Gulf States Archive

In October 2017, an unlikely pair of Saudi expatriates began exchanging messages on WhatsApp. Omar Abdulaziz was a dissident YouTuber in Canada in his 20s, well-known for his satirical videos that mocked the Saudi leadership. Jamal Khashoggi, 30 years older and more of a moderate, was a prominent Saudi journalist who had grown increasingly alarmed by the kingdom’s crackdown on dissent. Having gone into self-imposed exile in Washington in June 2017, Khashoggi used his newfound perch as a Washington Post columnist to criticize the worsening human rights situation under Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s young crown prince and de facto […]

After months of standoffs and halting negotiations, Yemen’s internationally recognized government signed a power-sharing agreement with southern separatists that, as the International Crisis Group put it, “has averted a war within Yemen’s civil war, at least for the time being.” The deal, brokered by Saudi Arabia and signed in Riyadh on Nov. 5, lays out the terms of a cessation of hostilities between President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi’s government and the separatist movement known as the Southern Transitional Council, or STC. Whether the agreement holds—let alone precipitates an end to Yemen’s devastating civil war and a new way forward for its […]