Taher is also the chair of the Health Professionals for Yemen (HPY-UK), head of the National Reconciliation Movement (NRM UK), lead of the online Yemen Public Health Praxis Project, and the lead of the Yemen in Conflict Project.

 He was a founder and leader of several local and national voluntary organisations, including the founder and chair of the Liverpool Arabic Centre, the founder, and chair of the Liverpool Arab Arts Festival, the chair of the Merseyside Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic (BAME) Consortium, the Chair of the National Yemeni Community Coordinating Council UK, a co-founder of Liverpool Friends of Yemen for Peace, and a co-founder of the Yemen Mobile Health Project. He was awarded his MBE in September 2007.

Faisal is a retired Yemeni since 2020. His professional life was as an Economist at the Stockholm County Council, Sweden.

He also worked as a district nurse in children and preventive health care in both Yemen and Sweden. In addition to that he has been working as clinic manager at one of Sweden’s largest Psychiatric Clinic.

Louise Hosking graduated from the University of Durham with a BA in Modern Arabic in the late 1970s and subsequently obtained an MA in Arts Policy and Management from Birkbeck College. She has had a long career working with organisations connected with the Arab and Muslim worlds and from 2006 until its closure in 2019 she was Executive Officer of the London Middle East Institute (LMEI) at SOAS, an institute established to support academic research on the Middle East and foster scholarly and public interest in the Middle East and North Africa region.

While at LMEI she worked closely with the British Yemeni Society, for example on the delivery of its academic conference ‘Yemen: Challenges for the Future’ in 2013 and the publication in 2014 of Why Yemen Matters, edited by Helen Lackner.

Louise lived and worked in Oman in the mid-1990s and was a Trustee of the British-Omani Society from 2013 to 2019.

Robert first visited Yemen in 1972 when, as a student of Arabic at Cambridge, he took a year out to teach English and learn spoken Arabic in the small mountain town of Hajjah. After finishing his BA, he started to work on a Ph.D. in the same area of northwest Yemen and secured a five-year contract as an assistant lecturer in Arabic and Islamic Studies.

Between terms he made extended visits to Yemen, traveling widely in the western and central highlands on foot, by donkey, or on a motorbike. In 1982, he was offered a position in the Foreign Office’s Research Department, advising on the Arab world. From 2012 until his retirement from the Foreign Office in 2014, he worked at the British Embassy in Sana’a.

The fruits of his thesis and subsequent research were published in his Gazetteer of Historical North-West Yemen. Robert served as Chair of the Society for a three-year term during 2015-18.

Robert deals with membership enquiries and applications.

Dr. Sarah Clowry is a Fellow at the Institute of Political Science, Tuebingen University. Her research explores international peacemaking in Yemen and Syria. She was awarded her PhD at the School of Government and International Affairs, Durham University, in 2021 where she was funded by an Economic and Social Research Council studentship.

Prior to her Ph.D., Sarah worked in the field of international affairs, spending two years based in Nablus, Palestine before returning to the UK to manage global grants programmes for the British Council.

She holds a First Class BA in Music from the University of Oxford and an MA with Distinction in International Studies from Durham University.

Award-winning BBC Special Correspondent Nawal Al-Maghafi has been reporting on the Middle East since 2012. Over the past six years, she has been one of the few journalists conducting firsthand reporting of the ongoing conflict in Yemen; travelling extensively throughout the country.

Her investigation into a 2015 attack on a Yemeni funeral — the deadliest of the conflict so far — provided key evidence in the case against weapons sales to Saudi Arabia by the US and UK.

Her most recent documentary, Iraq’s Secret Sex Trade, was nominated for two Emmys. The film investigates Shia clerics at some of Iraq’s holiest shrines, and Nawal reveals the exploitation of vulnerable girls and young women, tricked into ‘pleasure marriages’, a practice in which clerics make money from helping men who want sex with very young girls. Secret filming reveals a cleric conducting a ‘pleasure marriage’ with a girl he believed to be only 13.

She has also traveled across the Middle East to investigate how Mass Surveillance technology sold by BAE systems was being used by repressive Gulf states to monitor and stifle dissent by local human rights activists and recently returned from Yemen where she has been filming the impact Covid-19 has had on a country already battling the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.