Yemen’s Muslim Brotherhood Remains the Biggest Obstacle Towards Peace
The elephant in the room that no one wishes to directly address Yemen’s Muslim Brotherhood, also known as Al Islah party has become the single biggest impediment to peace. Unlike many of its political counterparts who remain willing to compromise to see an end to the violence and bloodshed, the Brotherhood has adopted...
Building a Lasting Peace in Yemen by Getting Ahead of the Generational Gap
While Yemen remains locked in a grand political dispute, its people bound by the competing ambitions of various factions and militias as they each argue power, legitimacy, and righteous politics, it is likely that peace will require more than a coming together of those warring parties … Peace as it were, will...
Ending the War by Coming to Terms with Yemen’s Political History
While Saudi Arabia sits only days away from a political agreement with Yemen’s STC forces (Southern Transitional Council in its bid to salvage Abdo Rabbo Mansour Hadi’s presidential claim over an increasingly divided nation, such headways remain symptomatic of Yemen’s unravelling. And though many will see in the move...
How Yemen’s War Stands to Redefine the Region’s Future
If ever anyone was still under the impression that North Yemen would soon surrender to Saudi Arabia’s intense military pressure, Saturday’s attack on Aramco some 200 miles east of Riyadh, the Kingdom’s capital, most definitely shattered such belief. If anything, Ansarallah, under...
What Would Need to give for Yemen’s War to Come to an End
“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself” - George Orwell. I find this one quote from George Orwell to be particularly fitting to Yemen’s war, and more to the point, to Saudi Arabia’s attitude towards Yemen’s war … a war the Kingdom both engineered and...
The Great Set-Up - Is Washington Postering the UK against Iran?
Who needs enemies when one can befriend the United States of America? And indeed after being baited by Washington to seize one of Iran’s tankers on the premise that the said-tanker was in violation of Britain’s decision to bar Syria from importing crude oil, the UK, America’s very...
What Wahhabism Looks Like From Up Close And Personal
How many times will we need to be reminded of the horrors of Wahhabism - that cult, which for lack of better words murdered and pillaged its way to the heights of power to better rationalise itself a school of thought under the umbrella of Sunni Islam, for our world leaders to...
Broken Democracy — America Detains US-born Journalist without Charge
“... Iran does it too!” When confronted with news that FBI had detained US-born journalist Melanie Franklin (better known as Marzieh Hashemi without proper due legal process and in clear infringement of her constitutional rights, US media were only too happy to justify the move...
Saudi Arabia Declares War on Free Speech and Civil Liberties
Saudi Arabia has done it again … that is to land itself in the middle of a controversy that exposes not just the dictatorial devolution of its system of governance but the inaptitude of its governing dogma to self-sustain against the pushes of technology.тEarly this January news surfaced that Prince Mohammed bin Salman called on...
What is Left of Saudi Arabia’s Friendship with the United States?
If 2018 should have told us anything it is that geopolitical alliances exist to be broken - especially when the United States is involved. A fickle mistress, America is not one to be defined by its friendships, or even the treaties it signed, but rather its ambitions. And yet...
Why Supporting Armed Dissidence Could Dissolve Nations’ Territorial Integrity
If anything is to be learned from Jamal Khashoggi’s murder is that moral relativism is a plague that has come to pollute not only the public debate but the very fabric of our psyche - and how we relate to one another as people. The premise so far has been one of...
Beyond America’s Bottom Line — How MBS Could Explode the Middle East
Jamal Khashoggi’s disappearance and alleged brutal death was not an accident … rather the inevitable result of both our inability and unwillingness to face up to the nature of a regime defined in bloodshed, for the sake of lucrative contracts and one grandiose pipedream...