Before unification under Ali Abdullah Saleh in 1990, Yemen’s south was for decades a Marxist-Leninist republic, while the north was ruled by a Zaydi Shi’a imamate – the sect from which the ...

For its part, northern Yemen’s imamate gained de facto independence after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the revolution in Turkey.

For more than a century, Yemen’s Zaydi clans have been at war with local warlords, neighbouring states, and great powers, seeking an independent state along the Red Sea. Now, they’re showing their ...

First published at MERIP. Until it fired missiles and drones against Israel in October 2023, the Yemeni Houthi movement, officially known as Ansar Allah, remained largely unknown in the Global North.

Yemen has faced civil wars for decades, but the current conflict has its origins in the Arab Spring of 2011. Pro-democracy protesters took to the streets in a bid to force the president, Ali ...

Zaydis make up around 35 percent of Yemen’s population and Sunnis account for some 65 percent. A Zaydi imamate ruled Yemen for a millennium before being overthrown in 1962 by army officers who ...

Last week, after eight years of self-imposed nonentity as a British private, T. E. Lawrence returned to Arabia as a British plenipotentiary and arrived at San’a, the Capital of the Imamate of Yemen.

Much of the latest bloodletting results from the aging Imam’s efforts to make sure that his favorite son, Seif el Islam el Badr, gets the Imamate when the old man dies. Crown Prince Badr is a ...

He meant all of Yemen, though the Houthis control less than half of Yemen’s territory. He went on to boast that the Houthis have outpaced their longtime patron in the so-called Axis of Resistance.

If you look back into history, even prior to the republican movements in Yemen, the royalist imamate that was running the northern part of Yemen walked out of the UN meeting in 1947 where the decision ...