Ned Whalley

1 month ago | sanaacenter.org | Ned Whalley

“This [is] not about the Houthis.” US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, March 2025.[1]Recently leaked US attack plans, shared inadvertently with Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, were startling not just in their disclosure but in what they disclosed – that the Trump administration may have no intermediate or long-term plan for how to deal with the Houthis.

2 months ago | sanaacenter.org | Casey Coombs |Ned Whalley

On January 23, the Houthi group (Ansar Allah) detained seven UN staff members working in Sana’a.[1] In response, the UN halted the movement of all staff working in Houthi-controlled territories[2] as Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for the UN workers’ immediate release.[3] But the incident is just the latest in a string of disappearances and detentions of UN, NGO, and civil society staff in Yemen, who are often held without charge and denied contact with lawyers or family...

Jul 23, 2024 | sanaacenter.org | Ned Whalley

Threatened with new attacks, Saudi Arabia has forced the Yemeni government to abandon efforts to cut off the Houthi group (Ansar Allah) from the international banking system. Financial sanctions enacted by the government-aligned Central Bank of Yemen in Aden (CBY-Aden) were perhaps the government’s last card in its efforts to negotiate economic relief or affect the power imbalance ahead of presumptive peace talks.

Mar 10, 2023 | sanaacenter.org | Ned Whalley

Helen Lackner's Yemen: Poverty and Conflict // Photo from RoutledgeYemen: Poverty and Conflict, by Helen Lackner, Routledge, 2022, 184 pp., $48.95 (paperback), ISBN 9780367180508, $170.00 (hardcover), ISBN 9780367180492. An explosion of writing accompanies a war. Conflict journalism typically focuses on immediate outcomes of the fighting, humanitarian publications highlight the terrible human cost, and political and diplomatic observers proffer opinions on various strategic implications.