What Yemenis Are Living Through

Edited by Sam Thielman

IN JULY, Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman threw away four years of truce in the war in Yemen—a pitiless war he launched in his prior role as defense minister, with support from the United States, a decade earlier—by bombing Sanaa International Airport. The attack aimed to prevent the landing of an Ansar Allah delegation that attended the funeral of Ayatollah Ali Khamanei. The delegation landed at Hodeidah instead. 

It’s three months later. Ansar Allah has taken control of Bab el-Mandeb and closed it to Saudi shipping. Its battle-tested fighters are confronting a new Saudi-backed campaign to recapture the crucial mouth of the Red Sea. For the past two weeks, it's launched persistent strikes on the Riyadh airport, the King Fahd airport in the east, and Saudi Aramco infrastructure. The Ansar Allah attacks forced the cancellation of a "Davos In The Desert" investor conference MBS had wanted to showcase; and as of this morning, they've sending Brent crude above $115 per barrel. The U.S. embassy is evacuating nonessential personnel from Riyadh. Saudi Aramco is doing the same for its Dharan headquarters.

In Doha this week, amidst reports that the U.S. and Israel will resume air and missile strikes on Iran shortly after both countries' elections if not sooner, U.S. envoy Tom Barrack told the Gulf that it's shit out of luck if the U.S.' traditional partners expect Washington to continue the generations-old security-for-cheap-oil bargain. That's an exclamation point after Donald Trump's astonishing rebuke to MBS, who had wanted the U.S. to tap in to his renewed war on Yemen. 

"America as the guarantor to the world, for the last 80 years, it is no longer there," Barrack said, a line that would spell political death if uttered by anyone a fraction to his left. "What’s happening in this administration is not an abandonment. It’s a message for realignment… And that message is like raising a teenager. It’s not easy." It only counts as abandonment, apparently, if you end a war you lost; I digress. I take it back, I don't digress: after rebuking the teenagers who aren't too keen on getting their ports, desalination plants and offices destroyed by Iran once the U.S. and Israel resume a bombing they warned against in the first place, Barrack didn't even make a show at providing the region with the predictability so often demanded when antiwar voices call for withdrawal. As quoted by the Wall Street Journal, Barrack dismissed the idea. "We don’t have a playbook," he said. "We’re all on audibles. We can go one play at a time." I checked out of the NFL more than a decade ago, but imagine what Bill Parcells would say about that. 

Anyway, probably not what MBS bargained for in July. 

But MBS is not the victim here. He's the aggressor. The victims of all of this will include the people of Yemen, who must attempt to live through the overlapping wars that foreign powers have brought to their doorsteps. There has been less journalistic effort devoted to their plight over the past several months, it seems to me, than there was during the first iteration of the MBS-UAE-U.S. assault on Yemen. On Monday, the United Nations reported that more than a quarter-million people have been displaced since the Saudis broke the ceasefire. Taiz, in the southwest, is where most went—and Taiz is currently under siege.

So to understand what the people of Yemen are currently enduring—and may yet, still—I spoke with Dr. Aisha Jumaan. An epidemiologist, Jumaan is the president of the board of the Yemen Relief and Reconstruction Foundation, which provides frontline relief like food, medicine and water-purification kits, as well as awareness that there are real people suffering at the whim of foreign agendas they never asked for and cannot influence. Jumaan usually travels to Yemen annually. This year, the Saudi decision to resume the war made that impossible. Her contacts still in the country provided her with visibility into the current conditions people in Yemen face.

"WHAT WE'RE SEEING, the major thing, is the displacement," Jumaan tells me. "The poverty has been there. Economic strangulation continues." She emphasized that latter point. While the guns had silenced and the bombs had ceased dropping following the 2022 ceasefire, Saudi restrictions on imports persisted, keeping prices of crucial commodities—not least of them food, fuel and medicine—sky-high. 

"Something that we buy for $100 in Sanaa, in rural, mountainous areas, it's $200," Jumaan says. The cost of a sheep or a goat—something the Foundation purchases for Yemenis—was around $70 to $90 before the war, and "it's almost $200, $250 in the villages" now. "And do that [calculation] for medicine, do that for food. Do that for everything." 

That has provided awful continuity with over a decade of overlapping wars. The violence and instability has left 22 million people "with no food on the table on a daily basis," including two million malnourished children. Childhood malnutrition impairs brain development. Those "born during these war years" will have to struggle with that for the rest of their lives. As they will with the legacy of what she estimates, as an epidemiologist, is a million deaths since 2015. 

Jumaan had to suspend projects in Taiz due to the siege. Ansar Allah is attempting to take the southwestern city from the Islah Party. Islah is "blocking entrances and exits from Taiz. Ansar Allah is doing that too," Jumaan says. People within the city face "huge fuel shortages" and, accordingly, massive inflation for staple foods. "Unfortunately, the merchants fear they're not going to be able to bring in more food [and] jacked the prices quite a bit. … Safety is an issue, food is an issue, water, Taiz has always had water shortages."  

And especially medicine. "If it's available, it's extremely expensive because of the blockade on Yemen," Jumaan says. Medicine shipped into the country is "stopped in Saudi Arabia for checking. Sometimes they're delayed for months." Twice the Yemen Relief and Reconstruction Foundation shipped medicine to the country, she says. "By the time it got to the clinics, over two thirds of it was expired." Two years ago, Jumaan was in Sanaa and needed tablets for a sore throat. Pharmacies sell them in single doses, she learned. "I was stunned, and then I realized people cannot afford" the whole package, as she learned when the pharmacist quoted her an astronomical price. 

Should the U.S. and Israel return to bombing Iran, Jumaan fears, "we're going to have a lot more airstrikes on Yemen as well." She's worried about Iran, Gaza and the West Bank, "all of these places are going to pay heavily for this." That means the destruction of civilian infrastructure like hospitals, something that was normalized in Yemen before Israel subjected Gaza to it and before the U.S. subjected Iran to it. Blockades of these places will continue to send food and medicine prices beyond most people's means. "People worry about Bab el-Mandeb and the Strait of Hormuz because of the global economy," Jumaan says, "but unfortunately they don't pay enough attention to the local countries, the populations that pay a larger price in terms of death, destruction, famine, lack of medications, all of that." 

Yet the social fabric of Yemen, Jumaan says, is holding. 

The tribal structure in Yemen is "our social fabric, our safety blanket." I am not going to pretend like I understand it, having never visited Yemen, but it has "made sure that the less fortunate are supported by someone more fortunate." The millions of internally displaced Yemenis are "absorbed by their own," Jumaan says. "You have not seen tents like we have seen in Syria, for example." That hadn't occurred to me until Jumaan mentioned it. A decade earlier, when her own family's neighborhood was under Saudi bombardment, a friend in Hadramaut offered refuge. Another time, when Jumaan was in Taiz conducting a survey for USAID on available health services, a destitute family with "nothing in the house" borrowed money so they could present her, their guest, with a meal. She had to tell them she was fasting so they wouldn't go into debt because of the hospitality—the humanity it represents—they clung to through their tribulations. 

Jumaan cried telling me that story. "This is what Yemen is, what a lot of people don't know about Yemen," she said through tears.

The centrality of that tribal structure to the social and material resilience of Yemen has made a recent move by the Saudi-backed "Internationally Recognized Government" (IRG) stunning. It declared that "gatherings under the guise of tribal mobilizations" within Ansar Allah-held areas will be considered "legitimate military targets." The announcement shocked Jumaan. Assaulting the tribes amounts to "breaking the biggest No in Yemeni history," she says, and the IRG surely understands the implications of violating the taboo. "It has to be a Saudi directive," she says. 

"I have to end on a good note," Jumaan said as we wrapped up our conversation. "Yemen has always been known to be the grave of invaders. And there is a reason for that." 

CNN REPORTS that the Pentagon has cleared the Active Denial System (ADS), a millimeter-wave cannon, for loan to Customs and Border Protection for potential use on migrants at the southern U.S. border. Even for these two agencies, the sadism here is stunning. 

The ADS was intended as a crowd control weapon to protect U.S. bases in Iraq and Afghanistan from Iraqis and Afghans. It was deployed to Afghanistan and then swiftly recalled before usage when Gen. Stan McChrystal realized that it wasn't worth the Taliban propaganda. (The Taliban said it was a weapon to sterilize people through microwaving their reproductive organs.) 

CNN says the ADS causes a "burning sensation," followed by what unnamed military officials call a "tingling effect." Reader, that is a massive understatement. I know because I was shot by the ADS. 

You can read the whole story and even watch a video of this happen to me, back in 2012, and I need you to understand that my fashion choices were the result of a persistent depression. That also helps explain why I agreed to be shot by this fucking thing. "When the signal goes out over the radio to shoot me, there's no warning—no flash, no smell, no sound, no round," I wrote back then. "Suddenly my chest and neck feel like they've been exposed to a blast furnace, with a sting thrown in for good measure." 

That piece went viral, and CNN interviewed me. When the anchor asked me what the ADS felt like, I couldn't resist saying on cable news that it reminded me of the Mobb Deep line "when the slugs penetrate, you feel a burning sensation," except I had the burning sensation without the slugs. It so happened that Prodigy (RIP) was watching and he reacted to the clip on Twitter. Anyway, the idea of using this thing on migrants—people suffering such extreme violence or poverty that they are compelled to leave everything they know to come to the United States, which often was a contributing if not driving factor behind the extreme poverty or violence—is sickening. 

ALEX KANE REPORTS for Jewish Currents from Michigan on the Mike Rogers/Abdul El-Sayed race, where he finds that "Rogers’s most vociferous Jewish backers have put Jewish Democratic voters under intense social pressure to not voice support for El-Sayed."

I REGRET THAT I didn't have time before finishing this edition to read Matthew Cole's piece on the Jared Kushner-Mohamed bin Zayed slush fund nor Jasper Nathaniel's piece reporting from the IDF-backed settler pogroms targeting the Palestinian olive harvest in the West Bank. I have a strong feeling both will be worth your while. 

THIS HAS BEEN THE 500TH EDITION of FOREVER WARS. Thanks for supporting us to make such a milestone achievable.