Yemeni Updates

First, a hat tip to Larry Marczak, the regular commenter who posts as LJ Marczak and who shared an apartment with me in Cairo in the CASA program back in 1972, when dinosaurs still roamed the earth and Nixon was President, and whom I hadn't seen until he retired to this area a year or so ago. He sends me links that I don't always find myself: he seems to pore over the Arabian peninsula stuff, having spent many of his intervening years in banking in the Gulf. I find most of this stuff myself, but tips from readers are always welcome.

Anyway, a report that Yemen had foiled an attack on the US Embassy in Sana‘a' by arresting some men with weapons and hand grenades has been called into question by this story saying they weren't intending to target the embassy but were just exercising their traditional right to bear arms.

Now, I'm well aware that the traditional jambiyya or khanjar type dagger has been replaced in practice with the fully automatic AK-47 as Yemen has entered the modern age, and men don't leave home without one, but I'm still a little vague on the utility of hand grenades walking through the middle of the national capital. Of course, the fact that these guys came from the Sa‘da region — heart of the Houthi rebellion — added a little zest to the original narrative, but perhaps once their tribal bona fides were checked out, it was decided they were just your average bunch of grenade-toting guys strolling near the embassy.

I can't argue too much since I live in Virginia, where the rest of the state keeps making sure we Northern Virginians understand the whole right to bear arms thing by making it illegal for local jurisdictions to do anything outrageous like ban open carry in restaurants or anything like that. I've been around here long enough to remember back in the late 60s or early 70s, I think it was, when the Virginia General Assembly finally decided to ban private ownership of anti-tank rockets. This infringement of the right to defend your home against hostile tank attacks was prompted by an incident in which a fellow gassing up at an Arlington gas station had either a WWII bazooka or an RPG (I forget the specifics) fall out of his pickup, launch a rocket, and blow the gas station to bits. So I'm sure there's some reasonable explanation for why Yemenis want to carry hand grenades in downtown San‘a'.

Also on Yemen: an update on the northern battles, and (in Arabic) a Saudi report quoting President Salih (who isn't normally that popular in the Saudi press) on Iranian support for the Houthis.