Dressed in flip-flops and sarongs, their Kalashnikovs dangling from sinewy shoulders, a group of Yemeni fighters gathered under a half-ruined archway that had once marked the entrance to the port of Haita.
The sun was setting over the Red Sea, and their cheeks bulged with their evening wad of green khat leaves. No one strayed far from the old dirt road down to the shore.
“There are so many mines here,” said Fahmi Haydara, 33, a lean fighter with a red-check headscarf. “There’s a rocket buried over there, too. Come and look.”
In the drought-cracked savannah of Yemen’s western coast, The Sunday Times embedded last week with the Yemeni fighters’ allies — troops from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) whose role in the conflict gripping