Project

Yemen: Assessing the Threat

After the attempted bombing of Northwest flight 253 in December, Yemen again became the focus of US and international counterterrorism policy. A flurry of media reports in January gave the world a glimpse of this fragile country, sliding disastrously towards collapse.

Through their long-term project, "Yemen: Assessing the Threat," reporters Paul Stephens and Haley Sweetland Edwards will explore the complex politics, society, and history of Yemen, with the goal of providing a more in-depth understanding of this often misunderstood nation. While the international media is primarily focused on the terrorist threat in Yemen, policy makers will have to work to solve the numerous other crises contributing to the country's instability.

At the start of 2010, Yemen faces a number of challenges. The government is battling an on-going insurgency in the northern provinces, a separatist movement in the south, and renewed concern over Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a branch of al-Qaeda active in many regions of the country.
Yemen, the poorest nation in the Arab world, must also absorb record numbers of refugees fleeing Ethiopia and Somalia, at a time when its own unemployment rate is over 35 percent. In the background, a growing water crisis, dwindling oil resources, and widespread malnutrition loom large.

Yemeni Separatists Flaunt Stars and Stripes

Sheikh Abdu Alrib al-Naqib, a gray-haired separatist leader from Yemen's rural south, sat on his couch in this ramshackle port city, waving two American flags and humming an approximate version of "The Star-Spangled Banner."

"We love America," he said, grinning beneath his cream-colored turban. "We are not terrorists. We only want our human rights and our freedom from the authoritarian regime in the north."

Separatism grows in Southern Yemen

In the rural villages around southern Yemen, the signs that a separatist movement is growing are unmistakable.

Residents fly the South Arabian flag – a red, white, blue and black symbol of the former South Yemen – outside their homes, and paint it on shop fronts, street signs or on the stocks of their guns.

Since South and North Yemen united in 1993, there has been a growing sense of dissatisfaction in the southern provinces, but it was only three years ago that movement gained an organisational structure.

Uncle Ali

Yemen is prettier than it looks on TV. If you drive the length of this rugged nation—from the border with Saudi Arabia in the north to the sparkling turquoise of the Gulf of Aden in the south—the landscape outside your window will slip from something resembling New Mexico, to West Texas, to Baja California, until finally you'll arrive in a place that is as desolate and craggy as the moon.