A Struggle for Peace in a Place Where Fighting Never Ends

Photos
A Place Called al-Jawf
U.S. advisers trying to bring democratic reforms to Yemen's tribal areas face tremendous challenges, including poverty, lack of schools, and decades-long tribal conflicts that have claimed thousands of lives.

This is what happened in Mymerra two weeks before when it was shelled and evacuated, and this is what Rabea wanted to show -- the effects of fighting on even one village and its residents.

So here was a man displaying the glass eye he got after a grenade explosion in 1985.

And here was a man showing a bullet hole in his upper left arm that he got in the 1990s.

And here was a man, a teacher, parting his hair to show where he was shot in the head in July, one of the first victims in this new round of fighting that began when someone chose the wrong spot on a blurry border to build a little house.

"Hamdan," he said when asked who shot him. He said he was in the back of a car that was sprayed by machine guns. Where did it happen? Outside the provincial capital of Al Jawf. It was raining, he said, and at first he thought he was hearing thunder. Then his right hand went limp. Then one of his eyes was closing. Then came blood. Then came a long drive back to Mymerra, which has one of the few functioning medical facilities in Al Jawf -- a small private hospital where for 200,000 Yemeni rials, which is equivalent to $1,036, which was all of the teacher's savings, a doctor dug into his head and saved his life.

This happened on July 25.

Eight days later, a Hamdan sheik named Abdullah Hassan al-Iraqi was walking along a street in Sanaa when he was shot in the back of the head. A month after that, Mymerra was evacuated, and Rabea was diving into a ditch and turning into a smoker.

And now, because of an agreement that Hamdan would apologize to Rabea by giving him 44 Kalashnikovs, the people of Mymerra were back, resuming what life is like for them when there's peace.

Men, most of whom don't work, were standing around in clusters. Women were returning on donkeys from the morning's search for water. Children were roaming wherever. The school had been closed for so long that a chalk outline of a child's hand on a classroom wall was fading. The public health clinic remained closed as well. And Rabea was in the courtyard of his house, surrounded by men waiting to see if he would invite them inside for a free lunch, which they knew he would do because such are the obligations of a sheik.

One was the teacher, who said, "I don't have a great life, so I don't feel bad about being shot. You either live or die."

Another was a man who had just finished praying at a mosque. "I asked God to destroy America," he said of his prayer.

The next day, Rabea headed toward the front line of the war, and however sad or unsettling or surreal Al Jawf seemed the day before only increased in intensity.