Yemen is a country being pulled apart and battered by several different conflicts, internal and external, some a product of its history and some the imposition of global trends. It’s a proxy war for some nations and a Petrie dish for others. It’s a country where modern violence has become, to the outside world, quotidian and expected, and where it takes a particularly horrific, or at least focused, attack to garner headlines.
Such an attack happened last Friday, in the Southern port town of Aden- once the capital of the secular and socialist south, later the hotbed for a new democratic Yemen, and now the bloody plaything for competing millenarians and indifferent governments. On Friday, at a nursing home, 16 nuns, volunteers from around the globe, were bound and executed with shots to the head.
(This was extreme enough to warrant an immediate disavowal and denunciation by Ansar al-Sharia, who said it wasn’t the way they fight. And it is true- since reforming in the last decade as AQAP, they have avoided the kind of blood-thirsty acts that alienate a local population.)
The global reaction to such a shocking crime was at once justified, but also indicative of how societies come apart at the edge of attention, until all it happens all at once.
Shooting Irrelevance 