How did you get into international affairs?
I was born in a remote mountain village in Yemen in 1990, the same year communist South Yemen united with North Yemen to create one state. Until secondary school, I lived on the family farm with my parents – my father can read and write a bit, my mother not at all. After studying in the capital city, Sana’a, I won a scholarship to study in Los Angeles for the last year of high school. Being a farmer, tending sheep and keeping bees had been the only future I could imagine, then suddenly, I found myself in California.
Later, I received a scholarship to attend the American University of Beirut, and the Arab Spring happened during my time there. It was the most significant moment for my generation: the exclusivity of politics was at an end, and we could suddenly imagine more than one president in our lifetime. That year, I worked with the international press as a fixer, which set me on the path into international affairs. If it wasn’t for the Arab Spring, I most likely wouldn’t be in this job.
When I was 23, a few weeks after I graduated, I testified at a US Senate hearing. I was invited because I had helped break one of the first stories that proved US drone strikes had killed civilians in Yemen, and then six days before I was due to testify, American drones struck my own village. I gave an emotional testimony, and the next day the US strikes on Yemen were all over the media, in the Financial Times, the Guardian and the New York Times.
You worked as a mediator after Houthi rebels took over Sana’a in 2014 and triggered the civil war months later. How challenging was that?
I was someone everyone hated but everyone talked to, and I built a strong reputation around that. It was dangerous work: I wrote my own death statement at least five times before I went into meetings with militias and warlords, and I wasn’t sure if I would walk out again. I would give the statement to someone, and tell them to release it if I didn’t come back after an agreed period of time.
I carried on my mediation work until the Houthis put me on their state enemy list in 2024. They had invited me to Sana’a to negotiate an economic de-escalation, but I felt something was wrong. So, at the last minute, I decided not to go. Later, they broadcast a TV programme where they accused me of being a western spy. It is too dangerous for me to go back for now.
Has knowledge of Yemen improved in recent years?
Yemen remains one of the least understood countries in the region. In 2014, I set up a think tank there called the Sana’a Centre for Strategic Studies because I was frustrated with other people’s lack of knowledge about my country. When the war broke out in 2015, there were only a handful of international journalists in Sana’a. Between 2001 and 2008, the international conversation was about what Yemen meant to Al-Qaeda. Then it became about Yemen and Iran, and then Yemen and Saudi Arabia, but never a conversation about Yemen itself.