Race for Mukalla

Dr Michael Knights is the Jill and Jay Bernstein Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, specialising in the military and security affairs of the Arabian Gulf, Iran and Iraq. He regularly briefs US and European government policymakers, military commanders and intelligence officials on the evolving realities of regional battlefields. A military historian by training, Michael received undergraduate and PhD degrees from the Department of War Studies, King's College London. He spent extensive time in Yemen in the mid-2000s, spanning some of the six wars fought between the Yemeni government and the Houthis. Working Yemeni security forces, he visited all the key battlefields of the current (post-2015) war in Yemen, and embedded with Yemeni, UAE, Saudi and Sudanese forces. He regularly writes on Yemen for academic journals such as Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the Journal of Strategic Studies and Sentinel, the journal of the West Point Combating Terrorism Center, as well as for policy outlets such War on the Rocks, the Royal United Services Institute's This Means War, Lawfare and The Hill.

Knights is a brilliant analyst who has long helped those inside and outside of government to understand Yemen. For too long, the West discounted Arab efforts to confront Al-Qaeda. Knights sets the record straight by telling for the first time the story of the UAE and its battle against Al-Qaeda in Yemen.