By JORDAN LESSER-ROY
In Yemen’s civil war, the governorate of Marib and its youth activists challenge the idea that war must mean total destruction.
In March 2015, Sadam Al-Adwar boarded a plane from Pakistan to return to his native Yemen. A fresh university graduate, Sadam planned to stay with his family in Marib for only a year or two before continuing his education abroad.
More than five years later, Sadam and Marib are irrevocably changed. Yemen’s civil war has been marked by intense violence and unprecedented levels of humanitarian need. To wish for peace in Yemen is perhaps a folly, the conflict too deep and entrenched to merit any happy ending. The glimmers of hope and progress evident in Marib and the trajectory of one of its native sons suggest that all the loss and destruction in Yemen have not fully extinguished hope.
The Computer Scientist with a Passion for Human Rights
I most recently spoke with my old colleague Sadam on November 9, a shaky Zoom signal coming from his Cairo hotel room. He was in Egypt to meet with colleagues, one of the few places he could travel with his Yemeni passport.
At 29, Sadam already has a long history of community engagement and human rights work. In 2007 he founded the first youth-led community service organization in Marib, and has been steadily working in the rights space ever since—save the four years he spent in Pakistan studying for a degree in computer science. When I asked him about the seemingly incongruous degree choice, he explained “in the last year of my high school, the choice was to go to Syria to study medicine and I was not interested. The second option was to go to Malaysia to study engineering…But I got a laptop and so I decided to go to Pakistan to study computer science.”
Once in Pakistan, Sadam considered switching to studying social work, but yielded to his father’s insistence that computer science would give him more options after graduation. Ever the good sport, Sadam took his father’s advice in stride, knowing he could return to his work in human rights upon his return to Yemen.
Marib: Underdeveloped and Over-Gunned
Sadam’s childhood in Marib was marked by contradictions. The governorate of Marib was one of the richest in Yemen in terms of natural resources, and supplied oil and energy to the rest of the country. Yet despite this apparent wealth, Marib remained poor and underdeveloped.
A landlocked, central governorate, Marib was the first place where oil was discovered in Yemen during the 1980s. Until the war, however, Marib saw none of the revenues from its oil production. For a time Marib relied on money drawn in by tourism to heritage sights such as the Awam temple, but this stream of funds ultimately dried up as the Al-Qaeda threat increased.
“Pre-2015, Marib was considered the Axis of Evil,” Nadwa Al-Dawsari, a preeminent expert on Yemen with a focus on the tribal structures, told me. She noted the perceived significant presence of Al-Qaeda’s Gulf branch, AQAP, in the area. “Most INGOs wouldn’t work there because of the security risks,” she said,
Indeed, the security situation precluded Marib from the development projects and aid money that went to other regions of the country. This neglect exacerbated existing infrastructure and personnel shortages leading to underdevelopment and chronic resource supply issues throughout the late 20th century.
“There was only one high school for the whole governorate,” Sadam tells me. “Before the conflict, there was so much revenge between the tribes.”
Indeed, the informal tribal governance that arose in Marib to fill the void left by the central government often resulted in violence. “A tribal man could be killed in the market just by a man from another tribe,” Sadam says. He explained that the government supplied the tribes with weapons so that they might fight among themselves instead of realizing they had been deprived of essential resources.
As Sadam describes it, life in Marib “didn’t provide a lot of options.”
War-Time Boom
The Marib of Sadam’s childhood stands in stark contrast to the Marib of 2020. The city’s population has grown, by some estimates nearly tripling in size, and the economy is expanding quickly. IDPs from all over Yemen have flooded Marib city, one of the last safe havens from fighting between government forces, backed by Arab monarchies, and the Houthis. For now, the long simmering tensions among tribes have all but disappeared, a Pax Maribi spreading throughout the city and the governorate at large. Although the conflict has devastated much of Yemen and civilian life, Marib is in the midst of a war-time boom.
Over a Zoom call, Nadwa explains to me that the war has incentivized Marib’s tribes to lay to rest their mutual grievances and focus on de-escalation in order to ward off the omnipresent threat of the Houthis. Unlike other major cities such as the (former) capital Sana’a, Marib has managed to maintain freedom from Houthi control, despite repeated attacks. The relative safety created by the tribes’ protection has incentivized hundreds of thousands of IDPs to come to the city and seek a new life.
“Actually, the population move to the East [Marib and surrounding governorates] has been good,” Nadwa says. “Marib has the space and resources, but we need investments in local government and the economy for long term growth.” Thanks to the efforts of governor Sultan al-Aradah, some of the oil money has finally begun to make its way back to Marib. Perhaps development will finally come to the region.
“I Quit Working with Yemen Almost Every Day”
It is tempting to envision a future Yemen in which all governorates model themselves after Marib, but Nadwa wrinkles her nose over the computer screen when I ask about that possibility. So much of the success in Marib is circumstantial, she said, built on a temporary peace resulting from decentralization of power in the country and the move to local governance.
“Shabwa [Yemeni governorate] has potential,” she says, but then reminds me that the Emiratis are amassing more control in the governorate each month. She sees foreign intervention as inherently destabilizing and has little faith in a UN-brokered end to the conflict.
I ask Nadwa how she can continue to work towards peace and prosperity in Yemen. The threat from the Houthis grows stronger each day, even in Marib, and the humanitarian crisis continues to cause widespread suffering. Nadwa replies without missing a beat, “I quit working with Yemen almost every day.” But, like Sadam, she keeps coming back.
The Optimism Ambassador
I detect a sense of fragility in my conversations with Sadam, too. He fears a return to the Marib of his youth and the constant tribal fighting that prohibited any development or enrichment for the governorate and its population.
“Every day we lose friends, and two to three times per week we go to a funeral,” he says, referencing the toll of the conflict in areas just outside Marib’s borders. One breach of the tribal alliance keeping Marib safe, and his home could fall to the civil war.
Despite the precarious outlook, Sadam tells me he has garnered a nickname from his friends and colleagues.
“I am the optimism ambassador,” he tells me, a smile breaking out across his face after several minutes of a furrowed brow. He sees his role as an activist as one that centers around raising awareness of civilian rights in conflict, and documenting abuses by all parties to the conflict.
“We don’t want to lose these lives without justice,” he says, a somber tone in his usually chipper voice. For the Yemeni people, healing after so much brutality is a prerequisite for any future advancements.
Sadam’s unrelenting optimism is all the more remarkable in contrast to Nadwa’s exasperation, a feeling that many other Yemenis of her generation share. Sadam is one of a number of youth activists in Yemen working tirelessly to build a better future for their country. Nadwa describes this flurry of activity as the “silver lining” of the conflict.
“I feel hopeful when I talk to young people,” she says. “They are a generation of war and they are very strong and forward-looking with great ideas and activism.”
Sadam too feels that youth activists have an important role to play in lifting Yemen from its current position.
“We can do more as youth activists because of our passion and energy,” he says. “We need to build a better future, better than what we have already faced.”
Sadam’s passion for human rights work has led him to co-found his own NGO, Musaala. He strives to educate others to document human rights abuses and make communities aware of their rights.
An Uncertain Future
At the end of the call with Sadam, he expresses his appreciation for the time and space to air his anxieties and hopes for the future. Being the optimism ambassador can get a little tiring.
The war in Yemen is at a dangerous precipice: COVID-19 has swept through an already vulnerable population. The Trump administration is moving to designate the Houthis a terrorist group, which will effectively cut off the majority of Yemen’s population from vital Western aid. At the same time, the Houthis continue to assail Marib’s borders and the Gulf powers maintain their struggle for power within the country. There may come a time when the tenuous peace in Marib fails, and there may be a moment at which the wellspring of youth activism dries up.
For now, Sadam carries on: “I will not give up.”