Worse than Syria

By Stephen A. Seche

Ambassador (ret.) Stephen A. Seche is the executive vice president of the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. He spent 35 years as a U.S. Foreign Service officer.  From 2011-13, Ambassador Seche served as deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs at the Department of State, with responsibility for U.S. relations with the GCC states and Yemen. He was U.S. Ambassador to Yemen from 2007-10.

Now in its eighth month, the conflict that Amnesty International has called Yemen’s “forgotten war” grinds on, overshadowed by a metastasizing terrorist threat emanating from Syria, and a seemingly endless wave of Middle East and African refugees sweeping into Europe.

But the international community ignores Yemen’s war at its own peril.  In the first place, it has spawned a humanitarian crisis of alarming proportions.  Following a visit to Yemen in August, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said, “Yemen after five months looks like Syria after five years.” A major reason is the relentless air campaign a coalition of Sunni Arab states led by Saudi Arabia began in March, which has pummeled Yemen’s already fragile infrastructure and traumatized its civilian population.  According to the United Nations, two million people in Yemen are now internally displaced and over 20 million—80 percent of its population—are in urgent need of humanitarian assistance.

“The Cipher Brief has become the most popular outlet for former intelligence officers; no media outlet is even a close second to The Cipher Brief in terms of the number of articles published by formers.” —Sept. 2018, Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 62

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