Iona Craig writes: In the Islamic concept of qadar, your divine destiny is inescapable. If you try to cheat death it will find you. For two women on a dusty road in mid-June on the southwest corner of the Arabian Peninsula, their repeated attempts to dodge fate ended in tragic failure.

Leaving the war zone of Yemen’s southern port city of Aden on June 10, the women headed north in a Toyota Cressida driven by a male relative. The pair were escaping the violence that had already turned entire streets in Aden to rubble, left hundreds dead and thousands of civilians under siege, struggling to find food, water and medical care.

Driving ahead of them was a family of four in a Hilux pick-up truck, slowing at the numerous checkpoints along the road and weaving around potholes in the asphalt. Between 4:30 and 5 p.m., seemingly from nowhere, the first missile struck. The Hilux flipped into a cartwheeling fireball, killing the two children and their parents inside.

Before the women in the Toyota had a chance to compose themselves an ominous whistle preceded a second missile, which smashed into the ground beside them and sent their car careering off the road into the dusty scrubland. Twice in the space of just a few minutes the women had stared death in the face.[Continue reading…]

By Sophia Dingli, University of Hull

Among Yemen’s myriad misfortunes, its greatest has been being Saudi Arabia’s neighbour.

Saudi Arabia’s founder, King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, thought Yemen so unpredictable that he warned his sons that they had to tame it in order to remain secure. Saudi Arabia is now embarked on its largest ever effort to “tame” Yemen, but it has already been a disaster: thousands are dead, and the unspeakable destruction wrought by the unprecedented Saudi intervention has undone decades of cautious and under-the-radar meddling.

Ever since Saudi Arabia became a state in 1932, it has been quietly but actively involved in Yemeni politics. Saudi money has been the most important source of revenue for the Yemen Arab Republic for decades, even as Riyadh has tried to stop the emergence of a strong central government by funding other groups, including powerful tribes and the sheikhs of Yemen’s most important tribal confederations.

But in the past couple of decades, Saudi-Yemeni relations have become even more complicated. Multiple points of friction emerged after the 1990 unification of Yemen, after which it drew up a democratic constitution and refused to vote for a UN-backed intervention against Saddam Hussein after he annexed Kuwait.

Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, was pursuing a policy of outright cultural colonialism in an area near the blurred Yemeni-Saudi border, which was historically populated by Shia Zaydi tribes. When the border was finalised at the start of the 21st century, it prevented those tribes from moving freely, restricting their animals’ grazing routes and threatening their livelihoods. This ultimately gave birth to the Houthi nationalist movement.

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By Sophia Dingli, University of Hull

In the summer of 2014, our screens were inundated with videos of the carnage from the streets of Gaza. The European media was outraged, and the sense of moral urgency was amplified across social media. Similar outrage greeted the destruction of UNESCO heritage sites in both Iraq and Syria with the condemnation of Islamic State’s barbarism reaching a crescendo when it overtook Syria’s majestic city of Palmyra.

Compare this coverage to the almost universal silence on the ongoing war in Yemen, which is largely absent from our TV screens, Facebook and Twitter trending topics sections and the front pages of broadsheet papers.

Admittedly, the Yemen conflict is a complicated matter, where the Saudi “bad guys” in the northern half of the country are looked upon as potential saviours in the southern half. The war includes a number of factions, and provides no easy narratives for the casual news watcher to follow.

Of course, neither the Israeli-Palestinian conflict nor the Islamic State’s onslaught are simple matters, but the Western media has plenty of simplified narratives and stereotypes at its disposal to structure its coverage. And crucially, the media coverage of both Israel-Palestine and Islamic State is loud and clear in its condemnation of the human cost, both civilian and cultural.

So it may come as a surprise to learn the the damage inflicted upon Yemen and Yemenis since March 2015, when the Houthi rebels’ march toward Aden was met with a massive Saudi-led offensive, has already claimed more casualties than the last Israeli offensive in Gaza and has destroyed parts of a UNESCO world heritage site. Worse yet, it shows no signs of stopping.

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Lamya Khalidi writes: For more than 10 years, I was one of a number of American and Yemeni archaeologists surveying and excavating sites dating to the fabled South Arabian kingdoms and beyond, to prehistoric times. We were members of the Dhamar Survey Project, started by the University of Chicago and named for a historic town in highland Yemen.

The team spent decades exploring the magnificent megalithic monuments and walled towns of a civilization that developed terraced agriculture as early as the third millennium B.C., an ancient tradition that has stunningly etched the entire surface area of the region’s steep mountains like a topographical map. The project collected thousands of artifacts from more than 400 sites, including tools, pottery, statuary and inscriptions in ancient South Arabian languages.

We ensured that all of these artifacts, evidence of ancient cultures that traded at great distances during the Neolithic period and eventually built roads to link the highland towns to major incense trade routes, were deposited in the Dhamar Regional Museum. There, they were restored and studied by foreign teams and Yemeni archaeologists, and put on display.

This museum has just been obliterated from the air. In a matter of minutes, the irreplaceable work of ancient artisans, craftsmen and scribes — not to mention the efforts of Yemeni and foreign researchers who have dedicated years of their lives to studying and preserving this legacy — were pulverized. The museum and its 12,500 artifacts were turned to rubble by Saudi bombs. [Continue reading…]