Yemen

The most fertile corner of Arabia, once called Arabia Felix, now the site of the world's worst humanitarian crisis. Ancient Yemen was rich on frankincense and myrrh and on control of the Red Sea route; the Sabaean Marib dam irrigated the region for a thousand years and its collapse is remembered in the Quran. The country split between a Zaydi Shia imamate in the northern highlands, which lasted a thousand years, and a south that Britain took at Aden in 1839 as a coaling station for India. The two became separate states, the north a republic after 1962 and the south the only Marxist state in the Arab world, and they unified in 1990 - then fought a civil war in 1994. Ali Abdullah Saleh ruled for thirty-three years and described governing Yemen as dancing on the heads of snakes. The Houthi movement took the capital in 2014, a Saudi-led coalition intervened in 2015, and the war has killed hundreds of thousands, most from hunger and disease. Sanaa's old city is a World Heritage site. Qat consumes much of the country's scarce water. The country has about thirty-five million people, the most populous on the Arabian peninsula after Saudi Arabia. Arabic is official. Socotra island, far offshore, has a third of its plant species found nowhere else. Shibam's mudbrick tower houses have been called the Manhattan of the desert. Yemen is the only republic on the peninsula. Coffee takes its European name from the port of Mocha, from which it was first shipped.

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