Scenes of the Taliban takeover of Kabul in August brought back memories from 2015, when Al Qaeda occupied my own city of Mukalla, in Yemen, for over a year. At the time, Yemen’s multifaceted war overshadowed the tragedy. When I look for news from that period, I find only snippets from local media outlets that dared to report despite the repercussions. The international press was almost absent.
Mukalla is a coastal city of half a million inhabitants. It overlooks the sea and is the capital of Yemen’s Hadramawt province, the largest in the country and one of the most important sources of petrol, agriculture and fish.
In 2015, I was a high-school student when I decided, along with a group of other girls from my school, to produce our first school play in English. It was about the Arab revolutions. There were no cultural events in the city at the time, especially for girls. I dreamt of having a theater at school and I was about to fulfill my dream when the nightmare began.
