Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Although I don’t agree with the use of some of the language such as ‘the international community’ by a supposedly a radical leftist magazine, it is a history and context, power struggle and geopolitics, internal dynamic and social forces that help us understand a movement and its actions .   An interview with Yemen scholar Helen Lackner

The objective of the US-UK imperialism strikes on Yemen is to stop the disruption to one of the arteries if capital accumulation and support Israel’s goals on its war on the Palestinians. The strikes on the Houthis might actually embolden the Houthis and see they support strengthened .  Everything that was worth striking has been struck by the Saudi coalition in the past nine years,” al-Iryani said, referring to the war waged against the Houthis by a Saudi-led coalition that began fighting the Houthis in 2015 after they had overthrown President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, head of the internationally recognised government. “I don’t think [US attacks on Houthi targets] are going to act as a deterrent to the Houthis,” Raiman al-Hamdani, a researcher at the ARK Group said.

 Killer Prince

Saudi-led coalition loses its grip

Scale of torture and deaths in unofficial prisons

"Many international commentators continue to present the war in Yemen through the lens of Saudi Arabian intervention or sectarian conflict, [or both]. In essence, Yemeni internal stability has been undermined by widespread political disenfranchisement and socio-economic marginalisation. The Houthis exploited this alienation, which was not merely sectarian – many Zaydi Shiites rejected their message as anachronistic and anti-democratic, while many Sunnis shared their non-sectarian resentments." So far so good. But, like in Syria, it is convenient to give predominance to "sectarianism." It is good for both imperialism and "Western" public consumption. Note: Al-Arabiya is an arm of the Saudi propaganda machine. For that obvious reason there is no mention of the Saudi, and the Emirati, crimes in Yemen. That does not invalidate the analysis that the conflict is originally 'a homegrown affair."  The war in Yemen is a homegrown affair Relate

Yemen: Death from above

The New Yorker has just discovered this: The Middle East's Great Divide is not Sectarianism Too late though. 

Civilisation Looking around her, Dr. Mahdi could not fathom the Western obsession with the Saudi killing of Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul. “We’re surprised the Khashoggi case is getting so much attention while millions of Yemeni children are suffering,” she said. “Nobody gives a damn about them.” No one gives a damn about them

Qat, Friedman explained to his uninitiated readership, was “the mildly hallucinogenic leaf drug that Yemeni men stuff in their cheek after work.” Though Friedman himself “quit after fifteen minutes,” he still managed to devise the following “new rule of thumb” for US involvement in the country: “For every Predator missile we fire at an Al Qaeda target here, we should help Yemen build fifty new modern schools that teach science and math and critical thinking — to boys and girls.” This magical “ratio of targeted killings to targeted kindergartens” was, Friedman felt, America’s best bet “to prevent Yemen from becoming an Al Qaeda breeding ground.” The US [and its allies] helped massacre Yemeni schoolchildren

What kind of a war is the Yemen war?

"The “Houthis are Shi‘a” narrative should be seen for what it is—a carefully crafted piece of political rhetoric devised to gloss over important differences between religious denominations, to reinforce the false image of a war between those who identify as Sunni versus those who identify as Shi‘a, and to encourage foreign—and particularly US—military intervention in Yemen. It provides a dangerously simplistic mental short cut for policymakers who are unfamiliar with Yemeni history and politics. In so doing, it diverts attention from the massive humanitarian crisis caused by years of civil war and the US-backed Saudi-led coalition’s ongoing blockade and bombardment. The cynical use of sectarian language casts the conflict in Yemen as part of an epochal, region-wide struggle rather than a local civil war made more deadly for Yemeni civilians by Saudi and Emirati intervention." How the Houthis became "Shi'a"

"Clearly the so-called “sectarian civil war” in Yemen is a recent permutation of the self-declared Sunni monarchies’ geostrategic rivalry with the Islamic Republic of Iran as well as those ruling dynasties’ discrimination against their own Shi`a populations. Overall, ample evidence is presented that the problems that provoked Yemen’s Southern Movement ( hirak ) and the 2011 popular demonstrations, respectively, are rooted in militarism and corruption rather than religion, and that the Gulf’s royal families have for decades feared mass mobilization in the most populous, least prosperous, perennially restive part of the Peninsula." Arabia Incognita: Dispatches from Yemen and the Gulf

Yemen's disaster