More than 1,200 people have died since Saudi Arabia and its allies launched a military operation in Yemen in March, but the country has become so hard to access that news organizations are finding it almost impossible to cover the conflict. At the same time, a lack of electricity and poorly developed internet infrastructure are hampering the citizen journalism and online activism that have offered a window into other recent conflicts.
Yemen’s political turmoil has gone underreported for years, but journalists say the current conflagration has made reporting on the country more difficult than at any other time in memory. There are vanishingly few foreign journalists in Yemen as a result of the violence on the ground, access restrictions, and wavering commitment on the part of international news organizations.
Yemeni journalists, meanwhile, face power outages for days at a time, the threat of food shortages, and the problem of finding sources in a polarized country where violence has hardened attitudes.
"Not only are journalists struggling to get into the country, but the whole country is actually under siege at the moment," said Iona Craig, a freelance journalist who was based in Yemen for more than four years until December 2014. Like other foreign reporters, she has been unable to reenter Yemen since the Saudi-led assault began.
"We’re talking about 26 million people here. It’s really difficult to get a feel for the impact of something like that when there aren’t journalists on the ground," she said. "Yemen has basically become an island."
Some Yemenis are trying to overcome the information blackout by making their voices heard on social media. But unlike in Syria, a relatively developed country before the civil war, or in Egypt during the 2011 revolution, Yemen’s poor infrastructure complicated their attempts. About 20 percent of Yemenis have internet access, less than in either Egypt or Syria.
The problem has become so acute that some Yemeni expatriates are using online media to address the dearth of on-the-ground reporting. The acclaimed Yemeni-Scottish filmmaker Sara Ishaq has been noted internationally for her role in highlighting the voices of Yemeni civilians. In an interview in Cairo, Ishaq said she was inspired in part by a phone call with her father in Sana’a in the early hours of March 26, the first night of Saudi airstrikes.
"I called my dad and he picked up and he said, ‘Who’s bombing us?’ And I said ‘Saudi Arabia.’ He didn’t have a clue what was going on." The power was out, leaving her family without light and information.
Ishaq recounted the phone call on Twitter, and the anecdote went viral. On social media more broadly, Yemenis have shared updates and fragments of life amid the accelerating chaos, when and where electricity permitted.
Exchanging information is one thing, but Ishaq said the use of social media to raise the overall profile of the Yemen crisis hadn’t become as widespread among Yemenis as she might have hoped. "I think the reason it didn’t catch on is because of the lack of electricity and slow internet, and people just being completely exhausted by it," she said.
At the moment, journalists have no reliable way into Yemen. The Saudi-dominated coalition has bombed the airport in Sanaa, leaving some journalists seeking other routes into the country. Some have attempted to broker passage on ships bringing aid to the country.
An enterprising journalist might try the Omani border, but then it would take more than 600 miles of dangerous driving to get to the cities clustered in the west of the country.
A crew from BBC television managed to enter the southern city of Aden briefly in April, but left soon thereafter, apparently due to security concerns. Other news organizations are covering the conflict from neighboring Saudi Arabia, or from Djibouti, Cairo, or Beirut.
"It’s deeper than the problem of there not being foreign journalists on the ground. It’s even deeper than issues with the Yemeni press," said Adam Baron, a journalist who was based in Yemen until 2014 and is now a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations in London. "It’s the simple fact that it’s literally almost impossible to get information in or out of that country because of the apocalyptic damage and strain to Yemen’s infrastructure."
"The narrative has come to be dominated by voices outside of the country," says Baron. "Yemenis are losing their agency in the discussion."
