Word: sana
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Yemeni capital of Sana'a thunders at night with the sound of war planes taking off and heading north, toward a remote conflict on the Saudi border that the Yemenis and Saudis have stealthily managed to keep off-limits to journalists and aid workers. In the lawless frontier zone of Saada governorate, a fierce battle has raged for months between Yemeni troops and rebels belonging to the Houthis, a religious minority. Each side - Houthis on one, Yemenis and Saudis on the other - has offered conflicting reports on everything from air strikes to motives, and with Saada a no-go zone...
...region sent hundreds of fighters to the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan and, to judge by the number of captured, killed or identified insurgents in Iraq, continues to be one of the biggest suppliers of fighters to regional conflicts. It's common knowledge in the tearooms of Sana'a and in Western embassies that the government of northern Yemen used jihadis to help defeat the south in the civil war that ended in 1994. But the symbiotic relationship between the government and al-Qaeda shifted after 9/11 and the American invasion of Iraq, when the Yemeni government worried that...
...worried that Yemen isn't taking the threat seriously enough. In July, General David Petraeus, the top U.S. military commander in the Middle East, visited the country to encourage President Ali Abdullah Saleh to be more aggressive. "The view from Sana'a doesn't match the view from Washington," says Gregory Johnsen, a U.S. expert on Yemen. "The Yemeni government is much more concerned with fighting the Houthis in Saada and with the secessionists in the south. Al-Qaeda ranks a distant third. The government doesn't see it as a Yemeni problem. [It sees it as] a foreign problem...
...arable land is devoted to the plant, which accounts for approximately a third of the country's water usage. And Yemen has very little water to begin with; almost all of it comes from underground aquifers filled thousands of years ago and replenished only very slowly. Experts predict that Sana'a, a city of almost 2 million, could run dry in as few as 10 years. The social upheaval from such an environmental catastrophe and the refugees it could produce might create an even more perfect breeding ground for al-Qaeda. "I tell [the U.N. refugee agency] that they should...
...discussing all your problems and think you've solved everything, but in fact you haven't done anything in the past four hours because you've just been chewing khat, and all your problems actually got worse," says Adel al-Shojaa, a professor of political science at Sana'a University and the head of an organization opposed to the use of the narcotic. "All the decisions you've made are bad because you made them while on khat." Unfortunately, there's one group that could solve Yemen's khat problem. The angry puritans of al-Qaeda don't touch...