A few days after Saudi Arabia started bombing Yemen last month, a friend of mine from the port city of Aden began sending me distressing images. “The situation is appalling,” Mohamed said in an e-mail. “Everyone’s afraid of getting killed by air strikes ... This is more than we can get used to.”
The photographs were a mixture of high-quality stills from local news sites and blurred, amateur shots pulled from his friends’ Facebook pages. Some of the scenes were similar to those I saw when I lived in Yemen in 2012: cars snarled on a highway in a day-long queue for petrol; a teenage boy in army fatigues holding a Kalashnikov.