Is There Any Hope Left for Yemen?
On the night of March 25, Saudi Arabia began a bombastically named air raid campaign, Operation Decisive Storm. The Saudis want to pressure the Houthis, the Shiite tribal community who have overrun much of Yemen, to negotiate with our former president, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who fled last month for exile in Riyadh.
As the shelling of infrastructure and the killing of civilians continues, Yemen is coming apart. Hunger is pervasive; major cities have become ghost towns. The bombing campaign will not resolve our four-year-old political crisis; it will only erode any modicum of national cohesion left. When the intervention ends, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula will step into the vacuum left by the chaos and by the government’s weakness, especially in southern cities like my hometown, Taiz.… Seguir leyendo »