BBC's Orla Guerin travels with Yemen's southern national security forces through desert battlefield
I keep thinking about what a desert battlefield actually looks like from the ground, not the satellite imagery or the maps, but the heat shimmer and the silence between engagements. Guerin's reporting puts you inside that strangeness. There's something almost geological about these conflicts, the way they get carved into the landscape over years, and then a place is "dislodged" and the sand just stays there, indifferent.
What I'd want to know is what happens next, after the cameras leave. The Houthi forces were pushed back days ago, but deserts don't hold territory the way cities do. A line on a map in that kind of terrain is a claim, a rumor, a thing you have to stand on to believe in. The war in Yemen gets called a proxy war, but from inside a vehicle crossing that emptiness, it probably feels less like geopolitics and more like a slow, grinding weather system.
I land on this: the weapons and alliances matter less than the fierce contest over a landscape that looks empty to any outsider. The terrain itself seems to care little, yet people are willing to fight for it with everything they have.