From the New York Times Magazine
At night, Samie took me up to the roof of the house, where there was a view down onto the city. We could not see the protest square, but we could hear grenades and heavy guns being fired down into it from a military base on a hill. “They shoot into the square every night,” Samie said. “It lasts until 2 a.m.” In the other direction, toward the airport, tracers arced across the night sky, as young opposition fighters shot at another military base. I looked down into the trees around the house and saw the guards, clutching their rifles and standing alert by their posts. I asked Samie about several mysterious killings that were reported that day in Taiz, the latest in a series of assassinations. “The first one was an officer killing one of the youth at a checkpoint,” he said. “The officer was then tracked down and killed.” I did not ask him how he knew. The next day, Samie told me about an ambush on a government convoy that had destroyed a large truckload of weapons. When I asked how the attackers had taken the truck out, he said, without hesitation, “It was a rocket-propelled grenade,” and I thought I caught a hint of pride in his voice. “Would you like to see one?” he asked, then went downstairs and came back with the weapon. He then showed me an antitank missile. He was working hard to lure sympathizers inside the military to defect, he told me. The next day, one of his guards drove me past a weapons market at the airport, where I saw row after row of rifles, ammunition boxes and grenades. “The prices are going up,” the guard said. “People did not have weapons before in Taiz. Now everyone is buying them. War is coming.”
