The Tightening Dark

by Sam Farran

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  THE GENERAL, OMNIPRESENT THREAT of al-Qaeda, of lawlessness, kidnappings, and bombings, certainly contributed to the gradual retraction of the Western diplomatic presence. But also, at this time, a few specific events began to weaken the security situation.

  Just before the National Dialogue Conference kicked off, one of the main heads of the Zaydi clans, Yahya al-Mutawakkil, was assassinated. Then, during the conference itself, another big Zaydi clan leader, Muhammad Sharafuddin, was assassinated as well. Those murders eroded much of the main Zaydi power dynamic and unbalanced the more conservative and cautious wing of the Zaydi elites. We heard rumors that Saleh’s guys were behind it, not wanting a return of traditional Zaydi influence. We also heard rumors that Islah ordered the assassinations, as the Zaydi-Sunni tensions had begun to flare up. Most intriguingly, we heard some speculation that the Houthis themselves got rid of Sharafuddin as he was one of the few strategically minded leaders with enough gravitas to have overcome their movement. He’d been starting to eclipse Abd el-Malik al-Houthi, the head of the Houthi movement, as a figurehead for Zaydi political ambitions, and that couldn’t be tolerated.

  Another event that really shocked Sana’a was the suicide bombing in May 2012 during the graduation parade for the Yemeni military academy. The parade field was located right on the periphery of Hadda, very near diplomatic quarters, and the bombing occurred in a most brazen and destructive manner, with the bomber walking into the middle of the rigid parade formation and detonating, killing more than seventy young Yemeni cadets just as they were about to cross the parade stand to officially begin their careers as officers. Traces of this bombing could be seen for years afterward, not just in the blast marks and blood on the parade field but also in posters of the dead shellacked to the wall of the parade ground, right on the main street between Saleh’s new mosque and the Hadda neighborhood.

  While this bombing was the bloodiest event, another incident likely contributed even more to the withdrawal of the Western diplomatic community behind the barricades of their embassies. On September 13, 2012, two days after the 9/11 anniversary, the Houthis staged a protest in front of the US Embassy. This protest swelled in size, and the crowd spilled up the street toward the newly barbed-wire-surrounded Sheraton, which had been rented in its entirety to house American embassy personnel. I was at the embassy at this time, participating in one of those monthly OSAC meetings.

  Suddenly the protest, which had begun peacefully enough, took a weird turn as all the Yemeni military personnel posted around the embassy abandoned their positions. (Later information I obtained indicated that an Islah-affiliated leader in the chain of command of these troops ordered them to stand down so that the peaceful protest might get out of hand and tarnish the Houthi’s reputation with the United States.) Still, the incident wouldn’t have gotten too much worse had the first few protestors who approached the US Embassy not shaken the gates, which were loose, basically unhinged, and collapsed inward to give the whole crowd access to the interior embassy grounds.

  To the credit of the embassy security staff, all employees managed to get inside secure buildings ahead of the crowd. From there, looking through thick glass windows, the embassy staff watched a few hours of mayhem: cars with their keys left in the ignition being driven like derby mobiles around the manicured embassy grounds, riotous dancing and chanting, smashing and looting of anything moveable, a few halfhearted attempts to break through the windows of the secured buildings. The embassy’s chief of security ordered the Marines on the roof of one of the buildings to be prepared to fire a warning shot or two, but they knew the Houthi protestors were unarmed, and not wanting things to escalate, they held back.

  The protestors’ success on the embassy grounds carried through the crowd, and a few protestors on the opposite end of the crowd began to scale the even-less formidable walls of the Sheraton compound. There another group of the Marines on the Sheraton roof were not only given the order to fire a warning shot but also authorized to use deadly force should anyone get on top of the wall. When the first protestors crested the wall, the Marines received a nod of agreement from their leader and fired several bursts from an M249 machine gun, as well as a handful of M4 rounds. I read in a local newspaper the next day that a nineteen-year-old Yemeni was killed. Not much was made of it afterward, as I suspect the families were paid off by the Yemeni forces, a traditional way of settling a feud, called diah, or blood money.

  The Islahi sect of the military scored a victory then, a political victory, simply by stepping away. Until that moment the US Embassy had been treating the various factions in Yemen pretty much equally, despite the official Houthi slogan “Death to America, Death to Israel, a Curse on the Jews,” which decorated all their flags. This slogan was meant to rally their base and excite their youth, while in reality (at least up until this moment) the Houthi leadership had been very careful not to endanger or harm any foreign person or property: no kidnapping, especially not Americans, no hurting, no killing. They’d committed no criminal acts against foreigners. Now, after the rioting inside the embassy grounds, the American government was going to have a very hard time trusting or negotiating with the Houthi leadership.

  The breach of the US Embassy was the tipping point but not the sole factor in the worsening security situation. A somewhat spectacularly unsuccessful suicide bombing happened later outside the gates of the US Embassy, rumored to have been an al-Qaeda operation, leaving just a stain of blood and soot on one of the outer perimeter walls, just to the right of the main entrance gate. Although a failure, this direct attack continued to reinforce the edgy situation all the embassy employees and security personnel faced, never knowing what might happen on any given day.

  The Americans weren’t the only ones targeted either. Another suicide bomber tried to detonate himself on the motorcade of the British Embassy’s delegation, again unsuccessfully. Kidnappings increased in Sana’a itself, mostly of Western individuals for ransom, with Dutch and German personnel often targeted since their embassies were known to negotiate and pay for the release of hostages. Sometimes issues cropped up that didn’t involve direct targeting either. Various factions took potshots at each other or staged displays of power, with a lot of firing into the air, even of larger weapons and artillery, but never much killing. Diplomats’ houses could be nearby. Their convoys and motorcades might get caught in the middle. All of this added up to a worsening, tense, and restrictive environment.

  Toward the end of the National Dialogue Conference, we few expatriates were getting together with our diplomatic friends much less often, with American and British personnel coming down to Hadda for an occasional dinner or event but no longer living with us out there. Still, we saw the diplomats at least every once in a while and were reassured by their continuing presence and commitment to Yemen. Two of the most regular and important gatherings we enjoyed were the semiofficial OSAC meetings—now reconstituted as something of a private affair since many of the attendees didn’t want to go through the enhanced security procedures necessary to get onto the grounds of the US Embassy or Sheraton—and also the monthly or bimonthly soirees hosted by my old Lebanese friend Assaf at his villa in Hadda.

  I’d become a regular fixture in Sana’a by this time, which didn’t help my second marriage at all. Soon it, like my first, ground to an end. I loved—and still love—Zainab dearly. But Yemen had my attention and a big hold on my heart. I’d spent years basically living as a geographical bachelor and started to think I wasn’t really fit for family life anymore. The work in Yemen was a passion, but also a distraction, preventing me from really being the husband I could and should have been.

  As my marriage with Zainab ended, I began to rekindle a friendship with a Yemeni woman named Abeer, whom I first met back when I worked in the attaché office. Abeer had come to the embassy one day to get a visa, and she had seen me there in my Marine uniform. She asked some of the other Yemenis who worked at the embassy about me and, through t
hem, finagled a meeting. We became acquaintances, and when I left my post in Yemen, we stayed in touch as friends. We grew closer and closer over the next couple years, and the relationship proved to be critical once the Houthis took over.

  Like the work, Assaf’s parties were a distraction too. At one of these parties I met Ben Buchholz, who has now teamed up with me in writing this book. He was then chief of the attaché office, the same office I’d worked for about a decade earlier. He and I struck up a good friendship, one that has survived these years and even strengthened despite the divergence of our paths after the US Embassy finally shut its doors and evacuated in early 2015. Ben would bring a few other attachés and security personnel, maybe a handful of people who had been authorized to go out on the town, and they’d all arrive together with their bodyguards in a big caravan of armored Land Cruisers. They traveled this way whether going to an official meeting, heading to one of Assaf’s parties, or attending the OSAC breakfast meetings now being hosted at Jannah Hunt or one of the other oil-industry compounds.

  These parties were full of interesting people with diverse backgrounds and genuine characters. Our expatriate group numbered among its members an ex–Navy SEAL, an ex–Green Beret, an ex–Canadian Mountie, a couple former British Special Air Service guys who now worked for oil concerns, and a few liberal types who worked for NGOs doing humanitarian work like demining, health care, or agricultural and economic support. A French contingent always brought wine and cheese (but drank our beer and liquor first before breaking out what they called the “good stuff”). And the Germans, who won the World Cup in soccer that year, vied with the Dutch and British in their chitchat about sports. At Assaf’s parties, the clientele also included movers and shakers from a wider swath of both Yemeni society and the expatriate community: businessmen, relatives of the Saleh family, generals, ministers, underministers, diplomats, general managers of the oil companies, even a few literary types. Assaf thrived at making connections between people. His events tended to take on greater importance the more apparent it became that they were among the only intersections of the diplomatic and expatriate communities.

  I’d soon enough have reason to rely on him again, just as I had when Amira was trapped in Lebanon during those beginning days of the Israel-Hezbollah conflict.

  Footnote

  1 The Coast Guard was a great unit, probably one of the better ones in Yemen, a real success touted by the US Embassy. But it was doing everything it could, just like the rest of Yemen’s security sector and really anyone in a position of power in Yemen, to turn whatever advantage it possessed into profit.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE HOUTHIS COMETH

  THE HOUTHIS’ BASE of power centered, and still centers, on their tribal lands in the far northern mountains of Yemen, almost on the border of Saudi Arabia, in and around the city of Saadah.

  There the leader of the movement, Abd el-Malik al-Houthi, lives in guarded seclusion in the fashion of other rebel leaders: switching houses, video-taping statements to his followers rather than appearing in person, rarely keeping to a schedule or to a pattern of behavior. The Houthis fought six wars against the Yemeni government over the decade between 2004, when the Yemeni government placed a bounty on Abd el-Malik’s brother, a rising political star named Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi, and the fall of 2014, when the Houthis marched victoriously into Sana’a.

  During these years they engaged off and on in skirmishes with Saudi forces along the border, as well as with Sunni radicals, some of them Wahhabis coming in from Saudi Arabia, some of them homegrown Islahis, who adhered to a similar view on Islam as the al-Qaeda fighters. Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi had been killed in the first war, after the price on his head rose from $55,000 to $75,000. His nascent movement—still officially called by the name he gave it, Ansarallah, or the Victors of Allah—took his name after his martyrdom, while his brother Abd el-Malik ended up running the show.

  The Houthis had a chip on their shoulders compared to other Zaydi clans, since they were only the third- or fourth-most prestigious, and since they had suffered much worse than other clans through those six wars. When the other clans moderated their behavior, preferring to work with former president Ali Abdullah Saleh and take whatever assistance (and cold cash) he provided, the Houthis took the road of rebellion and became something of a rallying point for more radical-minded Zaydis throughout Yemen, including a significant population of Zaydis in Sana’a’s Old City, right there under the nose of the US Embassy and the Yemeni authorities.

  Throughout most of my time in Yemen, the Houthi wars experienced upticks and then calm periods. They became something of a feature of the landscape, just like al-Qaeda’s attacks and assassinations. Besides the occasional hot fighting that Ali Muhsin’s 1st Armor Brigade (and a few other units of Yemen’s army) brought to the mountains north and west of Sana’a, the Houthi problem seemed to be a regional one rather than a national one.

  That changed toward the end of 2013.

  First, as a gesture of reconciliation, the interim government of President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi returned Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi’s remains to Saadah for proper burial. Rather than reconciling, though, the Houthis took this as a victory. Some missteps by the government in denying certain people visas to attend the burial further aggravated and emboldened those in the group who were already advocating for increased militarism in the light of the interim government’s fragility.

  A second, even bigger reason for the change in the Houthi dynamic was the collapse of a school, officially called the Dar al-Hadith, or House of Hadith, in a small village just to the south of Saadah. That village is called Dammaj. And the school itself often would be referred to more colloquially as the Dammaj Institute.

  Situating the Dammaj Institute right in the Houthis’ backyard was one of President Saleh’s more brilliant ploys. This was a staunchly Islahi institution, led by a man with close ties to the Islah party and to al-Qaeda. In fact, rumor had it that the major purpose of the Dammaj Institute was to provide a “forward staging base” and cantonment area for radical Sunni fighters—Wahhabis from Saudi Arabia as well as Islahis—to operate in and around Saadah. While it might seem that situating an institution of this sort so close to the nucleus of rebel power would be a bad idea, in fact it kept the Houthis focused on Dammaj, on protecting their neighborhood, and not on national-level issues or military forays into other provinces. And, from Saleh’s point of view, it probably helped keep the radical Sunni fighters focused elsewhere too.

  Throughout the earlier parts of 2013, we’d hear reports from Saadah and from the vicinity of Dammaj, mostly coming from Red Crescent or other aid workers who were occasionally permitted to bring medical supplies or other assistance into the area. A virtual no-man’s-land developed between the school buildings and the surrounding foothills in Dammaj, with Houthi artillery firing potshots at the school, night raids by fighters venturing out of the walls of the compound, and bodies—mostly those of the Islahis, it was rumored—strewn on the ground between the forces, left to rot.

  I believe that the issue of the bodies precipitated the next fateful event: a truce was negotiated. The sides started talking to each other, at least at the political level, mediated by various international aid groups and diplomatic missions in Sana’a with an eye to justice and rightness (understandably possessing much less of Saleh’s foxlike consideration for how best to balance and neuter the various forces that could disrupt Yemen). These negotiations resulted not only in a cease-fire to retrieve the remains but in a larger framework for shutting down the institute, relocating its “students” to various Sunni areas (one sticking point was not getting them to leave, but finding new homes for them because not many tribes wanted hardened Islahi fighters coming in to rile up their own youth and disrupt their own tenuous political and sectarian equilibria), and also, somewhat inadvertently, allowing the Houthis to reconsolidate their power.

  Had the Houthis stopped at that point, things might be very different
in Yemen right now. They’d likely be living in Saadah semi-autonomously, perhaps with some of their grievances unaddressed but with the rest of Yemen still on the road to recovery and perhaps even enjoying some semblance of representative democracy.

  However, Abd el-Malik had a problem on his hands: he too had a core of hardened fighters, like the Islahi fighters from the Dammaj Institute, most of them eager youth, flush with what they considered a significant victory. This presented a fork in the road. Either Abd el-Malik would need to work very hard to redirect the energy of these core supporters into productive pastimes—tough to do when, at the same time, the National Dialogue Conference (NDC) was taking measures to restrict the Houthis’ power, like redistricting their province so that they had no access to a seaport—or he would have to give his blessing to further military activity and hope it would lead to a better outcome than a negotiated peace.

  Abd el-Malik chose war. But he did so in a very slow, almost unnoticeable way.

  Unnoticeable to us in Sana’a at least.

  He took plenty of time to reconsolidate, to rebuild his forces. And he could afford to do so because most of the attention of the Yemeni government, of the diplomatic missions, and even of the expatriates like me was still focused on the NDC. What little other attention we had tended to drift toward either al-Qaeda or the new threat in town: the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

  For a while, just as ISIS was making its name in Iraq and Syria and spreading its franchise into other areas like Africa and, yes, Yemen, it looked like the radicalized Sunni elements in Yemen would abandon al-Qaeda and join this new, more radical group.