When Yemen’s former strongman Ali Abdullah Saleh was still alive and in charge in 2010, local authorities in the capital, Sanaa, organized a pageant of sorts to celebrate national unity, which was already frayed at the time.
It is memorable if only because it was so bizarre.
Children dressed up as villains representing various threats facing the country. Wearing black cloaks and horror-movie masks, they crept on stage to steal the Yemeni flag.… until kids playing Yemeni soldiers arrived to seize it back.
Just four years later, one of the threats portrayed then — a clan-based Shia rebel group little observed by the
