FORMER AL QAEDA BASTION OF MARIB BRINGS YEMENIS HOPE FOR FUTURE
▶ City remains surrounded by civil war - but open businesses are providing optimism
The clang and thump of jackhammers and diggers fill the streets of Marib. The oil-rich Yemeni boomtown, once accustomed to the sounds of conflict, is now an oasis of stability in a country embroiled in a civil war.
Yemen is the site of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, with rampant disease, famine and a war pitting supporters of the legitimate president Abdrabu Mansur Hadi against Iran-backed Houthi rebels.
But the fall of Yemen has coincided with the rise of Marib, once seen as an Al Qaeda bastion, which has been spared much misery because of its oil and gas reserves, proximity to Saudi Arabia and rare tribal cohesion that has helped to repel Houthi incursions.
“We have managed to push the war far away from Marib,” said provincial governor Sultan Al Arada. “Marib is untouchable.”
The border city is now Yemen’s most thriving industrial centre, thanks in part to an influx of hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people, among them entrepreneurs, doctors and Yemen’s elite, which is driving up investments and property prices.
Hundreds of new businesses have risen, from restaurants to water bottling factories.
Jobs in Marib offer salaries, a novelty to legions of employed youths in a country with chronic unemployment.
“The spectacular rise of Marib has come not despite the conflict, but because of it,” says Farea Al Muslimi, a Yemen expert at Chatham House in London. “Marib has gained from the chaos surrounding it.”
Its university is expanding and businessmen who fled the war are slowly returning.
They include Obaid Zubaiyen, head of a family-run trade and construction business with interests across the Arabian Gulf. Mr Zubaiyen fled Yemen in 2011.
“The family is back because Marib means opportunity,” says Misbah Ohag, a group manager, showing a blueprint of a multimillion-dollar project of villas, apartments and malls.
Mr Arada has plans for an international airport and aims to make Marib, home to temple ruins from the ancient Sabaean kingdom, a magnet for tourists.
But some scars of the war outside Marib are still visible inside the province. At a rehabilitation centre for child soldiers, drawings sketched by the youngsters are telling.
One showed a grenade, a tank, a helicopter gunship and crimson splashes of blood.
“They blew up my school,” the caption reads.
Houthi rebels have planted thousands of landmines around Marib and the mangled wreckage of cars litter its mountainous border.
“So many dead and limbless people,” says Mohammed Al Qubati, head of Marib General Hospital which includes Yemen’s only functioning prosthetic limbs centre in government territory. “It’s like we are waiting for the remaining people to die.”
Marib, with an original population of about 350,000, is reeling under the weight of what officials say are 1.5 million displaced people from across Yemen, putting a strain on resources.
In a decrepit camp on its outskirts, dozens of people from the Jaham tribe tug at the sleeves of Saudi aid officials, imploring them for more relief.
“This is the kind of life you wish on your enemy,” says a tribesman from nearby Sirwah district, which was overrun by the Houthis. “We used to live in palaces, now we live in tents.
“No, no,” interjects another tribesman. “This is not even a tent; this is wood covered with a flimsy blanket.”
Houthi rebels besieged Marib for months in 2015 after they captured the capital Sanaa but they were pushed back in fierce clashes with local tribesmen aided by the Saudi-led coalition, of which the UAE is a leading member.
Mr Arada, one of the region’s most influential tribal leaders, rallied fellow elders to pledge loyalty to the Hadi government – even those who traditionally supported the Houthis.
The US, which launches regular drone strikes in the territory to battle Al Qaeda, has imposed sanctions on Mr Arada’s brother, accusing him of supporting the group – a charge the governor denies.
Marib faces the constant threat of Houthi rockets, hundreds of which have been launched at the city. A missile strike killed six children last year during Eid festivities, Mr Arada says.
Paying a heavy price for the conflict are thousands of divided families in Yemen, split between Houthi and government territory.
“We go through checkpoint, checkpoint, checkpoint,” says Amina Al Ayashi, 55, describing a circuitous route to Sanaa, where her journalist son Taufiq is in a Houthi jail as the rebels clamp down on the media.
“It feels like a whole lifetime. They humiliatingly search us. We bring clothes, bread, vegetables. They refuse.”
Morsal Haidara, an English professor at Marib University, which restarted in 2016 after being shut down during months of fighting, draws parallels with Shakespeare’s Hamlet, comparing the rebels to the character King Claudius who seized the throne by poisoning his own brother.
“What’s happening in Yemen is a tragedy,” Prof Haidara says.