كولد بريف، لا يمكننا دعوة اي فصيل في بلادك للاختفاء او ان تدعو كذلك الاخوان المسلمون للاختفاء بسوريا، اولا اخوان سوريا مستقلون عن اخوان مصر، ثانيا اخوان سوريا هم الاعداء الحقيقيون للخمينية ثالثا هناك الكثير من السوريين يؤيدون تلك الجماعة فأنت بذلك تستعديهم، توقف عما لا علم لك به

The other day I got a message from @alsharabi31. I did not know him. He asked me, politely, to write about what life is actually like under the Houthis. Not the proxy war. Not the missiles. Not the shipping lanes. The people. He was right to ask, and he was right about me. I write about geopolitics. Fronts, supply chains, alliances, strategy. It is what I know. But the war is not happening to a map. It is happening to about 35 million human beings, and most of them live on the side of the line where almost nobody is allowed to look. So I spent the weekend on it. Here is what I found. One thing before I start, because it matters. There are two Yemens now, and they are not the same. The internationally recognised government has a war on its hands, a damaged economy and plenty of its own failures. I am not going to pretend otherwise. But in the government areas, aid workers are not in prison. Women can cross a provincial boundary without a male guardian's signature. Journalists are not disappeared for counting the hungry. Monitors can actually monitor. So when you read what follows, keep asking yourself one question. Is this a consequence of war, which would show up on both sides of the line? Or does it only happen where the Houthis are? Because almost all of it only happens where the Houthis are. Start with money, because everything else follows from it. In Sana'a, public-sector salaries have gone unpaid for years. Teachers, nurses, clerks, municipal workers. Sometimes a half payment appears. Then nothing again for months. Poverty estimates in some Sana'a reporting reach 75 to 80 percent. A casual labourer finds work somewhere between four and twelve days a month. Food prices in the capital rose 6 to 13 percent in the first months of this year. Now picture that as a household. One adult working a third of the month, at best. No salary arriving for the ones with a government job. Prices climbing. Nothing saved, because everything was sold years ago. And through all of it, the collecting never stops. Levies. Checkpoint fees. Zakat collections. Licensing rules. Business restrictions that have simply closed shops down. Hospitals run with unpaid staff and empty shelves, and some have cut admissions sharply. Power, water and sanitation are unreliable where they function at all. Nationally, 22.3 million Yemenis need humanitarian assistance, more than 18 million face acute food insecurity, and more than 2.2 million children under five are acutely malnourished. Those are country-wide numbers and I am not going to hang them all on the Houthis. But look at where the worst of it sits. FEWS NET projects Emergency conditions, IPC Phase 4, persisting in Houthi-held Hodeidah, Hajjah and Taiz. The deepest hunger in Yemen is concentrated in the areas the Houthis hold, in the part of the country with the most people and the most farmland. The 2026 humanitarian response plan is funded at somewhere around 15 to 20 percent. The world is not even paying for the part it is still allowed to see. Which brings me to the part that made me angriest as I read it. Seventy-three United Nations staff are currently in Houthi detention. Some have been held since 2021. Dozens of NGO and civil-society workers are held alongside them. One World Food Programme employee died in their custody in February 2025. The stated justification is espionage. No other actor in Yemen is doing this. Think about what it achieves, because it is not random cruelty. When you detain the people who assess need, you do not merely slow aid down. You blind the assessment. Independent monitoring in northern Yemen is now the weakest it has ever been, in precisely the place where most Yemenis live. That is not incompetence. That is the point. You cannot report a famine that nobody is permitted to measure. Then, in August, they made all of it worse on purpose. Since 6 August the WHO has recorded at least 674 people killed and close to 3,000 injured. IOM tracked between 128,000 and 133,000 people displaced between 1 August and late September, the overwhelming majority after 31 August, concentrated in Taiz, southern Hodeidah and Lahj. This was a Houthi offensive. Nobody forced it. The front lines had been broadly frozen since the 2022 truce, and they chose to break them. UN human rights officials documented 32 civilian deaths in the flare-up, 15 of them children, and three separate Houthi attacks on camps for people who had already been displaced once. Read that last part again. They shelled the places people had fled to. The families who got out carry nothing. Camps and host communities are packed far beyond capacity. There are reports of shared latrines, a communal meal every other day, and women giving birth with no medical care at all. Some have put to sea and crossed to Djibouti, which tells you exactly how much hope they have left in their own country. Now the part that gets the least coverage in the West, because it makes people uncomfortable. Houthi authorities enforce a mahram requirement. A woman needs a male guardian to travel between governorates, to reach an airport, to leave the country, and in many cases needs written permission on top of that. That single rule quietly removes half the population from the economy. It cuts women off from work, from hospitals, from any independent life at all. This is not a wartime shortage. It is a rule, written and enforced by them, and it does not exist in the areas they do not hold. Women have been barred or restricted from whole categories of public employment. There is dress-code enforcement, gender segregation and morality policing. Some local and tribal pacts have banned women from owning smartphones or singing at weddings. Landlords routinely refuse to rent to a woman who arrives without a man. There is no legal minimum age for marriage, and child marriage is widespread. Reproductive healthcare barely exists. Rights groups have documented thousands of violations against women since 2017, including killings and injuries from shelling and mines, abductions, torture, and the forced recruitment of girls. Recent reporting describes raids, disappearances, and unofficial detention sites that Yemenis call hidden houses. And then the children. The Houthis recruit them systematically. Through schools, through summer camps, through mosques, through the scouts. The recruitment drive intensified during this year's escalation. Boys as young as 15 have been sent to the front, and child soldiers have been captured in the current fighting. Schools are used for indoctrination and military training. Millions of Yemeni children are either out of education entirely or inside a system that exists to produce fighters. A movement that runs its recruitment through the classroom has told you exactly what it intends to do with the next generation. Then there are the people who simply do not fit the doctrine. The Houthis impose a narrow Zaydi-derived reading on everyone beneath them. The Baha'is who remain, Christians who are mostly converts, the last handful of Jews, and Sunni or dissenting Muslims all face harassment, detention, forced recantation, seized property, and propaganda painting them as foreign agents. Levi Marhabi, the last known Yemeni Jew, is still in detention despite a court order for his release. Converts risk violence from their own families. A Jewish community that lived in Yemen for more than two thousand years has been reduced to one man in a cell. Journalists, critics and human-rights defenders are arbitrarily detained. Protests are met with arrests, including around the anniversary of the 26 September revolution, which is no coincidence at all, because that revolution is the one that abolished the imamate the Houthis are busy rebuilding. Landmines they laid are still taking the legs off farmers and children. The National Commission to Investigate Alleged Violations documented thousands of incidents in the year to July 2026, covering killings, injuries, child recruitment, arbitrary arrest, disappearance and forced displacement. In the investigated cases of civilian casualties and recruitment, the large majority were attributed to the Houthis. So now let me say something about language, because the words we use are part of the problem. We keep saying the Houthis "control" territory. Houthi-controlled areas. Houthi-held governorates. You see that phrasing everywhere in the reporting, including in my own posts. It is the wrong word. Control implies governance. Governance is a bargain. Revenue goes up, services come down. Salaries. Water. Electricity. Courts. Schools that teach something. Hospitals with staff who get paid. Go back through everything above and find the return side of that bargain. It is not there. They collect at every checkpoint and they deliver nothing. They tax a shopkeeper who has no customers and pay a nurse nothing for a year. They do not govern that territory. They occupy it, and they farm the people living on it. I have seen this before, in a different country, wearing different colours. The PKK-aligned self-administration in northeast Syria could not govern either. It ran on conscription, on detention, on silencing local voices, on making sure that what actually happened inside its area never reached an outside newsroom intact. I lived there for months. I know how that machine works from the inside. The difference is that the Syrian project is being dismantled and folded back into a state. The Houthis are at the peak of their strength, better armed than they have ever been, holding a coastline they did not hold a month ago. And here is what makes all of this unforgivable rather than merely tragic. Yemen is the poorest country in the region. It has no business being poor at all. Coffee is Yemeni. Not figuratively. Literally. From the 15th century, Sufis in the Yemeni highlands brewed it to stay awake through night prayer. It travelled from there to Cairo, to Istanbul, to Venice, and into the coffee houses of London and Paris. For roughly two hundred years Yemen held a near monopoly on the world's coffee trade, and all of it left through one port on the Red Sea. The port was called Mocha. That is where the word comes from. Not a syrup. Not a drink with chocolate in it. A Yemeni harbour. The genetic ancestors of most of the Arabica grown on earth today came out of those mountains. Yemen caffeinated the planet. Now look at what grows in those same mountains today. Khat. A mild narcotic leaf that is chewed and spat out, that nobody can eat, that nobody exports, and that no one outside the region will buy. Roughly 90 percent of Yemeni men and around half of Yemeni women chew it daily. About a quarter of household income goes on it. Go back to that family I described earlier, the one with four days of work a month and no salary arriving. A quarter of what little comes in is spent on a leaf that is chewed for a few hours and thrown on the floor. Official figures put khat at around 15 percent of Yemen's agricultural land, roughly 166,000 hectares, and some agronomists believe the real number is closer to 300,000. It is the country's leading cash crop. And it drinks. Khat takes somewhere around 38 to 40 percent of all water used by Yemeni agriculture, in one of the most water-scarce countries on earth. Now hold the two crops side by side, because this is the whole argument. Coffee is production. Khat is consumption. Coffee gets picked, dried, sorted, bagged, trucked, inspected and shipped. Every one of those steps is a wage. It crosses a border, so it earns foreign currency. It passes a customs desk, so it pays the state. It builds a reputation abroad that raises the price of next year's harvest. Yemeni coffee sells at premium prices in Western markets today precisely because there is so little of it left. Khat does none of that. It is grown, cut and chewed within a day, inside the same country, by the same people. No export. No foreign currency. No customs revenue. No processing industry. No buyers abroad. Because it has to be fresh, it cannot even travel. Khat is money leaving a household. Coffee is money entering a country. Then there is the time. From around noon, most of Yemen stops. Offices, workshops, ministries, markets. Hours of working daylight, every day, across an entire nation, go into a session that produces nothing. A Yemeni who plants coffee is not only feeding his own family. He is funding a state. Wages, exports, customs revenue, a real economy that a real government could tax and spend on schools and hospitals. A Yemeni who plants khat is funding an afternoon. And a militia that lives off checkpoint levies on the khat trucks has no reason on earth to want that changed. Coffee is only the beginning of what Yemen actually has. There is oil and gas in Marib, Shabwa and Hadhramaut. There are minerals barely touched. There is one of the longest and richest coastlines in the Arabian Peninsula, with fisheries that could feed the country and export the surplus. And there is the position itself. Yemen sits on the throat of one of the most valuable waterways on the planet. Handled properly that is a permanent revenue stream, the kind of geography Singapore turned into a fortune. Coffee mountains, fish, gas, minerals, and a strait the whole world has to sail through. Plus 35 million people who would rather be working than queuing. So why is Yemen the poorest country in the region? It is not the land. It is what sits on top of the land. And if you want that in a single image, take the port. Mocha, the harbour that gave coffee its name, was captured by the Houthis this month. It is now a military position on the Red Sea, used to threaten the shipping passing through Bab al-Mandeb. That is modern Yemen in one place name. A harbour that once exported the world's most desired commodity now exports risk. So let me strip all of it down to what is specific to them. Not the war. Them. Your salary has not arrived in years, but the checkpoint still charges you every time you pass. Your wife cannot travel to a hospital in the next governorate without a male guardian and a signature. Your daughter can be married at any age, because there is no minimum age at all. Your son is being recruited at school, and the summer camp is part of it. Your sister cannot rent a room, because she turned up without a man. The nurse at your hospital has not been paid in over a year. The aid worker who came to count how hungry you are is in a cell. Some of them have been there since 2021. The journalist who tried to write about any of it is in the cell next door. The last Jew in Yemen is in prison too, despite a court order to release him. The field behind your house grows a leaf you will chew this afternoon instead of a crop you could have sold abroad. The mine in the road was laid by the people who govern you. And when you fled the shelling to a camp, they shelled the camp. Not one of those is a consequence of war in general. Every single one is a policy decision, taken by a named group of men, and enforced deliberately. And none of it is happening in the parts of Yemen the Houthis do not hold. There is no reform that fixes any of this while they are still there. No aid package, no donor conference, no clever humanitarian access arrangement. You cannot feed a country whose rulers imprison the people counting the hungry. You cannot rebuild an economy taxed by a militia that pays nobody. You cannot educate children in schools converted into recruiting stations. And you certainly cannot replant a coffee industry for a movement that profits from the leaf that replaced it. The Houthis did not inherit a poor Yemen. They are manufacturing one, deliberately, every single day, because a population that is hungry, uneducated, unpaid and frightened is far easier to rule than one that is not. Yemen gave the world its first cup of coffee. Today it cannot feed its own children. That is not fate, and it is not poverty, and it is not bad luck. It is a choice, made by specific men in Sana'a, and it will go on being made until somebody stops them. Thank you, @alsharabi31. You were right. This needed writing.

"The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's 🇸🇦 engagement with @UNAOC 🇺🇳 is grounded in the conviction that dialogue, coexistence & respect for religious & cultural diversity are essential foundations for peace and stability." - H.E. @AdelAlJubeir, Minister of State for Foreign Affairs .

المستحيل !!!؟ كان أن نجتمع في دمشق والمعجزة !!!؟ هي أننا اجتمعنا هنا #سقف_الممكن_مذهل

Very concerned to hear about the attack on the Swedish-Israel Friendship Association (VSI) event at the Göteborg Book Fair. Relieved that nobody got hurt. This attack is not only an attempt to delegitimize Israel and the friends of Israel, it is an attack on free speech and open discourse.

Iran's delegation came to New York to threaten the world. They're leaving by minibus. 🚐 #UNGA #Iran