The international community must hold them to this commitment, and press the Huthis to do the same. The UN and other humanitarian organisations will need to maintain open lines of communication with the Huthis, the coalition and each other in order to provide as much targeted assistance as possible.
Finally, measures should be put in place to protect Hodeida and Saleef ports, and to hold to account any party that willfully damages this vital infrastructure. Yemen is rarely afforded the time and resources its strategic position and depth of human suffering demand from policymakers. Much U. But resources — time, people, money — must be made available, and genuine pressure brought to bear on all parties to the conflict.
The confrontation around Hodeida could still offer an opportunity to break the cycle of conflict in Yemen.
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Failure to seize it can only extend and deepen a humanitarian catastrophe, rendering Yemen enduringly unstable. But it takes me more than a year to arrange my journey. Everything about getting there drives home how deeply three years of war have broken and divided the country. My first application in January languishes in bureaucratic limbo. Unofficially, I am told that Aden is too unsafe for me.
I make progress but lose that visa in a bureaucratic mix-up. Then, at last, all my phone calls, meetings, messages and form-filling pay off.
A Yemeni diplomat pastes the visa into my passport while I am visiting the United States in the late fall of The importance attached to this official symbol of Yemeni statehood is, of course, in stark contrast to the reality on the ground. After three years of war, the country is in fact fragmented into several competing power centres. The Houthis retain control of the north-west, including Sanaa. Nominally one bloc, the Saudi-led coalition and its Yemeni allies are divided, with UAE-aligned southern forces at odds with the Hadi government, especially over control and influence in Aden.
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My most recent trip to Houthi-held Sanaa in was equally hard to arrange. A Hadi government visa is only one step in planning my trip to Aden. Before travelling, I inform UAE officials of my trip and obtain approval from the UAE-allied Yemeni security forces that control the airport and most of the city. My next challenge is to book a flight on Yemenia, the only airline flying there. With just one or two flights a day from either Cairo or Amman, competition for the seats is intense. Several Yemeni friends trying to reach Aden around the same time are told the flights are all booked, and some think they might have to pay bribes to jump the queue.
In my case, a contact in Aden is able to do the labour-intensive work of constant personal follow-up at the Yemenia offices. What choice do I have? When I board the Yemenia plane in Cairo at the end of February, I am surprised to see that one third of the seats are empty. I suspect that potential travellers are deterred by the exorbitant price for anything less than emergency occasions. Many of my fellow passengers are returning home after medical treatment abroad. I see one young man I had previously met, who had taken a relative to India for treatment of a medical problem that could not be resolved in Yemen.
It was too late. He died. The family is coming home to mourn his passing away with other relatives and friends. We take off for Aden five hours late, typical for Yemenia flights from Cairo, which are scheduled to depart very early each morning. My nerves are jangling. The plane is in shocking disrepair. All the seats are at different levels, and mine is falling off its mountings. No staff member bothers to give the usual safety instructions.
The aircraft lands intact and I emerge to find an Aden transformed. I have not been here since January , a few months before the Saudi-led intervention. Back then, southerners were preparing to repulse the coming Houthi offensive, but as yet there had been no combat. Now there are bombed buildings in and around the airport and a sense of militarisation everywhere. A new military-style barrier made of large sand-filled canvas bags is under construction around the airport perimeter. The terminal is still in one piece, and passport control is open, if sparsely manned given the limited flights.
Because the terminal is closed to car traffic for security reasons, there is nobody outside to meet me. A friend had arranged entry, but it was denied at the last minute. So we walk through the large, empty car park outside. My fellow passengers and I carry our bags to the entrance checkpoint, where we cross into a narrow, congested two-lane street that now functions as the access road to the airport. As painstakingly arranged, a friend of a friend is loyally waiting. He picks me up and drives me to where I will stay.
I am to spend the first part of my eight days in Aden in the Bouraiqa district, on an island-like peninsula 15km west of the main city, itself also almost an island in the Gulf of Aden. On the way to Bouraiqa, we pass through a stretch of desert wasteland where security forces from the UAE have set up a base. This is my only sighting of Emirati troops. The UAE wields great authority in Aden, but its soldiers mostly seem to stay hunkered down in their compound.
Incongruously, there are also shiny new billboards along the causeway. Another displays the leader of the opposing political bloc, President Hadi. They are made up of southerners allied with Zubaydi and the STC. The Hadi government calls them illegitimate militias on the UAE payroll. It was the Emiratis who led the military campaign that ousted the Houthis from Aden. And they support and pay the security belt forces, in part because they know that many in the city perceive Hadi, who is aligned more closely with the Saudis, as corrupt and ineffectual.
Both the UAE and its southern Yemeni allies view Islah with deep suspicion and associate the group with political radicalism and violence. Many southerners in Aden resent Hadi and Islah, and the UAE-aligned local groups have the military advantage on the ground.
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There is also a regional component to the raging intra-southern feuds. There is a perception that the security belt forces in Aden draw too heavily from these areas and that the STC, whose membership is regionally diverse, under-represents Aden. Others vehemently deny the importance of regionalism. While current divisions are not carbon copies of the past — in which groups from the current governorates of Dalia and Lahj fought a brutal ten-day civil war against Abyan and Shebwa in — history does appear to have an echo.
The friction between the UAE and Hadi camps erupted into open clashes in January that lasted two or three days before the Emiratis and Saudis stepped in to impose a ceasefire, which has remained fragile and tense. If the Emiratis wish to gain more traction, they need to communicate better what their military and political goals and capacities are. The January truce has held, but there has been no political reconciliation.
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Instead there is Balkanisation and political paralysis. In parts of the city, for instance in the vicinity of the Interior Ministry, pro-Hadi forces hold sway. Elsewhere, STC-allied forces are in charge. What surprises me most, however, are the guns. In northern Yemen, especially in rural areas, guns are ubiquitous, but that was never the case in Aden. Not under British colonial rule, not under the communists who ruled the South when it was an independent state until , and not in unified Yemen under the regime of President Saleh.
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Today, guns are everywhere, carried by the security forces in pickup trucks with heavy machine guns mounted on the back — some of them clearly dressed in uniforms, others in a confusing mix of tribal and military garb — and by young men on motorbikes, some of whom may be part of the divided security services, others not. Another danger feeds underlying tensions.
Since , unknown assailants have assassinated over twenty clerics and preachers, many of them associated with the Sunni Islamist party, Islah. All of this violence is targeted, of course, but I do not want to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. This makes Aden quite unlike Sanaa, which the Houthis run as a relatively secure police state. Because of the insecurity, I do not move around much. Most of my contacts and friends come to see me where I am staying in Bouraiqa, with a family of business people who have a fine villa overlooking a lovely small fishing bay.
When I do go out, I always wear the abaya and niqab — a long black robe and a full-face veil. That way, at checkpoints and in public, I draw less attention. Moving around town, I am shocked by the scale of war damage in Aden. The main road into the city from the north, where the Houthis advanced and retreated, I am told looks like east Aleppo. In Aden, almost every large hotel is destroyed.
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On past visits I would stay at the Mercure Hotel, right on the beach. The Mercure is now ripped open, its entire lobby exposed by an airstrike aimed at the Houthis, who were occupying the building at the time. The nearby Aden Hotel was destroyed in Saudi coalition airstrikes. ISIS bombed a third hotel built by Saleh.
Many parts of the city are in ruins. There has been a lot of looting. Amid the destruction, there is still plenty of life. Fishermen are out in the bay off Bouraiqa. At lunchtime, the fruit and vegetable markets are packed.