to convey a sense of speed but instead became a synonym for hubris and failure. The regional military coalition intervening in Yemen chalked up another anniversary this March – five years since Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates led the way into a war thinking it would take only weeks to force…

The international relief agencies themselves have become prisoners to the war in Yemen, with their efforts having been mutated from helping to address the country’s suffering into prolonging it. The principal belligerents on one side – Saudi Arabia and until recently the United Arab Emirates, heavily backed by the United States and the United Kingdom – are by far also…

Among the less prominent, but no less crucial, aspects of the Riyadh Agreement, signed November 5 by Yemen’s internationally recognized government and the Southern Transitional Council (STC), are its commitments to combating corruption. Many in Aden and across the south blame the lack of public services and constant electricity blackouts there on crooked government practices. Raging against such garnered the…

History will likely record the Riyadh Agreement as a game-changing moment in the ongoing Yemeni conflict – how exactly the game will change is still far from certain. What the agreement signed on November 5 in the Saudi capital may mean is that for the first time since the war began the disparate forces that make up the anti-Houthi coalition…