Al Qaeda bombings, drive-by shootings, and penalty kicks?

SANAA, Yemen International sporting events can be a great way for a country to rehabilitate its image. For two weeks in 2008, for instance, the world focused not on China’s treatment of Tibet or economic policies, but on its stunning Olympic facilities and the spirit of apolitical international competition. This summer, South Africa used the ...

By , a journalist and author of Don’t Be Afraid of the Bullets: An Accidental War Correspondent in Yemen.
AFP/Getty Images
AFP/Getty Images
AFP/Getty Images

SANAA, Yemen International sporting events can be a great way for a country to rehabilitate its image. For two weeks in 2008, for instance, the world focused not on China’s treatment of Tibet or economic policies, but on its stunning Olympic facilities and the spirit of apolitical international competition. This summer, South Africa used the World Cup to put forward an image of an emerging “rainbow nation” unencumbered by racial tension or poverty. But compared with Yemen, which plans to host the Middle East’s largest soccer tournament later this November, those countries had it easy.

The international media generally only focuses on Yemen when it emerges as the source of an international terrorist plot, as it did in October after a failed attempt to send explosives in packages to the United States was traced back to the unstable Middle Eastern country and after the failed underwear bomber plot of last Christmas. But even when the world is not watching, shootouts at police checkpoints, attacks on oil pipelines, and assassinations of government officials are regular occurrences in Yemen’s southeastern region, where the central government’s control runs thin.

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Laura Kasinof is a journalist and author of Don’t Be Afraid of the Bullets: An Accidental War Correspondent in Yemen. She was the New York Times correspondent in Yemen during the Arab Spring. Twitter: @kasinof

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