SANAA, YEMEN—They walk through the Old City like visitors from the future. Sneakers shuffling along cobblestone laneways handcrafted centuries ago, emerging in and out of the shadows cast by towering gingerbread-like buildings. Even the mangy cats look up from garbage piles in the early morning dawn, startled by these creatures with backpacks and boards with wheels.

Only two from the crew came to skateboard today, Majd Aldouis and his friend Luqman Esmail. The other skaters are getting ready for school or sleeping, like typical teenagers who prefer the sun rises before they do.

Majd looks like a 16-year-old who could be dropped anywhere and probably adapt. He has a mess of curls framing his face, an easygoing nature and a smile that seems especially dazzling here, where so many have teeth stained from chewing the leafy stimulant khat.

He doesn’t use the drug — illegal in many countries but a cultural staple in Yemen, occupying more than half of the population for a couple hours each day. None of the Sanaa skaters chew khat, just one of the many things that make them unique.

“Skating’s my life actually. I love to skate,” says Majd. “(It’s) everything. . . . I just skate, go hang out, have fun.” The other skaters religiously recite the skateboarding creed: “It’s not a hobby, it’s a lifestyle.”

That lifestyle was upended for the skaters last year, as life was generally for this struggling Arab nation, the much poorer southern neighbour of Saudi Arabia.

The skateboarders who call themselves the Arabian Skaters all refer to the months of protests that claimed the lives of hundreds and deposed longtime autocrat Ali Abdullah Saleh as “The Situation.”

“The Situation? It was really hard,” says Majd, describing how his family would avoid rooms with windows. “We (sat) in the middle of the house because most of the houses, like, bullets came in.

“We were really scared. No electricity, really bad. But thank God, it’s better now.”

PHOTOS : The skaters of Sanaa

In many ways these skaters are just a bunch of bored teenagers with big ambitions, practising their sport in an exotic locale — a Middle Eastern version of the Jamaican bobsled team perhaps. They are not a harbinger of Yemen’s ability to evolve.

But Sanaa’s skaters offer a foil to perceptions of Yemen as the hapless terrorist-loving nation with UNESCO-protected architecture. More than just a stereotype, this simplification of a complicated country threatens to undermine its prospects for a better future.

Yemen is not backward in the way many assume. Tribal sheikhs are business tycoons. The former president had a taste for women and whisky but managed to keep Islamic fundamentalists onside. It is a land of contradictions where girls as young as 9 are forced into marriage, but it is also home to the outspoken Tawakul Karman, the first Arab woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. There is abject poverty and a mosque that cost millions to build. The KFC is always crowded. And Sanaa’s skaters define their lifestyle by the board, while in desert towns teens fight under Al Qaeda’s black flag.

THERE IS A TENUOUS calm in Sanaa. The fighting has stopped, there is a new president and spotty electricity. But has the country really changed from the three decades Saleh was in power?

The year-long protests that claimed the lives of nearly 2,000 gave Yemenis a voice and exposed the country’s sectarian and political fault lines — revealing to the world a regime stacked with the president’s relatives.

Driving the streets of the capital is not easy at the best of times.

But removing Saleh was just one of many steps toward change. Besides, the 70-year-old is still here, heading the opposition party known as the GPC, or General People’s Congress. His son and nephews hold key military and intelligence posts.

The most serious international concern now is Al Qaeda. The United States considers AQAP (Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) to be the greatest terrorist threat facing the West. The announcement this week that the CIA disrupted a sophisticated new airline bomb plot emphasized the fear. In southern Yemen, entire cities have reportedly been taken over by the group’s affiliate, Ansar al Sharia. They are fashioning themselves as a government where there is none.

Another problem is cultural. In this historic city, which Yemenis believe was founded by one of Noah’s sons after the floods, modernity is often resisted. Some fear losing Islamic values or tribal tradition; the rich fear losing their bank accounts, which were padded by the Saleh regime; while a people that embraces conspiracies fears foreign meddling, especially by Saudi Arabia or the United States.

Walk with the skateboarders and see the shock of something new. “They watch us and they just wonder what are they doing in the middle of the street. Why are they doing this?” says Luqman Esmail, who explains with a grin that his name is pronounced, “Look man, Ismail!”

Yemenis often ask them if jinn — the Arabic word for supernatural forces — keeps the board on their feet.

The skaters are like pretty much everyone else here, unsure of what’s next. Most of them figure their future is outside of Yemen, to study at least before returning. Some are just passing through, born in other Arab countries and brought by parents who are temporarily stationed here.

Together they have created their own street family to escape some of Yemen’s problems, ennui and other typically teenage woes.

Luqman gets a dreamy look explaining skateboarding. “It feels like you’re on top of a cliff, wind blowing,” he says.

“It’s like you’re standing and everything else is moving.”

THERE ARE no clearly defined social classes in Yemen, not in the typical sense. The middle class is tiny, the overwhelming majority is poor and a small elite is rich, very rich.

A better distinction is between the educated and uneducated, and the skaters are definitely part of the educated class. All speak near-perfect English and most have spent time outside of Yemen.

They called themselves the Arabian Skaters since about a quarter of the crew come from outside Yemen, like Luqman. He emigrated a year ago from the Tanzanian island of Zanzibar with his sister and aunt after his father died. His older brother had married a Yemeni woman and thought it was a good idea that his siblings learned Arabic and Islam. Luqman didn’t speak a word of Arabic when he arrived, which is why he gravitated toward Majd and the other English-speaking skaters.

A couple years ago, there were about 60 members of the Arabian Skaters. They created a Facebook page and had fans.

What does Yemen's capital look like after the revolution?

Then came “The Situation” and those with families elsewhere, or the means to leave Yemen, fled. Others just stopped skating and stayed inside because they had to — or their parents made them.

Now, on a good day, about 20 are skating again, taking over the streets of Old Sanaa, or the basketball court or the dry fountain in Al Sabeen Park, attracting curious crowds.

The group’s founder is 20-year-old Ryan Sanabani and he is both of the educated class and the elite; son of Faris Sanabani, a longtime secretary to Saleh and founder of the monthly English magazine Yemen Today.

Ryan’s parents divorced when he was young so his summers are spent with his mother in Spain. That’s where he discovered skateboarding and in 2005 he brought a board back with him — quite possibly Yemen’s first. After a year practising in his backyard, he hit the streets; every time he did, more joined. They enlisted traveling friends and parents to bring boards back from their travels until a local sports store started importing and selling some cheap brands.

“People thought it was the strangest thing,” said Ryan in a telephone interview from Michigan, where he now attends university. “After about a year, though, I started meeting guys who were interested.”

The crew also attracted the attention of the U.S. State Department’s cultural affairs office, which held a competition for them in 2010, giving away three high-end skateboards as prizes. Before the protests, Ryan had designed plans for a skate park and was hunting for sponsors.

Skateboarding in Yemen is novel but it’s not the first time the sport has taken a country by surprise. In Tunisia, a dozen skateboarders calling themselves the “Bedouins” took over the abandoned mansion — with its perfectly curved swimming pool — that once belonged to the nephew of toppled dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. A lanky Australian named Oliver Percovich started a non-profit club called “Skateistan” in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2007. Young girls now skate alongside the boys in a country where genders are typically segregated.

All the Sanaa skaters smile and drop their badass composure when asked if they want girls to join them. Of course , they all say.

But Yemen may not be ready for that, as it’s rare in the capital to see a woman who isn’t wearing the flowing black abaya and the face-covering niqab , let alone hanging with guys on a board.

“Yemeni people, they’re going to say, ‘Abaya?’ ” says Majd. “Skating, especially a girl, they’re gonna think the wrong thing.”

As it is, the skaters sometimes face criticism. Omar Hawat, one of the younger skaters at 15, says he has been stopped not just for skateboarding but because he is wearing jeans and a hoodie, instead of the traditional robe-like garment and jambiya, a ceremonial curved knife that many men wear.

“They find us skating and they tell us, ‘You’re not Yemeni,’ because we don’t wear the jambiya, we don’t chew khat. ‘You’re not Yemeni, so just go away.’ I didn’t even know that’s Yemen,” says the teenager, who grew up in the farming town of Amran, about 50 kilometres north of the capital.

Omar wanted to join his classmates at the protests but he was studying for exams and, for his family, education comes first. Well, second, after safety. After his father died three years ago, his mother became increasingly protective and was frightened of the demonstration camp, called Change Square, where government snipers had assassinated protesters.

“My mom was like, ‘You go, and (you) don’t return back.’ She’s always scared. Even right now, she might call,” he says as we sit on a warm afternoon in Sabeen Park. The phone doesn’t ring, but she does call me later that night to find out who her son has been meeting.

Many friends of the skaters were central to the protests — active on Facebook and Twitter. Yemen’s uprising wasn’t a social media revolution in the way it was in Tunisia and Egypt, but these were some of the kids who informed the world on what was going on. Ala’a Jarban was one of them. When the demonstrations began, Ala’a was concerned Yemen would get a bad reputation so the 21-year-old swept the streets after each protest. Clean the streets, clean the government — he hoped the metaphor wouldn’t be lost.

That was early February 2011, before the government forces and baltagiyah, the street thugs, began attacking civilians. That was before the army divided and the streets became a war zone.

“Some people helped us, strangers, some people were laughing at us, some were taking pictures, some were hugging us saying they were very proud of Yemeni youth,” Ala’a said when we met a year ago at the upscale coffee shop Mokha Bunn. He looked down as his phone rang. “May I take this?” he asked apologetically. “It’s CNN.”

Ala’a looks the same as he did then, still stylishly dressed, a smile and warm hug as a greeting. But the last year has changed him.

“The idea of the election was just nonsense to me,” he says of Hadi’s appointment as president in February, a preordained deal brokered by Gulf countries to stop the bloodshed and get Saleh out of power. “My mom voted. I took her there. She was the only one who voted from the family.” She has never cast a ballot before, he says, and “she wants that the first time she votes it’s to take him out.”

Ala’a had never seen anyone die until last year, when he saw dozens killed, both before his eyes and on television. On March 18, 2011, he was at the demonstration when snipers shot from rooftops following prayers. He ran to the field hospital inside Change Square to see if he could help.

“The most horrible moment was when I saw my friend come in. He was shot in the chest,” he says of 22-year-old Awadh al-Yafai, one of 52 killed that day. “We’ve been friends since high school. We used to play football together.”

Six months later, he saw another friend, this time on TV. He was cut in half by a rocket-propelled grenade. “The thing is, by the end of the year, I got used to it. I don’t think it’s healthy,” he says. “I say I need therapy . . . The whole population needs it.”

Majd, like the other skaters, didn’t go to the protests. He says he was scared after seeing images of the injured and dead. He just wanted to skate, hang out with his friends, go to school; not hide inside like he was forced to do most days. “They used to say the president wasn’t good,” says Majd. “Well, I don’t know about this stuff. I just want the best for Yemen. I just want it to be good.”

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TERRORISM DOMINATES headlines about Yemen. But the skateboarders' reaction is indicative of the Sanaa state of mind. "Tourism?" some ask, mishearing the question.

The dismal state of tourism, and the economy in general, is of greater concern than what is often called Western governments’ terrorism tunnel vision.

Which isn’t to suggest the threat isn’t real. AQAP is a sophisticated group, carefully organized to survive loss of its leadership and intent on striking the West. Reports said the recent plot involved a bomb that was a refined version of the so-called underwear bomb used in a failed attempt on a Detroit-bound flight on Christmas Day, 2009. The group is learning, evolving and growing. Those who aren’t fighting are sometimes held hostage in towns pummeled by U.S. strikes or forced to flee to Aden’s already overcrowded displacement camps.

But, as everything else in Yemen, it’s complicated. AQAP, along with Ansar al Sharia, has fashioned itself as a government — providing electricity, security, food — in neglected southern regions. Many suspect the group’s sudden popularity was because Saleh’s forces propped it up during the unrest — or, at very least, looked the other way. This is why Yemeni analysts warn that the U.S. administration’s use of “signature drones” (ones that target regions, not specific leaders) will backfire and allow AQAP a chance to exploit the inevitable deaths of civilians.

All of this is of serious concern. All of this is part of a problem that can’t be fixed with military might alone. All of this is still a world away from the skaters in Sanaa and so many in a country of 24 million.

“I think it’s really annoying that (people) relate terrorism to Yemen … it’s a really beautiful place and locals and citizens are not really related to that,” says Mohammed Yahya, the older brother of 16-year-old Faisal, one of the skaters.

We’re sipping green tea on cushions in the Old Sanaa home his family recently inherited and restored. Thunder rumbles, the electricity is out again.

The house, like the boys, is a mix of East and West. There is intricate crown moulding and ancient stained-glass windows in this room and a foosball table on the ground floor.

“I think the West is more aware of terrorism in our country than we are. Because Yemen’s a conservative place and really an Islamic state, people tend to think of it as a terrorist place,” he says, as Faisal nods.

Faisal’s family is Zaidi, a Shia sect of Islam popular in Yemen’s north. He is also Hashmi, which means a direct descendant of the Prophet Mohammed. Historically, Hashmis comprised Yemen’s ruling class, which is why many own homes in the Old City.

A northern Zaidi insurgency led by Houthi rebels (named after their first military commander) threatens Yemen’s future, too, as do secessionist rumblings in the south.

Saleh controlled both southern and northern movements while in power with brutal suppression, while deftly exploiting the threat of terrorism to keep the U.S. dollars flowing.

Due to his family’s Zaidi heritage, Faisal knows a bit about the Houthi rebellion and hopes that, in a Yemen post-Saleh, its leaders can find a voice in government. He also knows a bit about the outside world since his father was once an ambassador in Germany and Korea and he attended school briefly in Houston, Tex.

But he’s not a particularly political teenager and wonders why more people seem to ask about religion now, as Yemen tries to sort its future. Being Zaidi had never been a factor, people just didn’t talk about whether you were Sunni or Shia, a Hashmi Zaidi or not, he says. “It was kind of rude to ask.”

As for the demonstrations, “The Situation,” he says they didn’t surprise him.

“It was kind of obvious because the system was really corrupt,” he says. “You see poor people and how really poor they are . . . I only saw two homeless people the entire time I was in America.”

Like his brother and most teenagers in the city, he knows almost nothing about AQAP. Early one evening, when leaving Sabeen Park after skateboarding, Faisal asked me about the case of U.S.-born radical preacher Anwar al Awlaki.

Awlaki came from a large influential family based in southeastern Yemen but was a relative unknown here until the U.S. labelled him “Terrorist No. 1.” The 40-year-old was killed in a CIA-directed drone strike last year — sparking debate about the legality of assassinating an American citizen and the effectiveness of drones in fighting AQAP.

But the less-publicized case — the one that resonates among many youth here — was the death two weeks later of Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman. By all accounts, he had nothing to do with his father or terrorism, but had run away a month earlier to find his father. He was hundreds of kilometres away in the south when his father was killed in the north. It’s unclear whether Abdulrahman was targeted or mistakenly killed by an American strike.

“I knew Awlaki, his kid. He was such a nice guy,” says Faisal, explaining he hadn’t seen him in a couple years but that they used to ride a school bus together.

“He ran away you know. His family didn’t know,” he says as we walk in the twilight, past families packing up picnics and toys and heading for the parking lot. (Awlaki’s grandfather Nasser later confirmed the story, explaining in an interview how Abdulrahman took off early one morning, leaving a note for his mother begging forgiveness.)

“I didn’t care when his dad died, you know,” Faisal continues. “His dad was the head of Al Qaeda in Yemen they say . . . But we were so sad when Abdulrahman died.”

He falls quiet again as he walks with his skateboard, keeping his head down.

“I guess he deserved it though,” he says, looking up. “He messed up, right? Do you think he deserved it?”

CURIOUS LITTLE GIRLS , who walk tilted forward to counterbalance heaving knapsacks, giggle at the sight of skaters on the stairs. It's late afternoon and Old Sanaa takes on a reddish hue as the after-school kids mingle with the khat-chewing men, forming a crowd around the skaters.

Recent rains have turned the street below into a raging river. The Sailah was a natural wadi, a riverbed, which was converted into a proper road years ago thanks to U.S. funds. Most of the time it is crammed with yellow cabs and minibuses, drivers using their horns as often as their brakes. Rush hour on the Sailah is every hour, it seems.

But this is the rainy season, when the Sailah floods, usually taking a few drivers who think they have more time before the water level rises for a watery ride. “When it was so high once I even jumped in,” said Faisal a few days earlier. “It was so dirty. Actually I didn’t know it was that low. I dived and blood came out,” he scrunches his nose. “I was afraid . . . Sometimes you can see dead cats floating. They’d be all swollen.”

Normally watching the flooded Sailah is a favourite pastime, but when the skaters are around attention shifts.

Majd is determined. He hits the stairs over and over until he lands his jump. Soon after he does, his board breaks.

Luqman cracks his knee as he falls, the crowd groaning for him. Purple fabric pokes out of a hole in one of his shoes — a piece of his sister’s discarded jeans that he has ripped up to protect his foot from the board’s sandpaper surface. A couple of young guys kick a soccer ball back and forth, oblivious of the skaters.

Florin Fawadi, leader of the Arabian Skaters in Ryan’s absence, is at the top of the stairs of the small concrete park overlooking the Sailah, also determined to land on his board at the bottom. After about a half-dozen attempts, the crowd of more than 50 is laughing, jeering and cheering with every attempt. Young kids look on in adoration.

Florin has high hopes of one day being sponsored, or at the very least seeing that his friend Amr Nasser, probably the most-skilled skater, achieves international recognition.

He spends much of his free time trying to get money to build the skate park Ryan first proposed. MTM, Yemen’s largest mobile company, has recently expressed interest, he said. “When we build a skate park people are going to see Yemen is developing and there is support,” says Florin.

He made a YouTube video with Amr and others called Dawn of the Shred . But filming stopped when the protests started. “Rest of the video couldn’t be filmed because of the situation in Yemen. Let’s all pray for Yemen!!” reads the post.

At the very least, the outside world will see a different side of Yemen if the skaters do gain the international recognition they crave.

For now, they’ll continue to roll along, explaining to the curious what an “ollie” or “kick flip” is, or why a “360 pop” is a skill they learned, not some sort of magic.

Ask about the future and most of them just shrug. “Just fix it. I want everything to be better,” says Majd. “No fighting, no kidnapping, fix the streets.”

The sun drops, the crowds disperse and as the water in the Sailah slowly recedes, the skaters head home.

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