Word: sana
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Shopkeepers are whispering in the medieval, walled Old City in Sana'a, the capital of Yemen, about a war they cannot yet imagine. Workers, students and the old men who sit outside the ancient mosques are wondering what fighting between al-Qaeda and the government would look like. Would it be like the conflict in the north, where extremist insurgents occupy villages with gunfire and government bombs rain down from the sky? Is al-Qaeda an army or just a bunch of ill-equipped gangs? "All citizens are scared," says Jamal al-Najjar, an English-language translator, while waiting...
...Sana'a, war has always been near. Rarely, however, does it breach the mountains that are topped with military bases and surround the capital. Much of the populace credits Yemen's President of 30 years, Ali Abdullah Saleh, with unifying north and south Yemen in 1990 and with holding on to the unification during a civil war four years later. "You should have seen it," Ghalib Onkumah, a teacher, says, shaking his head and making a face. In the dark days before Saleh took over, there were endless tribal and civil wars, he says. Onkumah, like many Yemenis, is confident...
...have been coming to Yemen since Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly tried to blow up a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day. Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian, is said to have been trained and armed by Yemeni-based AQAP. The threat from AQAP led to the closing of foreign embassies in Sana'a, including the U.S. and British ones. While the embassies have quietly reopened, people are wary that al-Qaeda, in the form of foreigners or locals, may be operating in the capital...
...fighters to the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan and - to judge by the number of captured, killed and identified insurgents in Iraq - continues to be one of the biggest suppliers of fighters to regional conflicts. It is common knowledge in the tearooms of the Yemeni capital 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...
Meanwhile, the Sana'a government is in the middle of another ferocious war, against its Houthi minority, Yemeni followers of the Zaydi sect of Shi'ite Islam. That introduces the shadow - both real and imagined - of the primary Shi'a power in the region, Iran, which is happy to take credit even if its actual influence may still be negligible. When Iran is mentioned, however, both the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, the predominant Sunni power in the region, start quaking. And al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, no friend to any of the parties, is happy to sow destabilization...