The Lawfare Podcast: Gregory Johnsen Answers "What is a Houthi?"

The Lawfare Podcast

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4.7 • 6.4K Ratings

🗓️ 25 September 2015

⏱️ 41 minutes

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Summary

On this week’s Lawfare Podcast, Gregory Johnsen outlines the state-of-play currently in Yemen. Johnsen, who is a writer-at-large for Buzzfeed News, a doctoral candidate at Princeton University, and an all-things-Yemen-expert, walks Ben through the byzantine power politics in Sanaa that led to the conflict now engulfing Yemen and he explains why the war shouldn’t be viewed as just another Sunni-Shia fight. Yet while he clarifies that the issues that sparked the war are much more local, he warns that the longer the conflict goes on, the more likely it is to expand. Johnsen also outlines the events that led to the Saudi intervention and just whether or not Yemen, which he says is really twelve separate countries now, can ever be put back together again.

Johnsen is the author of The Last Refuge: Yemen, al Qaeda, and America’s War in Arabia. Follow him on Twitter for the latest updates on Yemen.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	The following podcast contains advertising to access an ad-free version of the LawFair
0:07.2	podcast become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash LawFair.
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0:18.2	Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, LawFair
0:25.6	no bull and the aftermath.
0:29.6	For all kind in the Arabian Peninsula, there seem to be rules of engagement that the
0:36.0	organization had in Yemen.
0:38.6	That is, they tried not to attack sort of Muslim civilians and when they did, there was
0:44.0	a very sort of egregious breach of this in December of 2013.
0:49.6	They were quick to apologize.
0:51.6	What's happening now is that ISIS is carrying out these bombings that are taking place in
0:57.6	Sana'a against what it calls Shia Ma'a.
1:00.6	And so what we're seeing in Yemen and it's very sad to witness that we are witnessing
1:05.4	it is I think a real radicalization of the religious landscape that is what happened in
1:11.7	the law.
1:12.7	This Shia Sunni war is now starting to happen in Yemen.
1:17.0	I think we're seeing the very beginnings of that.
1:19.6	And once that genie is let out of the bottle, as we've seen in Iraq, it's very, very difficult
1:25.8	to put it back in.
1:27.3	And in fact, I don't think anyone in Yemen right now is in a position to sort of hold the
1:32.2	country or bring the country back together.
1:34.7	I'm Cody Poplin and this is the LawFair podcast September 26th, 2015.
	...

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