I hope to God, despite the date, this is post-dated. I know Yemenis where I live and they cannot even enter ... because the airport has a giant fucking whole in the runway and now and they might have been landing in a downtown neighborhood with a long drag, if I understood one of my co-workers correctly. Or maybe that was the Iranians and other people that inspired raid-runs. God bless United States of Arabia Air Force (this is my joke name for the KSA strike teams; I do not see this as a positive).
Shit there is terrifying. If you have money, please donate. You can say what you want, but there are so many people who were struggling before that privileged asshole friends who live in the GCC, and I like to tell "Yemen stories" I hear from these dudes to ground the shit out of them.
And imagine your tribe repelling the army, the Houthis, and Al Qaeda in Yemen at the same time. Most of these dudes run their own villages, and no outside influence is welcome. The Yemenis are the ultimate libertarians, so help em out.
The post is about a trip I took in June of 2014. Agreed that what's happening now is horrific. For starters, pretty much every place I describe has been bombed.
In 2007 I got to visit a lot of family in Syria. My cousin took me from province to province while he was making sales calls for my grandfather's welding shop in Damascus.
In 2012 my cousin was shot in the head at a roadblock and died a few months later. My grandfather has fallen into a deep depression and the rest of my family has experienced a diaspora the likes of which we haven't felt since the 50s.
I'm not a religious person, but I thank probability every day that my family has Canadian citizenship and green cards and that I have an amazing job as a programmer. Even if I can't do anything about the place of my heritage, I've been able to buy a house in the US for my grandparents and have been able to donate to the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS Foundation) on a regular basis.
I have so many photos and journal entries from that time. I really need to get them online to show what Syria was like before all the shit hit the fan. Thank you so much for these writings. I hope they shed light on a humanity that gets robbed by conflict.
I can relate. My first Arabic teacher grew up in Syria in the 70's, and the last 40 years has been brutal emotionally. Both parents died as I grew up, and once her mother died (maybe after 2004?) and all the bureaucracy and bribes she was so disgusted she never went back. Years later, we were talking about Egypt and she said things like that would never happen in Syria, ever! And now look at the ironic state of things. Her sister still lives in Damascus. And when we talked recently, first time in years, and that came up, she almost cried. But it was out of sheer anger. People I meet do not even care about the emotional loss, but how they have watched their country implode so rapidly while everyone voluntarily fucks it up more.
Thanks, for the tip about SAMS. I assume this is them.
I am trying to pool people together with some people I know here and the MENA region to do fundraising for the Jesuit relief fund (I know, I know, but they are very cool and have no religious stake; I have met Iraqi Lebanese and Syrian employees from all backgrounds and their dedication to crisis assistance, religion is not even on the radar) and want to tap the Syrian-American community to help fundraise.
Email address is in my profile. I would love to get people like yourself involved.
I thought so. We had an interesting chat about it and me writing about my time in the Gulf. When I saw the date I felt a little sick to my stomach. Haha. Glad to hear I was right and the dates were not reflecting your time there.
> Ta’izz also has a healthy distrust of the northern hill tribes who periodically descend from the north of the country and cause chaos (as they’re doing now, a year after my trip)
To be more specific, from personal anecdotes, it is far more than regional. Neighboring tribes will kill somebody and blood feud can and often does go on for decades. Guys I know, when they go to Sana'a to their village, they must drive at night, you know, because snipers.
Steve Martin's LA traffic scene has nothing on Yemenis!
(And thanks for catching the obvious, did not finish an article like that in 5 minutes.)
For anyone interested in what's going on in Yemen right now, I've found Twitter to be a much better source than news sites. A good starting point is @altoflacoblanco and @yemen_updates. @ionacraig is excellent too but seems to have stopped tweeting for now.
If after reading these streams you find the conflict incredibly confusing and complicated, that's a good sign! You have a better grasp on things than 99% of the Western media.
Is it unsubtle? It seems like something more akin to a grassroots local political movement in Yemen than an international terrorist organization. A terrible political movement, but one nonetheless. Am I totally wrong there?
I really don't think there exists an international terrorist al-Qaeda at this point (at least not in the sense we imagine, with a Cobra Commander in some hollow island). It's more like a franchise, and regional groups use the name since it gives cachet and suggests a global, the-Caliphate-is-coming kind of power that makes these guys feel good.
It's also in the interests of the United States and other Western powers to sustain the impression of an international terrorist conspiracy potentially capable of harming people in the West. The branding has switched to Isis now that al-Qaeda has kind of fallen apart. I don't know to what extent this is a cynical ploy, and to what extent it's a natural dynamic where we kind of manufacture our own enemies by showing how scared we are of them.
All politics in Yemen is grassroots and local and foreign governments forget this at their peril. There's a tendency to assume the various Yemeni factions are puppets being controlled by Iran, the Saudis, the US and so on, but in practice the local factions are very adept at manipulating their various sponsors. The important divisions in Yemen are regional (north, south, and Aden) and tribal, and the tragedy of the country is that it is trying to stitch together very dissimilar regions while outside powers work hard to destabilize it.
With regard to al-Qaeda specifically, the Yemeni branch has always been quite distinct. Bin Laden has deep ties to Yemen, which ironically has made AQAP even more of a tribal, regional force, since unlike Afghanistan it's a bunch of locals.
I think it's good to remember that southern Yemen used to be a highly ideological, Marxist state(!). The fact that all these Marxists have vanished without a trace suggests how hard it is for any transnational ideology to gain a foothold in this deeply conservative, tenacious country.
This is pretty close to what I understood. (Thanks for truing me up).
So, not to put too fine a point on it: I have more of a problem with military attacks on 2015 Yemeni AQAP than I do with attacks in, say, Waziristan. It seems like attacking Yemeni AQAP implies attacking whole tribes.
I found this article gave a good sense of what drone attacks really mean for the people in the area, and what it means to be "a member of al-Qaeda" in Yemen, in the eyes of US policymakers: http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/america-tonight/ame...
In my mind, the worst thing about American military attacks in Yemen is that the government refuses to reveal what our policy even is. Everything about them is being kept secret, removing any hope of democratic accountability.
This reminds me of one of the problems facing US soldiers in Afghanistan: you can't just ask them where the Taliban are, because sometimes practically everybody they know is 'Taliban.' The word just doesn't mean what you think it means.
What is the story behind the last photograph with the two women? You mentioned that most women on your trip were totally covered except one you saw at a currency exchange.
I really enjoyed reading this but it makes me a bit sad. I have a dream to someday traverse the Muslim world in my old Land Rover 110. I would start in Dakar and make my way clockwise through the Sahara all the way to Egypt. I want to see the Bekaa valleys of Lebanon where my ancestors came from; I want to float the Euphrates and cross into Pakistan via Iran. I want to drive the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan and I want to visit the Wakhan Corridor. 45 years ago, I could have done all of this and lived to tell the tale. Today, it's virtually impossible, especially for a pale-skinned American like me. Now, in 2015, it may be hundreds of years before it's safe for my kind to go there. It makes me sad.
If you didn't already, you should check out The Way of the World by Nicolas Bouvier. Excelent book about a roadtrip from Geneva via Khyber pass to India in the 1950s.
It was a hellish day indeed and it went from bad to worse ever since.
I live in a predominantly Muslim country and Islam seems to have an insecurity & inferiority complex so large that it needs ear deafening audio signals broadcast at dawn time to notify the population of its suffocating and heavy presence in their daily lives.
I've never been to Yemen but somehow am in love with it (and so wish I could visit).This film started my obsession: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0478213/
So sad and inexcusable what is happening there right now - everyone playing for their own shallow political interests, doing enormous harm and grossly disregarding international law while pretending to help.
As others mentioned, all mainstream media reporting of the current events in Yemen is horribly biased, misleading and just ignorant. Twitter is a much better place to get a more objective feel of events as they unfold. My favourite source is @omeisy
"the owner bitterly congratulates me on striking a bargain he would never had agreed to in less desperate times. I am as crafty as a Bedouin, as wily as a serpent, and his only request is that I not tell anyone how good a deal I struck tonight lest he become the laughingstock of the city. Then he undermines his words by throwing in a couple of pieces for free."
One of the funniest things I've read this month :)
> The accident rate is high (about fifty times the per-vehicle rate in America) but nowhere what you’d expect given that everyone is driving at all times like a maniac.
I feel like this is the theme in every Arab and Asian country. How stuff keeps getting done and how people get to their destinations safely is indeed a wonder. It is a surprise, and often a testament of God's care, that the world still turns in these regions.
Your writing (and insights) are excellent. But you really <strike>need to</strike> <replace>would improve the content</replace> go<add>ing</add> back and scan<add>ing</add> for both typos and tag glitches.
Still haven't fixed the missing inter-page in your "Internet with a Human Face" article. I really wish you would.
I also have it on good authority from a some-time NPR anchor that the spider image specifically turned them off the page. I know, but a point to consider.
Why do I really need to any of that? I've written tens of thousands of words for you, for free, etc.
From my perspective, catching flak for picayune errors is a powerful motivation-sapping force. I realize nobody likes typos, but in revising these things for publication I generally go over them N-1 times, where N is the number that would make me delete everything and replace it with a 410 Gone page.
The fact that some NPR person is afraid of spiders makes me happy that I used that image.
Finally, you should have written "turned them off", not "turned them of". See? Not so easy.
Even Yehudi Menuhin had his critics, and I'm sure none of them played the violin close to the level where he was. So don't sweat it and please don't delete anything, it's better writing than just about any in mainstream media.
This is one of the reasons publishing a blog via GitHub Pages is so nice: somebody wants to do copy-editing for you, they can go through the work of creating a pull request, and all you have to do is click the merge button.
For what it's worth, I love your articles, and merely wanted to point out the error as a bit of help, with the thought that I'd want to crowdsource fixes for my articles too.
Granted, "need" may overstate the case. I've revised my comment above on that point and the typo (keyboard issues are making those somewhat more frequent).
But: I consider writing as a communication done, generally, for the reader's benefit. Not a novel viewpoint. HN featured a bit from Vonnegut on that point yesterday. Among his points:
Pity the readers: They have to identify thousands of little marks on paper, and make sense of them immediately
I guess I belong to the school which says that a thing worth doing is worth doing well. I try to fix bugs in my code, I try to write clearly, I try to be accurate in what I say and acknowledge errors.
And yeah, sometimes I get really annoyed at nitpickers who seem to have lost the thread:
But it's a very small point frequently, one that can make the difference between a good (or even really good) piece, and one that's truly epic. Which on a site such as HN which focuses in large part on executing both technical and conceptual brilliance, seems a good candidate for a general community value.
And yes, editing (especially for professional publication) is a sort of penny-ante death. I've been watching authors Charlie Stross and Ksenia Anske grouse about it lately on Ello. It's a bit of a pain for my own stuff. But obvious glaring shit? I'll fix it if possible.
Sure, there's the Zen ideal of imperfection as its own perfection. And there can be other reasons for errors and faults to creep in or be unfixable (HN locks comemnts from further editing, something that leaves me cringing frequently).
How about for starters: if you have boring notes to offer on someone's web page, send it to them privately, instead of posting it for the approval of the whole community.
Sometimes we have things to say about sites that are relevant to lots of people. But these notes not so much.
I'm probably not great about this either and would be happy if someone took the time to call me out for it.
I've actually done that, several times in this case - 2-3 attempts, about the maximum number I'll generally try. I prefer not to be a complete pest. Be careful in what you presume.
I thought I'd make one more attempt online now when the opportunity presented itself.
And while I try not to flagrantly call out errors on people's stuff, if I see them I'll note them as quietly as possible. On platforms that support it (e.g., G+) that includes a "delete this comment" note, frequently.
I really like Maciej's work. I'd posted a link to "Human Face" just yesterday:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sana%27a_International_Airport
Shit there is terrifying. If you have money, please donate. You can say what you want, but there are so many people who were struggling before that privileged asshole friends who live in the GCC, and I like to tell "Yemen stories" I hear from these dudes to ground the shit out of them.
And imagine your tribe repelling the army, the Houthis, and Al Qaeda in Yemen at the same time. Most of these dudes run their own villages, and no outside influence is welcome. The Yemenis are the ultimate libertarians, so help em out.
(Watch me roast for that joke; oh well, I tried.)