Renouncing Islam is a crime punishable by death in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen. In practice, though, the law isn't implemented nowadays. On the rare occasions that an apostasy case comes to court, the accused person is usually allowed to flee the country or...
Blog archive: Yemen
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26th April 2016
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9th December 2015Seven mercenaries – six Colombians and their Australian commander – are reported to have been killed fighting near Taiz in central Yemen. According to the local Saba News agency: "The army and popular committees repulsed an attempt of the mercenaries of the Saudi-led coalition to...
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6th December 2015The assassination of the governor of Aden this morning places a further huge question mark over the Gulf states' strategy in Yemen. Major-General Jaafar Mohammad Saad, who was appointed governor less than two months ago, died along with several others when his car was blown up ...
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2nd December 2015Simmering differences between Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who is still widely described as Yemen's president, and Khaled Bahah, the man he appointed as vice-president and prime minister, turned into an open rift yesterday when Hadi announced a cabinet reshuffle and Bahah rejected the changes...
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28th October 2015The Saudi-led aerial bombardment of Yemen entered its eighth month on Monday – an occasion marked by a series of strikes that almost completely destroyed a hospital in Saada province supported by Médecins Sans Frontières. Saudi, Emirati and Bahraini troops are also known to be fighting on...
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6th October 2015Today's explosion at the Qasr hotel in Aden It's easy to forget that there's a full-scale war raging in Yemen. Events in Syria which have more obvious repercussions internationally – the refugee crisis and Russian intervention, for example – tend to push it off the news agenda. Besides that...
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29th April 2015The changes in Saudi Arabia's royal pecking order, announced overnight, raise the question of what they are likely to mean for Yemen. Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the 34-year-old defence minister, appears to have been rewarded for his disastrous bombing of Yemen by being...
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21st April 2015An Iranian “armada” is heading towards Yemen, according to a report last Friday. A couple of days later, the American aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt set sail from the Gulf, also heading in the direction of Yemen. Fox News is in no doubt about what this means; a headline on its website ...
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10th April 2015Jamal Benomar, the UN's Special Adviser on Yemen "What's needed is a UN-backed negotiation to end the Yemeni conflict," an article in the Guardian proposed yesterday. It sounds like a good idea. Set up a National Dialogue to bring the warring factions...
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9th April 2015For most practical purposes the Republic of Yemen no longer exists. Whether it can ever be reassembled into a single state is, to put it mildly, doubtful – though that appears to be the objective of the Saudi-led military intervention. Even in more peaceful times the writ of central government...
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7th April 2015Saudi Arabia has asked Pakistan to support its military intervention in Yemen by providing combat planes, warships and soldiers. But according to an article in the Pakistani newspaper, The Nation, Saudi Arabia has a further request: that any troops sent by Pakistan should be...
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6th April 2015Prompted by the current turmoil in Yemen, I decided to search the old WikiLeaks files for US embassy cables discussing the Houthis. There are 284 documents with the keyword "Houthi", covering a period from August 2004 (during the first brief war between the Saleh regime and the...
