The indestructible Nokia erupted in my pocket like some kind of deranged electronic bat — one of those primitive relics from the digital Stone Age with a ringtone that hit the nervous system like a sugar-fueled Saturday morning cartoon binge. Christ! It was the auditory equivalent of having a possessed Coleco handheld game thrashing in your pants, desperately trying to signal its twisted electronic joy through a series of mindless, piercing beeps. The digital shrieking announced every goddamn caller with the subtlety of a shotgun blast at a funeral, a psychotic herald of telecommunications that defied all reason and sobriety this early in the morning. No matter how urgent the call — life, death, or in this case, the start of a war — you first had to endure this savage electronic tantrum, this digital seizure that preceded human contact like some kind of demented electronic goal celebration in a stadium filled with draft-beer-crazed robot fans. This was an age where callers still had the temerity to do so without texting first. And I hadn’t even had coffee yet.
I was in the lobby of a frayed hotel whose presentation card flitted somewhere between wedding cake chic and hall of mirrors funfair attraction — the kind of place where the walls themselves seemed to be sweating some unidentifiable chemical compound that hinted at industrial waste, desperation, and broken air conditioners and that would probably be illegal in most countries. Its color palette lurched violently from cheap imitation marble to the orangey gold so favored by Petro-princes and Mar-A-Lago aspiring tyrants, the kind of ornate crime against humanity that could only be designed by men who spent their careers looting nations. Every reflective surface seemed to amplify the insistent beeping yet confuse its real location, creating a savage audio hallucination that bounced off the gaudy fixtures until I realized that the infernal racket was coming from my own damn pocket.
It was still new days of having a technological tether in my pants and I tried to remember which calling plan I had signed away my financial future for. Was I charged for receiving calls as well as making them? Should I just let the infernal device ring and go to voice mail or did those corporate vampires charge for that too? From the beginning, the grim economics of telecommunications was a dark art that no sane mind could fully comprehend at this ungodly early hour. How the hell do you silence this accursed beast before it triggers some kind of paranoid episode among the seemingly nervous hotel staff, even if we were the only guests?
Their usual clientele? Saudi bachelor parties—pious hypocrites in white thobes slipping across the border to indulge in the very sins they publicly condemn. Middle-class punters who can’t afford, or don’t have time for, a proper weekend of debauchery in Bahrain, Dubai, or Istanbul—so instead, they opt for Yemen, the Tijuana of the Arabian Peninsula. Here, they escape the watchful eyes of the Mutaween—the religious police from the medieval Kingdom’s Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice—only to drown themselves in a hedonistic cesspool of third-rate vice and fourth-rate liquor. The parties are fueled by sun-bleached Heineken cans that fall off the backs of ships in Hodeidah, Chinese whiskey distilled in repurposed pesticide barrels, and prostitutes from the Horn of Africa with expressions that suggest they’ve long since abandoned the notion of free will. The men throw around riyals and self-righteousness in equal measure—piously abstaining from pork while engaging in everything else their holy books tell them will lead to eternal damnation. The ultimate joke? Many of the women they pay for an evening’s pleasure are the same ones they’ll later buy as domestic slaves, smuggling them across the border where they’ll spend the rest of their lives scrubbing palatial bathrooms and dodging the whims of a bored housewife with a gold-plated iPhone.
By daylight, these same men clean up, shake off the hangover, rub shoulders with the more pious al-Shabaab and al-Qaeda buyers and play at being warriors. They descend on the Al-Talh arms market—an open-air mosque of destruction where you can buy everything you need to start a small war or finish a family dispute. According to the UNHCR, Yemen is the second most heavily armed country in the world after the United States, where at least the massacres come with thoughts, prayers, and a national anthem. A fact that was hilariously underlined just the week before when, in a dazzling display of imperial irony, a U.S. diplomat gave a speech on arms reduction. A journalist, either brave or suicidal, stood up and asked if the same gun control measures being suggested for Yemen would be implemented in Dallas or Houston. The diplomat’s smirk froze into a material so hard his CIA handler had to rub lotion into it for hours before it finally softened.
But this market makes the Walwarts of Texas and Arkansas look like a Fisher Price daycare toy aisle compared to this X-rated Disneyland of mechanized mayhem, where the air smelled of cordite and questionable decisions. Pistols, machineguns, Kalashnikovs, assault rifles, grenades, bazookas, missiles, tank ammunition, mortars and anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs) are available in these markets —hell, if you had the right connections, you could probably pick up a secondhand Soviet tank with a half-tank of gas and a bloodstained seat. All of these can be sampled and sold, of course at a price. They then stock up on the molasses-like black honey from the frankincense trees down in the south of Yemen that they believe is a natural Viagra. Because, of course, after a long day of buying missiles and whiskey, the next logical concern was erectile dysfunction.
Then—silence. A brief, deceptive pause, like the universe had momentarily lost interest in torturing me. I exhaled, ready to mangle my Arabic in pursuit of coffee, when the goddamn alarm went off blaring through the empty lobby like I’d just tried to smuggle out one of the gaudy chandeliers. The sound rattled the gold-plated fixtures and pulsed through the low-slung divans where men gathered each afternoon to chew qat and murmur over tribal feuds and government betrayals. The cushions, dusty and sunken with age, bore the imprint of generations of restless conspirators, their elbows grinding into the garish fabrics—riotous patterns of crimson and emerald, worn thin but still clashing violently under the kaleidoscope glow of the half-moon windows above. Those stained-glass arches, so typical of Yemen, bathed the room in fractured bands of blue, green, and amber, making everything—dust, decay, even paranoia—look strangely holy. And then—again—the phone. Shrill, insistent, psychotic. Whoever was calling wasn’t just trying to reach me; they were trying to rip me straight into whatever fresh disaster was unfolding.
I finally picked up the phone, and my Yemeni boss, Mazen’s voice hit me like a gunshot through the earpiece. “Where are you? I need to know now!” Normally, his posh UK upbringing wrapped everything he said in layers of crisp, colonial refinement—even his insults sounded like polite suggestions. But now, all that Oxbridge polish had been sandblasted off by sheer panic.
“I remember you saying you were going up to Saada this semester break, right?” A pause. A sharp breath. “Well, congratulations—you’re in ground zero of a civil war.”
Civil war? Jesus. The phrase hit my uncaffeinated brain like a Molotov cocktail lobbed through one of the stained-glass window. Not a protest, not a riot, not a “situation.” The full-blooded, biblical variety—complete with airstrikes, artillery, and warlords treating ceasefires like bar tabs. Mazen kept talking, but my brain was still stuck on civil war. Like the kind with tanks and airstrikes and men in mismatched camouflage firing Kalashnikovs from the back of Toyota pickups. The kind that turns cities into splattered concrete and page 6 headlines into body counts.
His voice snapped me back. “Let me talk to your driver, Abdullilah. You need to get out of there—now! That is, if the road is still open.”
If? That word hung in the air like a guillotine.
I glanced out the hotel’s grimy window. The street, banked with miniature sand dunes and bathed in a dusty morning light, looked calm in the way a snake looks calm before it strikes. Maybe it was too calm come to think of it. There was no one out there.
The universe had made up its mind.
Time to run.
That call was over twenty years ago, back when the Houthis were just a scrappy mountain militia, a band of Koran-thumping, rifle-toting insurgents with the kind of death-glazed fanaticism that makes men fight long after their bones have become brittle and their god seems to have abandoned them. They weren’t supposed to last. That was the consensus among the think-tank war nerds, the clipboard-wielding Pentagon analysts, and the pudgy Gulf royals who believed their bottomless oil reserves and fleets of Western-supplied warplanes would be enough to snuff out a backwater rebellion in a country that barely functioned as a country in the first place.
But reality, as usual, had other plans. The Houthis not only survived but thrived. First, they bled the Yemeni army dry, slowly tearing through the government’s ranks like a qat chewer works through his plastic bag of leaves. Then, they stormed the capital, marching straight into Sanaa while the so-called authorities either fled or turned coats before the first bullet was even fired. The Gulf states panicked. A nominally democratic country with a perpetual president on the peninsula was bad enough, but now their princelings and war ministers choked on their imported caviar. They were horrified at the idea that a pack of mountain rebels with no royal blood might actually dictate the future of this corner of the Arabian Peninsula. So, they did what Gulf states do best—throw money at the problem and hope someone else dies fixing it. Saudi Arabia, flanked by its coalition of vassal states and armed to the teeth with American weapons and hired mercenaries launched a full-scale intervention in Yemen, assuming that their multi-billion-dollar air force could bomb the Houthis back to the Stone Age.
But the Houthis, as it turned out, already lived in the Stone Age. Bombing them was like trying to drown a fish. Towns and villages burned, civilians died by the numbers, but the rebels just melted back into the mountains, the caves and the winding wadis, places so rugged and labyrinthine that even satellite imagery couldn’t map them properly. The Saudis brought to the game their billion-dollar jets, their fancy Lockheed missiles, their bone-white palaces lined with Pentagon advisors—and none of it mattered. The Houthis fought them to a bloody, grinding, mud-soaked stalemate, outlasting wave after wave of high-tech slaughter with a mixture of grit, guerrilla tactics, and a sheer psychotic refusal to die.
Now, the Western media loves a simplified villain, and the Houthis—scruffy, turbaned, and conveniently shouting slogans that vaguely rhyme with “Death to America and Israel”—made an easy boogeyman. “Iran supports them,” they scream. Iranian drones, Iranian rockets, Iranian money! As if that explained everything. As if Yemen’s civil war was nothing more than a shadow puppet show staged by Tehran’s ayatollahs. The truth was far messier. The spark that ignited this whole blood-drenched nightmare wasn’t an Iranian plot—it was purely local, a cocktail of marginalization, sectarian resentment, and the slow, grinding death of a dysfunctional state that had been rotting from the inside long before Iran ever heavily got involved.
The Houthis, despite all the headlines, aren’t even “Shia” in the way the West understands Shia. They’re Zaidis, an obscure eighth-century offshoot of Islam so distinct from Iran’s Twelver Shia doctrine that the two have about as much in common as Lutheran Protestants and Vatican Catholics. They are the descendants of Zayd ibn Ali, a revolutionary who got himself killed in 740 AD for daring to challenge the corrupt caliphate. Since then, their innate sense of righteousness is hardwired and when they believe in injustice, they fight, often with Soviet-era AK-47s and a poet’s sense of martyrdom.
They deeply resented the globalization of the puritanical interpretation of Wahhabi Sunni Islam exported by their neighbour. This is Islam stripped down to its most brutal, literalist core – no saints, no shrines, no Faysal Alawi songs, no fun, just an unending desert of rigid doctrine and the ever-present threat of the sword, in this life and the next. The patterned red cloaks once favored by the women in Yemen was now a rarity, replaced by the soul erasing black abaya and niqab imposed by the intransigent imams across the border. But this isn’t just about theology, it’s about resistance versus oppression, tribal honor versus imperial decadence, a jambiya in the dark versus a cruise missile from 30,000 feet.
But nobody in Washington or Riyadh cared to fact-check the sectarian fine print. In the minds of the Gulf monarchies, the Houthis were Shia, and Shia meant Iran, and Iran meant the enemy. This was a battle for believers. That was all the justification they needed to unleash hellfire on Yemen, pounding the country into a choking ruin of starvation and cholera outbreaks, while Western arms manufacturers raked in record-breaking profits.
And then? The Houthis weren’t just surviving; they were winning. The Saudis, after nearly a decade of airstrikes and embargoes, were staggering backward, bleeding money and prestige and finally forced into negotiations with the very rebels they once vowed to crush. Riyadh had learned the hard way that even the most expensive war machines in the world are useless against men who simply refuse to lose. The United Arab Emirates, once eager to carve out its own chunk of Yemen, had largely cut and run, leaving behind a patchwork of mercenaries and warlords to fend for themselves. The Americans, bored and distracted by new wars in shinier locations, had scaled back their direct involvement, content to let their Gulf allies sputter and drown in the quagmire of their own making.
Meanwhile, the Houthis were no longer just a militia. They had transformed into something more terrifying—an actual government. They had ministers, bureaucracies and even tax collectors. They controlled major ports, oil fields, and supply routes, dictating terms not just to warlords and tribes but to international diplomats who once laughed at the idea of negotiating with them. What started as a rebellion had mutated into a full-fledged state-within-a-state, an entity with enough firepower, discipline, and sheer lunatic endurance to rewrite the entire balance of power on the Arabian Peninsula.
And yet, despite all this, despite the diplomatic visits and the quiet handshakes, the Western media still preferred to frame the Houthis as little more than Iranian puppets, cartoonish extremists snarling into the cameras as they launched drones at Saudi oil fields. Never mind that the Saudis had spent years starving Yemen into submission, weaponizing famine as brutally as they weaponized bombs. Never mind that Riyadh’s own hands were drenched in blood, that their war had created the worst humanitarian crisis on the planet while their princes partied in Ibiza and bought yachts the size of small countries. No, none of that made the news—just the image of the scrappy insurgents firing missiles at Dubai airports every now and then, their leaders grinning through the TV screens with the unflinching certainty of men who know history is tilting in their favor. Or at least they might hold on long enough till the rest lost interest.
The war dragged on, of course, morphing into something even more grotesque and complex. Yemen had become a fractured chessboard of competing warlords, foreign mercenaries, jihadi factions, and corporate vultures circling overhead. The Americans weren’t fully out of the picture—they never are—but their priorities had shifted to Ukraine, China, whatever new geopolitical bonfire needed gasoline this week. The Saudis, exhausted, were trying to negotiate their way out, their once-mighty war machine limping away from a fight they swore they would win in weeks. And the Houthis? They were still there, dug into the mountains, unmoved, unchanged. Survivors of a war they weren’t supposed to survive. Folk heroes to the downtrodden of the Arab world who saw them as Robin Hoods fighting the unelected Goliaths.
And then came October 7th.
After the atrocities committed in Israel by the death squad of Hamas, a new meaning of the Old Testament taunt was introduced. It was no longer an eye for an eye, but more like an eye for beachfront property and a tooth for a generation. And as the savage butchery saw no restraint and no end in sight, these sons of the Zaidi revival decided to transform themselves from regional insurgents into self-style avengers of the Palestinian cause, waging a maritime jihad that turned one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes into a carnival of rockets, drones and piratical swagger. If the genocide didn’t stop they roared, any ship flying the colors of Israel or its ‘imperialist accomplices’ would be fair game. The Bab el-Mandeb strait, that narrow throat of global trade, became their hunting ground. Freighters that once glided peacefully through the warm waters toward Suez now found themselves in the crosshairs of Houthi missile crews.
The Americans and their British yessirs, of course, couldn’t stomach the idea of our Amazon packages taking the scenic route around Africa and came in for a fight. The USS Harry Truman and her sister ships steamed into the fray, launching million-dollar missiles at third-world Houthi bottle rockets—blowing up ten-cent slingshots with weapons that cost more than a small country’s GDP– a grotesque fireworks display where the math just never added up. The West growled about ‘freedom of navigation’ but this was no clean war. This was a back-alley brawl, a proxy skirmish in the greater lunacy or a region drowning in blood, injustice and oil money. The militia turned the Red Sea into a stage for their theater of defiance – each intercepted missile a middle finger to the West, each hijacked ship a trophy to their holy war and every intercepted warhead a thousand recruitment posters.
And as always, the real losers in this rigged cockfight are the Yemeni people—the poor, the hungry, the damned. Caught between a rock and an airstrike, they suffer no matter which way the wind blows. They bleed so the powerful can posture. They starve so that oil sheiks and defense contractors can toast their next billion-dollar deal over gold-sprinkled steaks in Dubai.
But let’s be clear: this is no noble resistance. This is chaos as strategy, a calculated dance with madness that the West seems happy to play. The Houthis are no saints – they’ve starved their own people, crushed dissent with bullets and fear and now they’ve hitched their fate to the burning coattails of Gaza’s martyrdom betting that a ceasefire might buy them a few more qat chewing sunsets before the Saudis come back with a fresh batch of American bombs. It’s a sick joke, the kind where the punchline is always written in someone else’s blood.
And then—just when you thought the madness couldn’t get more depraved—the truth comes crawling out of the shadows on a public messaging app like a meth-addled desert jackal, a Signal group chat where the nation’s top brass plotted fiery apocalyptical chaos in Yemen. Jesus H. Christ—only in this deranged, bloodthirsty epoch could a military operation in Yemen become the backdrop for a Pentagon frat party leaked straight to the press via Signal, like some grotesque group chat between Dr. Strangelove and the cast of Jackass. Picture this: some Trumpian Pentagon frat boys, jacked to the gills on ketamine and power, hunched over their Xbox controllers like deranged gods, about to turn entire families into pink mist with the casual detachment of a teenager ordering an Uber. All this in a PC small group meeting, almost a deliberate misnomer and challenge to what we would normally ascribe to that acronym. The term principals committee generally refers to a group of the senior-most national-security officials, including the secretaries of defense, state, and the treasury, as well as the director of the CIA, whereas in this case it might as well have meant press committee.
Because there, watching it all with a notebook and a stiff drink in hand, was none other than the editor from The Atlantic, bearing witness to the fact that modern warfare to these ghouls is just Grand Theft Auto with real corpses. National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, in a blunder for the ages, had ‘mistakenly’ added this journalist to this clandestine digital cabal. The cast was a who’s who of the administration’s hawks: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe among others. They exchanged messages dripping with the kind of sensitive details that could make even seasoned spooks blanch—targets, weaponry, attack sequences—all laid bare in the unholy glow of their screens.
The only slight dissention came from the mascaraed Judas. The Never-Trumper turned implacably loyal footsoldier quibbled only over the timing of the potential war crime, not the act itself. A man who once had publicly called the President an “idiot” and said he was “reprehensible” while privately comparing him to Adolf Hitler yet now would never dream of countering him publicly. Which makes you wonder if the Nazi reference doesn’t quite pack the sting it might for students of history and those who still think the Third Reich was a bad thing.
Of course, none of this is surprising. The lives of brown people have always been worth less than a Slack message between defense contractors—“LOL, nice hit!”—followed by a fist-bump emoji (also included in the chat). This isn’t just war; it’s performance art for psychopaths, a declaration that we’ve fully embraced the Age of Mean and taken it on tour. The military ops? Not strategy, not justice—just a severed camel’s head tossed onto the foot of the bed of anyone crazy enough to think the rules still apply. This wasn’t just a breach—it was a confession. A neon-lit billboard screaming that the so-called “adults in the room” are, in fact, a pack of cackling hyenas with security clearances, treating human lives like high-score multipliers in a first-person shooter game. And the kicker? Nobody even bothered to pretend shame.
Jon Stewart unknowingly eulogized the entire scene just days before the expose in a particularly macabre piece that could somehow be filed under the ‘funny because it’s true’ category. He showed the insurgency leader in chief stepping off the golf course, his golf course, freshly off his much ballyhooed win of a tournament, perhaps complete with a golden trophy of himself likened after the one he foresees raised one day in his fantasy of Marbella of the East built on the bones of Gazans. Looking very much like some grotesque McDonald’s drive-thru employee, he entered the situation room to watch the operation in real time. As Stewart sadly remarked, “Anyone can bomb the shit out of Yemen after 9 holes, but 18!? By bombing Yemen, President Trump continued a presidential tradition dating back decades. It may have been what the Wright brothers invented the plane for. How much better do we have to make this for it to be able to reach and bomb the shit out of Yemen?”
Yet, unlike the turkey on Thanksgiving, Arabia Felix—the Land of Happiness as the Romans once called it—never gets a pardon. Decades after Mazen’s phone call, the nightmare continues, each new administration playing god with a land that has endured far beyond their fleeting reigns. The Yemenis, in their book of faith, are promised ‘a good land and a forgiving Lord,’ but the sycophants in Washington have made a sport of testing both. The current Masters of the Universe hold a rather different view of holiness and pray to a different but perhaps even more vengeful deity.
“I will say a prayer for victory,” Vance slathered in the chat while two other users added prayer emojis. In updates from the supposed Michael Waltz, he goes on to praise the operation as an “amazing job.” A few minutes later, “John Ratcliffe” enthused, “A good start,” suggesting that the suffering has only just begun. Waltz celebrated with three emojis: a fist, an American flag, and fire, giving us ample insight into how they see themselves. Others soon joined in, including “MAR,” who wrote, “Good Job Pete and your team!!,” and “Susie Wiles,” got in on the bandwagon, “Kudos to all – most particularly those in theater and CENTCOM! Really great. God bless.” “Steve Witkoff” responded with five emoji: two hands-praying, a flexed bicep, and two American flags. “TG” responded, “Great work and effects!” Just another day at the office.
And as the last missile finds its mark, as another family is erased with a keystroke, as the desert night trembles with the sound of a drone strike ordered between rounds of golf, we must ask ourselves: When will Yemen’s suffering be more than an emoji? More than a flexed bicep, a waving flag, or the hollow piety of a prayer-hand reaction?
For the gamers in the Signal chat, this was all play, a grotesque parody of power and dominion. But for the Yemeni people—the ones whose names are never typed, whose deaths come with neither fanfare nor consequence nor thoughts and prayers—it is survival. A struggle against a world that refuses to see them as more than collateral damage, as more than a convenient backdrop for another country’s imperial spectacle.
But they are more. They are a people who have survived famine, blockade, and endless war. A people who continue to rebuild even as the rubble piles higher. A people who, despite the best efforts of their tormentors, still believe in a future beyond the fire.
If there is to be any justice in this world, it begins by recognizing this truth: Yemen does not need our pity. It needs our rage. It needs our voices. And, above all, it needs an end to the silence that allows the killing to continue.
