Publications

For much of the past three years, periodic protests have rocked Mukalla, a port city and the capital of Yemen’s Hadramawt government. The cause, typically, is Mukalla’s poor electrical grid and frequent outages, although at times politics and Yemen’s broader war have bled into the protests. In turn, the authorities have continued to intensify their response this year in attempting to quash the unrest.…

Aden has historically been a cultural and commercial crossroads, home to a famed port linking East and West. Its setting, on the Gulf of Aden, at the confluence of the Red and Arabian seas, long brought trade and people to the city, making it a cosmopolitan hub. Throughout much of the 20th century, the city …

June 2020: My alarm went off at 6 a.m. that Monday. Normally, I would start getting ready for work at that time, but this particular morning I wanted to try something exceptional. I wanted to fill my car with gas. I had seen the queues of cars lined up outside petrol stations, so I knew …

Five hours. Three hundred minutes. Eighteen thousand seconds. The blink of an eye. That’s how long it took to transform one life into another. Before surgery, I had been a man, just like any other – someone who walked on two legs. After surgery, I was an amputee.   I am able to recall in vivid …

In Hadramawt, the region where I am from in Yemen, far in the country’s southeast, people place great importance on family lineage.  A person’s last name and tribe reveals their position within Hadrami society. Yet because of where my father was born, I was not indoctrinated with these ideas as a child. When I was in primary …

Since 2015, the devastating conflict in Yemen has created a debilitating economic and humanitarian crisis and displaced millions of Yemenis. While the vast majority of displaced Yemenis remain within Yemen — around 3.65 million — Yemenis who do seek safety abroad most often flee to countries across the Arab world, including Egypt, Sudan, Djibouti and Jordan, as well as to Malaysia.…

On December 11, Yemeni government and Southern Transitional Council (STC) forces began withdrawing from frontlines in Abyan governorate. The redeployments – first stipulated in the Saudi-sponsored Riyadh Agreement signed in November 2019 but implemented more than a year later than scheduled – are set to be followed by the imminent formation of a new Yemeni government that includes STC figures. …