Hadhramaut, Yemen
When flying over central Yemen’s Hadhramaut region, it appears to be a vast, barren plateau of sandstone. But upon closer inspection, deep narrow canyons are cut through the rock, carved by millions of years of water flow, as the annual summer floods move through the vast desert, creating life in the shadows.
At the bottom of the canyons lies green palm-fringed oases, and villages constructed from the same mudbricks used for centuries line the sides of these wadis. Inside, abaya-clad women with pointy straw hats graze their goats along the ancient riverbeds.
But bucolic life in these valleys is not as simple as it may appear; the region is deeply conservative and Sunni, which made it a perfect hiding ground for Al Qaeda’s branch in the Arabian Peninsula— AQAP. The organization continues to have a strong, yet shadowy influence over these valleys, which also form the ancestral home of the Bin Laden family.
