Buzz of hope drowned out by drums of war
For the Arabian Skaters, life in Yemen has undergone an ‘enormous reality shift’
When Faisal Yahya Alwazir was 16 and living with his older brother and parents in Sanaa’s picturesque historic district, life seemed pretty easy.
Longtime autocrat Ali Abdullah Saleh had been pushed from power and the streets were buzzing with the talk of change. Alwazir was back studying, hanging with his older brother and, of course, there was skateboarding.
Alwazir was one of the “Arabian Skaters” — a loosely organized group of teenagers with dreams of making it big. If he identified himself in any way that was it, as a skater, not by his religion, tribal affiliations or heritage.
In 2012, when we last met, he said his friends just never discussed their backgrounds. “It was kind of rude to ask,” he said at the time.
He wasn’t political either; while he supported the Arab Spring demonstrations, he was not on the streets marching every day. Now Alwazir is19, a high-school graduate and aspiring doctor — and his country is at war. All the hope that the Arab Spring ushered in is gone.
As the United Nations’ human rights chief has warned, Yemen is “on the verge of total collapse.” With airports and borders shut, many of the country’s 26 million people are essentially trapped.
Yemen’s conflict is roughly between the Houthis, a northern rebel group comprised mainly of Zaydis (a Shia sect of Islam popular in Yemen’s north and reportedly backed by Iran) against supporters of President Rabbo Mansour Hadi, who replaced Saleh in 2012 (and is supported by Saudi Arabia).
But Yemen’s fault lines are much more complicated. One example is that Saleh, who famously said ruling the fractious country was like “dancing on the heads of snakes,” never really left Yemen. He now has an alliance of convenience with the Houthis, a group he once brutally suppressed.
The only clear winner in the current chaos seems to be Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). In the past two weeks, AQAP has taken control of a major airport, oil export terminal and emptied a bank and a prison.
Alwazir says some nights he can hear the bombs of the Saudi-led aerial offensive known as “Operation Decisive Storm,” which Iran’s Supreme Leader has condemned as “genocide.”
“It’s an enormous reality shift. One day you’re avoiding homework, the other you’re huddled up with your family in the basement. Makes one appreciate what he has,” he wrote this week on Facebook Messenger.
“Am I an activist? The situation around me imposes me to be so.”
Alwazir, who is Zaydi, says he has recently become a member of the Popular Committees that support the Houthis. He plans to start a Facebook page providing reports from Yemen along with his friends.
Medical school applications will have to wait.
Across town, his friend Majd Aldouis can also hear the bombings in his Hadda neighbourhood. On Friday night, the mountains near where he lives were hit, shattering all the windows in his home.
“I hope we live,” he wrote, before signing off for the night.
And Sanaa, he says, is much safer than the southern port town of Aden, which has suffered three weeks of Saudi strikes, or Taiz, where clashes broke out this week.
“It’s like a street war,” Aldouis wrote in texts about those cities.
The UN said on Friday that at least 150,000 people have been displaced and the death toll will surpass 750.
Schools, mosques, hospitals and factories have been hit in the Saudi operation.
Aldouis, 19, was also an Arabian Skater and, like Alwazir, not particularly political.
He was studying petroleum engineering at the private Emirates International University when the Houthis took over Sanaa last fall. Now, instead of learning about petrol, he has joined the hundreds who line up in the streets by foot or in cars for the country’s dwindling gas reserves.
The Arabian Skaters were never emblematic of Yemeni youths. They belonged to a small middle class, in a country where much of the population is poor and the elite are rich — very rich.
But they defied the usual stereotype of a country with nothing to offer except terrorism and gingerbread architecture. They were optimistic about their futures. They talked of girls. When asking about terrorism they mis-took the question as one about “tourism.”
But, as Alwazir says, after the Arab Spring the “same old faces stayed.”
“2011,” he wrote this week, “proved to be nothing more than an illusion.” Follow Michelle Shephard on Twitter @shephardm