Ongoing war silences Yemeni indie radio station
Tayramana FM, a product of the Arab Spring, is on indefinite hold, waiting for an end to the current war so it can re-establish the community it had built.
On the morning of Nov. 2, 2013, with hours to go before the official launch of Tayramana FM, a 13-meter (43-foot) pipe was loosely tied to ropes and hoisted up the side of a six-story building. On the roof, a crew welded the pipe to a plate on the roof and screwed in four antennas on top. It was the last step before kicking off Yemen’s first independent English-language radio station.
“There are no skyscrapers in Sanaa,” Mohamed al-Iriani, Tayramana FM's founder, told Al-Monitor. “So I found a tall building in the center of the city, I calculated the location’s transmitting reach and I just did it myself.” Hours later, Iriani anxiously tuned in to 101.1 FM and heard his station for the first time, capping off years of persistence.
