Mokhtar continued to go into tribal areas, hours or days from Sana’a, and every time he packed his dagger, and a SIG Sauer pistol. His driver had a semiautomatic rifle. When he was in more troubled or unknown districts, he brought along another man who carried an AK-47 and a grenade. None of this was unusual. There were twenty-five million people in Yemen and at least thirteen million guns—after the United States, it was, per capita the world’s most armed nation. Men wore AKs walking down the street. They brought them to weddings.
