A Hill in Sanaa

Despite appearances I have not forgotten about Waq al-waq, and while I’ll spare you the usual and tired excuses for my lack of posts I will direct you to the National, which today ran an op-ed I wrote on the US Embassy attack last week in Sanaa.
Here is the first paragraph:
Forty years ago the US embassy in Yemen was a tower house in the heart of downtown Sanaa. Mud-brick and beige, it blended into the neighbourhood, which in 1972 also included the Soviet Embassy. At the time Sanaa was little more than a village; 50,000 people inside walls that had stood for centuries. The revolution that had begun a decade earlier was finally sputtering to an end after years of brutal fighting, and most Yemenis alive today had yet to be born.