Monday Papers: or I speak to al-Ghad

The war in Sa’dah continues to escalate, and although I don’t have time for a full or comprehensive post on the war today one is in the works. In the meantime, al-Sharq al-Awsat and al-Quds al-Arabi both have lead stories on the fighting. (I can’t link to it here, but I strongly recommend the piece by Faysal Mukrim in the August 14 issue of al-Hayat on page 8, which I read on the flight home.)

Also al-Ghad today has the interview I did with Muhammad al-Ahmadi, a Yemeni journalist I greatly respect. Waq al-waq gets top billing. This was my first Arabic interview on the far side of the notebook and my speaking style is a bit of curious mix of the various places I have lived in the Middle East (although my Egyptian colloquial has largely been removed from my speech and memory) and a strange hodgepodge of registers that at times has me sounding more like an illiterate peasant than anything else. Still, thanks to Muhammad for taking the time to do the interview and for removing the majority of my grammatical goofs.

The other big news is the US senatorial delegation that arrived in Yemen yesterday.

There is also this story and see other figures of note like , well worth checking out, from Michelle Shepherd of the Toronto Star on Salim Hamdan. I owe both Michelle and Lucas Oleniuk a huge debt of gratitude for inviting me along to the airport to watch the return of Shaykh Muhammad al-Mu’ayyad last week, which allowed me to meet – in the loosest sense of the word – Shaykh ‘Abd al-Majid al-Zindani and see other figures of note like Shaykh Haza al-Maswari.