Analysis

Analysis December 19, 2021 07:58 MIN Has Riyadh Woken Up From Its Al-Mahra Pipe Dream? By Yehya Abuzaid Since 2017, many residents of Al-Mahra, Yemen’s easternmost governorate, have had a growing anxiety regarding their Saudi neighbors to the north. What began as a trickle of Saudi troops into the area quickly transformed into what appeared to be a fully fledged campaign for control of the governorate, including its border with Oman to the east. By 2019, the Saudis had established more than 20 military bases and outposts across Al-Mahra, a governorate with no more than 300,000 inhabitants. This deployment has fueled speculation from American and Yemeni experts, as well as Mahri locals, that the reason for the Saudi presence was to secure Al-Mahra for the construction of a pipeline to carry Saudi crude oil to the Arabian Sea.… Continue reading Analysis December 19, 2021 08:58 MIN Development Assistance in Yemen: A Cautionary Tale from Al-Mahra By Ameen Mohammed ben Asem Even before the current conflict, Yemen’s development needs were vast. The escalation of the war in 2015 worsened many of the country’s pre-existing systemic and infrastructural deficiencies. This makes Yemen a prime target for international development assistance, both now and especially in any post-conflict scenario. However, good intentions and money are insufficient to ensure that development projects, even those that are badly needed, will be accepted and successful in the communities they are meant to benefit. The following is a cautionary tale from Al-Ghaydah, the capital city of Al-Mahra, Yemen’s easternmost governorate. Based on interviews with local officials, residents and private sector actors, it relates how a project to install a sewage system and treatment plant in the city using… Continue reading Analysis December 17, 2021 14:49 MIN The Curious Tale of Houthi-AQAP Prisoner Exchanges in Yemen By Sana’a Center Staff When Mohammed Ayidh al-Harazi was detained in Sana’a’s high-security prison for political detainees in 2011, he had little reason to believe he would be out any time soon. As a senior figure in Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) who had gone below the radar of authorities for several years, he was seized during the protests that swept Yemen during the Arab uprisings. He had set up a tent at Change Square for a group he called Shabab al-Umma (Youth of the Nation), eventually attracting the attention of US and Yemeni intelligence agencies despite his new profile as merely one of thousands of activists campaigning for an end to the rule of Ali Abdullah Saleh. Al-Harazi appears to have been… Continue reading Analysis December 17, 2021 27:20 MIN Yemen Economic Bulletin: The Limited Efficacy of US Sanctions on Houthi Financial Networks By Wadhah Al-Awlaqi Since 2015, conflict-related factors in Yemen and de-risking by financial institutions abroad have led to a mass migration of financial flows from the country’s formal to the informal economy. Informal market actors have benefited greatly from this increased liquidity, foremost among them Swaid & Sons for Exchange Co., which became one of Yemen’s largest financial service providers and the largest actor in the money exchange and transfer market. The company leveraged its position to build a domestic financial empire with broad international reach, with its pervasive networks having proved useful to ordinary Yemenis, independent commercial and financial actors, and the armed Houthi movement alike. In the past year the sanctions regime the United States has pursued against the armed Houthi… Continue reading Analysis December 15, 2021 38:05 MIN The Emir and the Sheikh: Al-Qaeda’s attempts to integrate into the Yemeni tribal system By Ahmed Al-Tars Al-Arami The 2009 announcement of the merger of the militant group Al-Qaeda’s Yemeni and Saudi Arabian branches marked a fundamental change in the organization’s structure. No longer would the group restrict itself to the borders of regional nation-states. The new organization, announced from Yemen’s Shabwa governorate and headed by Yemeni Nasser al-Wuhayshi, Osama Bin Laden’s former personal assistant, was to be called Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), and has remained so to the present day. With the Yemeni-American cleric Anwar al-Awlaqi as its chief ideologue, AQAP, in turn, established an offshoot, Ansar Al-Sharia, in 2011. Ansar Al-Sharia’s creation came as part of a new strategy, after AQAP realized that it needed to adapt to its environment, in part, by infiltrating… Continue reading Analysis December 14, 2021 14:07 MIN Turkey’s Policy Shifts Toward Yemen’s Civil War, a Local and Regional Perspective By Omar Munassar Turkey might be expected to be involved in the Yemen war for a number of reasons: the Ottoman legacy, regional influence aspirations, the ruling party’s ideological ties with the Yemeni Islah party and early backing for the Saudi-led military campaign in Yemen in 2015. Yet today, it appears to be absent from the Yemeni equation. The reasons for this are debated from numerous perspectives within and outside of Turkey. Turks attribute their country’s non-interventionist policy in Yemen to domestic and regional complications, including the country’s economic crisis, Gulf Arab nations’ three-year feud with Qatar and Turkey’s foreign policy priorities in Syria and the eastern Mediterranean, which led Turkey to step back from the coalition and reconsider its relations with Saudi… Continue reading Analysis December 9, 2021 04:42 MIN The Case for Mukalla as Yemen’s Capital By Farea Al-Muslimi In 2014, the Houthis took control of Sana’a. Five years later, President Abdo Rabbu Mansour Hadi lost his temporary capital of Aden to the Southern Transitional Council. Yemen's internationally recognized government is thus in need of a capital. The Cabinet, which spends most of its time in exile in Riyadh and other regional capitals, needs a presence inside Yemen if it hopes to reunite the country and remain legitimate. The fact that several ministers are based in Aden, the heartland of a rival political group, is awkward to say the least. There are few safe cities in Yemen that are well placed to serve as a new capital; Mukalla is the top option. The capital of Hadramawt governorate in eastern… Continue reading Analysis December 3, 2021 26:10 MIN Houthi-Salafi Coexistence Agreements: Motives and Future Prospects By Amjad Khoshafah One of the salient features of recent Yemeni history has been the tension between the Houthi and Salafi movements. The Houthi movement – an armed group adhering to the Zaidi branch of Shia Islam – views the Salafis as an anti-Shia extension of Saudi Wahhabism, imported into modern Yemen from Saudi Arabia, while the Salafis – an ultraconservative branch of Sunni Islam claiming to represent the authentic traditions of the Prophet Mohammed and his companions – view the Houthi movement as a Shia political group inspired by Iran. Both groups are new political phenomena emerging in the 1980s and 1990s in north Yemen, which has historically been a center of Zaidi Shi’ism. The first Salafi center, known as Dar al-Hadith,… Continue reading Analysis December 2, 2021 28:05 MIN ‘One Hand Does Not Clap’: Partisanship and the Dual Challenge of Women’s Inclusion in Yemen By Stacey Philbrick Yadav, and Rim Mugahed Because Yemen’s political parties are important to both Track I and Track II diplomatic negotiations and dialogue, it is possible to advance gender-inclusive approaches to peacebuilding by expanding their roles in decision-making and agenda-setting within their parties. This policy brief reviews the recent history of women’s partisanship and changes in the nature and function of Yemen’s political parties since 2011, and draws on data collected in conjunction with a recent Sana’a Center and CMI - Martti Ahtisaari Peace Foundation training workshop for partisan women. Data show that partisan women are eager to participate in decision-making within their parties and ready to help represent their parties in Track I and II work but experience some systemic roadblocks. On the basis of… Continue reading Analysis November 4, 2021 19:42 MIN How Outsiders Fighting for Marib are Reshaping the Governorate By Casey Coombs, and Salah Ali Salah Marib governorate has emerged as a pivotal battleground between the armed Houthi movement on one hand, and the internationally recognized government and their respective allies on the other. The opposing forces are pressing with all of their might to achieve military victories in Marib, knowing that the outcome of the battle for the governorate holds the potential to decisively change the national balance of power. In the early months of Yemen’s civil war, Marib emerged as a safe haven for internally displaced people (IDPs) fleeing Houthi-controlled areas. Marib’s small pre-war population of about 400,000 is estimated to have grown to between 1.5 million and 3 million people, with the bulk of the new arrivals settling in the capital, Marib city.… Continue reading Analysis October 22, 2021 14:52 MIN Using IMF Support to Mitigate Currency Collapse By Wadhah Al-Awlaqi Introduction The value of the Yemeni rial (YR) has been collapsing dramatically since the end of August in areas nominally controlled by the internationally recognized Yemeni government. This has spurred a rapid deterioration in the living conditions of millions of people and widespread social unrest. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) also recently allocated the Yemeni government substantial financial support that, if well used, could help stabilize the currency and mitigate the fallout from its collapsing value. This paper aims to put the current situation in context and offer policy options to the Yemeni government and international stakeholders on the best use of the IMF support. Background On August 23, the IMF allocated a total of US$665 million[1] worth of foreign… Continue reading Analysis October 21, 2021 09:37 MIN Where is AQAP Now? By Elisabeth Kendall Al-Qaeda in Yemen appears weaker now than at almost any point since its Saudi and Yemeni branches united to form Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in 2009. The group’s fortunes peaked in 2015 when it established a proto-state in the eastern port city of Mukalla, taking advantage of the security vacuum and increasing sectarianism as Yemen’s civil war spiraled into an internationalized conflict. But the past five years have seen it steadily decline. Today, AQAP is no longer able to govern enclaves, hold territory or even operate effectively in the shadows. Its frequency of operations is less than 10 percent that of its guerrilla peak in 2017. However, it would be premature to write off the group. AQAP’s current… Continue reading