When Mokhtar arrived in May of 2014, the Marxists were long gone, but intertribal warring in Yemen was again in full swing. Historically, Yemen, when not being invaded or colonized by outside powers, from the Ottomans to the British, was fighting itself. It wasn’t until 1990 that Yemen had become the Arabian Peninsula’s first multiparty parliamentary democracy. In 1993, elections were held, and in 1999, Field Marshal Ali Abdullah Saleh was elected president of the newly unified country. He was not popular for long, and the Arab Spring swept Yemen up in its dreams of a more democratic and
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