by Sam Farran
Al-Qaeda had morphed a bit over the preceding few years. At one point it had conquered and instituted Shari’a governance in several provinces in the east of Yemen: Shabwa, Abyan, and parts of the Hadramawt. But, while at first al-Qaeda’s presence might have seemed to the local sheikhs like a relief from the ineffective and corrupt governance of Sana’a, its version of Shari’a didn’t sit too well with the average Yemeni. The people at first tried to live with, work with, and help their new black-clad al-Qaeda leaders. They seemed resigned to or even supportive of harsher punishments, with stoning and summary amputation and decapitation reported as common outcomes of Shari’a legal rulings. However, when al-Qaeda tried to impose a block on chewing qat, the Yemeni people had had enough.
Combined with a fairly successful campaign launched around the same time by Yemeni military forces—rumored to have been trained and even assisted by US Special Forces and US drone operations—the populations of these provinces knocked al-Qaeda into hiding, into the background, and put an end to its designs to create a Yemeni caliphate.
At this moment ISIS arrived on the scene.
Unfortunately, this group’s methods were more draconian by far than al-Qaeda’s: crucifixions, assassinations, condemnations. The Yemeni people had already soured to all of this. They did not want to go back to Shari’a law. They did not want to give up qat or alcohol, which many Yemenis also partook of, albeit on the sly. What’s more, al-Qaeda had learned from its mistakes. It came back in a softer, subtler way, advocating for the establishment of a caliphate but willing to let qat as well as most civil administration and judicial functions continue according to tribal and societal norms. Al-Qaeda also responded to some of the more flamboyant attacks launched by ISIS by stepping up its military efforts—it needed to be seen not only as a more moderate governing option but also as a stringent, capable, and winning avenue for military action and for the youths’ need to test themselves in battle.
As such, al-Qaeda’s new strategy turned out to have two prongs: govern moderately but attack severely. Reports of an uptick in attacks started to come in from the provinces out east: bombings, suicide attacks, complex attacks. Then al-Qaeda took things a bit further, brazenly entering the port city of Mukulla—which it had been kicked out of the previous year—ambushing and taking over the headquarters of Yemen’s 3rd Military District, which had responsibility for all of the Hadramawt and Mahrah provinces. Operatives drove a suicide vehicle into the front gate, entered with a score of fighters through the flaming wreckage, and then battled Yemeni forces for more than a day from within the perimeter of the headquarters building. This attack sent notice to the tribes that al-Qaeda was back in charge, that ISIS was a thing of the past, and that whatever happened in the National Dialogue dragging on back in Sana’a, there in the comfort of the Moevenpick, the next government would still be a long time coming to the rural, eastern parts of Yemen.
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THE HOUTHIS CONTINUED THEIR regrouping efforts and began—ever so slowly—to take the first preparatory steps on their march south from Saadah to Sana’a. Never committing to any major action, and with the government in Sana’a rendered ineffective by dint of its interim status and its focus on the NDC talks, the hardened Houthi fighters, many of whom had been at war for most of their lives, began targeting the houses and compounds of known Islahi members or sympathizers on the margins of their own tribal lands. This meant conflict with the al-Ahmar family, who were the most proximate Islahis. The Houthis would come in, surround a compound, bombard it, kill or cause to flee any of the household servants or fighters housed within, and then—in a brilliant marketing and military ploy—finish the job by razing all the structures to the ground.
This tactic not only prevented the families and fighters from returning to these facilities but also sent a message to any neighboring tribes: you’re either with us or you suffer the same fate. Most chose to join the Houthis. Usually Zaydi, most of these neighboring tribes were closely aligned already, to be sure, and became more so when a major confederation of tribes in the north of Yemen decided to throw in their lot with the Houthis rather than with their age-old nemesis, the al-Ahmars. But many of these tribes felt the keen compulsion of the Houthi military presence too, being constantly reminded, any time they passed by one of these homesteads, of the dangers of resistance.
As the first reports of Houthi attacks on the al-Ahmar family started to reach Sana’a, al-Qaeda struck again. It seemed like al-Qaeda didn’t want to let the Houthis have the spotlight, and vice versa, the two sides, on opposite edges of the country, almost engaging in a long-distance game of one-upmanship.
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MUCH LIKE WHEN I was working in Jeddah and had been having a breakfast chat with the RSO, the head security officer at the consulate, on this particular day in Sana’a I was supposed to go to the military hospital, a facility located inside the sweeping, self-contained courtyard grounds of the huge Yemeni Ministry of Defense complex, the headquarters for all of Yemen’s military and the office and brain center of the minister of defense himself. I was planning to visit the hospital because a few friends of mine were receiving treatment there. While good care could be had at a number of Western-affiliated commercial hospitals in Sana’a, the best hospital in the land was the military one. All the members of parliament, Saleh’s family members, and even visiting dignitaries used it.
Fortunately, I had to cancel my visit. USAID had a new company coming into town and asked me to provide a country-orientation briefing. I was on my way to that briefing when al-Qaeda launched a spectacularly gruesome attack on the entire ministry complex. This attack involved two suicide vehicles, one of which blew down the headquarters’ exterior gates and one of which got inside the grounds and turned toward the defense minister’s office before blowing up in front of the hospital. A large contingent of al-Qaeda fighters, mostly Saudi nationals, flowed in behind these vehicles. They split in at least two directions, with a couple entering the hospital and killing nurses, doctors, and patients—dragging many of the Filipina nurses into a closet and executing them there. Among those killed was a prominent judge and member of the National Dialogue Conference deliberations, Abdojaleel Noman, who was sedated on the operating table when the al-Qaeda fighters entered. They killed the doctor operating on him, they killed him, and then—as his wife called her daughter in a panic—they killed his wife too, even as she spoke on the phone.
The Yemeni authorities claimed to have recovered control of their ministry buildings later that day, but word got out that three al-Qaeda fighters remained holed up in a room of the complex. The Yemeni military ended up having to drill holes in the roof and drop grenades into the room. Still, one of the fighters managed to approach the Yemenis and detonate his suicide vest, killing a few more.
In all, the attack claimed the lives of fifty-six people, most of them Yemenis but also two German doctors and several Vietnamese and Filipina nurses, and it did so right in the heart of what was supposed to be Yemeni military power.
This brazen attack left people shaken. It also likely precipitated the end of the National Dialogue Conference, which published its results about a month later. Key to those results was the redistricting of Yemeni provinces into seven regions, which ignited complaints from not only the Houthis, who were left without access to a seaport, but also much of the South and East of the country, where people felt like the lines had been drawn specifically to strengthen the North and weaken the South. Throughout this, despite having been appointed to only a two-year term as interim president, which expired in 2013, Hadi was viewed by most Yemenis as trying to consolidate power, which was at odds with the purpose of the NDC and the goal of following through on inclusive, democratic government.
The NDC agreement looked good on paper, and the smiling photos of the delegates resulted in great PR, but I suspected that the Yemenis wouldn’t actually do much to implement it. They didn’t have the resources. What resources they received from outside sources,
like the Saudis, anyone in power would try—through a hundred thousand schemes—to pocket. Those who benefited from the current system had no reason to facilitate a transfer of power. That wasn’t the Yemeni way. Hadi’s attempts to consolidate power demonstrated as much at the very highest level, and the principle applied to every level of Yemeni government, right down to the soldiers manning desolate checkpoints, who would extort a bag of qat or a few coins from each traveler as the price of passage.
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THE HOUTHI EXPANSION CONTINUED, ever southward along the spine of mountains toward Sana’a. Still, people were loath to believe the Houthis would ever make an attempt on Sana’a itself. People at the Overseas Security Advisory Council (OSAC) and in other knowledgeable corners of the expat community couldn’t believe the Houthis would be so dumb. Or that the Western powers, operating out of the embassies, would allow it, or that the Houthis weren’t really interested in a political settlement. We thought everything would settle down, just as it had in the previous several Houthi civil wars.
“That would be dumb,” my compatriots at OSAC would say. “They couldn’t ever hold Sana’a if they took it.”
“The West would resist it,” others would say. “The West would never stand for it.”
“They’re going to make a political settlement. Maybe Hadi will give them a seaport after all, and then they’ll go back to Saadah.”
We didn’t realize how serious the Houthi problem was getting, though, until someone started sending around a map of the “Houthnado”—a funnel-cloud-shaped protuberance stretching from Saadah ever southward, angling in to the east, so that its spear-like tip pointed right at Sana’a. This map showed the progress of the Houthis over time, and it was unmistakable that the Houthi thrust pointed directly at Sana’a.
Just between Sana’a and the tip of this Houthi spear, though, a major town called Amran, with a major military base, sat athwart the only real road southward, blocking the Houthi advance. This would be a serious hurdle—much more of a pitched battle—compared to what the Houthis had been up against in their attacks on individual compounds or in the few skirmishes outside villages or minor military outposts along the way.
As they approached Amran, for just a bit it seemed like the Houthis hesitated and reconsidered whether it was wise to bite off such a huge target. For a month or more, their attacks focused to the west, still pushing southward and still following the spine of mountains but making a detour around Amran and therefore also around Sana’a.
When we realized that the Houthis were doing this not out of fear but as a rather brilliant strategic sleight of hand—whereby they still aimed at Sana’a but were setting the conditions for a successful entrance by first cutting Sana’a’s only road to the Red Sea, interdicting its principal lifeline and escape route—all of us in Sana’a began to feel seriously uneasy. The map of the Houthnado now looked less like an unintelligent, if ambitious, wall cloud and more like a guided, perhaps even fated, master plan. The link between Sana’a and its closest port, Hudaydah, would shortly be broken right in the shadow of Yemen’s highest mountain, Jebel An-Nabi Shuayb, a 12,000-foot eminence beneath which the road makes several perilous and easily controlled switchbacks: impossible terrain to push the Houthis out of once they seized it. With the cutting of the Hudaydah Road, Sana’a would be stuck like a pig in the cupped valley of its mountain fastness.
As this realization sunk in, a number of other things began to happen all at once:
• The Houthis launched their attack on Amran.
• Hadi, in perhaps his most misguided decision, cut the subsidies for gasoline and some food staples.
• Protests in Sana’a erupted, fueled by many grievances but fired by the gas subsidy change.
• Houthi banners began to fly openly in the Old City, and even in other parts of Sana’a, plastered to walls, to light posts, to the doors of Houthi partisans.
• The attack on Amran, which everyone thought would result in a long stalemate, if not a Houthi loss, turned out to be lightning fast and frighteningly successful.
Suddenly the Houthis, with their numbers swollen by fighters from other tribes along their march south, looked like a much more formidable force, one that might bloody the Yemeni governmental forces and create quite a wreck of Sana’a, even if they did not prove ultimately victorious.1
The Houthi numbers had swollen, but their core remained those hardened bands of fighters who had endured a decade or more of guerrilla war. We expected that these hardened bands would be used at the forefront, and after a defeat, or even after encountering some good resistance, the supporters from other tribes might melt away, leaving the hardened bands exposed and outnumbered. The truckloads of irregulars from the neighboring tribes looked formidable but had not been tested in battle like the Houthis. They were, however, surprisingly well equipped, both because every tribe in Yemen prided itself on its weaponry and because the victory at Amran resulted in the seizure of masses of small arms, ammunition, artillery pieces, and even tanks.
Worse, unlike their normal tactic of leveling buildings and moving on to the next target, the Houthis occupied the headquarters compound in Amran, taking all the gear as they normally did. They then hauled Hameed al-Qushaibi, the general in charge of the plussed-up Amran Brigade, a longtime ally of the al-Ahmars, out of a shack on the grounds where he had been hiding and executed him with a single shot to the back of the head on the parade field of his own compound. Photos of this execution began filtering from person to person, even appearing in the paper. While the battle resulted in more than four hundred casualties for the Yemeni military, the Houthis did a very smart thing with the majority of the several thousand troops they captured. They took all their weapons, all their vehicles, all their equipment, then sent them trudging the twenty-seven short but winding and mountainous miles from Amran to Sana’a. This meant that for days after the battle, the road to Amran, which descends along several highly visible switchbacks out of the mountains above the northwestern suburbs of Sana’a, was clogged with bedraggled, demoralized, dislocated, and disarmed soldiers—a potent message to those in Sana’a who might resist. This also presented, like the leveling of enemy compounds, a potent psychological choice: surrender and be disarmed, or—like Qushaibi—make yourself an enemy and find yourself executed in your own yard.
Sana’a was surrounded, with escape possible into only the impassable wilderness of the Rub al-Khali desert or via the long and treacherous road south to Aden on the Indian Ocean. The road south from Houthi land stood open, with all of us watching the switchbacks for the first sign of the Houthi onslaught.
All kinds of wild rumors percolated throughout the city during these anxious days. Some of them proved to be wildly incorrect—like the one I heard about the Houthis getting ready to shell Sana’a with missiles and artillery from the hillsides, as they had done for so long to the Dammaj Institute. But some of them turned out to be fairly accurate too. For instance, along the Hudaydah Road, which they had cut beneath Jebel an-Nabi Shuayb, the Houthis apparently began to send vehicles loaded with troops eastward, a few first probing maneuvers back along the road toward Sana’a. They couldn’t come all the way into Sana’a via that route because the Special Forces headquarters at Asbahi Base, on a cliff right above the ritzy suburb of Hadda with its diplomatic compounds and nice restaurants, blocked the advance there. This was Ahmed Ali Saleh’s base, presumably filled with Yemen’s best-trained fighters.
What happened next still mystifies most observers of Yemen.
These government troops, with their strategic advantages, their training, and their loyalty to Yemen—or at least to Saleh and Hadi and those considered the ruling elite—all of these troops at Asbahi, at 1st Armor Brigade in the northwest corner of Sana’a and in many other places, all of them just laid down their arms and let the Houthis in. None, or very few of them, fought.
The Houthis came into town in two long columns, one from Amran, one along the Hudaydah Road from Jebel
an-Nabi Shuayb, and they met almost no resistance. We watched the tanks the Houthis had captured in Amran as they rumbled down the switchbacks on the mountainsides, sitting ducks if the Yemeni government had wanted to fire on them. The column chugged along, looking like blips on an old Atari video game.
A short skirmish occurred once those tanks got down into Sana’a itself, with some maneuvers on the flanks of TV Station Hill, right near Ali Muhsin’s 1st Armor Brigade headquarters. It was tank on tank, each turning, firing, turning again, motoring a few feet, a puff of gun smoke spewing from the muzzle of its cannon. Then one of the tanks went silent. The other one rumbled away. Other than that and a few units holing up in their compounds, the Houthis came in, surrounded the important buildings, took over all the important checkpoints, and began to act like they were in charge.
They didn’t molest anyone, though things remained tense. They had obviously been ordered to be polite and win over Sana’a’s citizens and diplomats. The only people they seemed to interdict were Islahi fighters or known Islahi politicians, though most of them had gotten out of town ahead of the Houthis like rats fleeing a sinking ship.
When the Houthi forces, many of whom seemed like mere children, child fighters, surrounded the US Embassy, the embassy personnel geared up for another event like the break-in and bumper derby of two years before. However, the Houthis did not disturb the embassy. They set up checkpoints on the streets leading in and out of the main compound and the Sheraton. And they monitored who came and went, only becoming concerned if anyone affiliated with the Islahis tried to approach the embassy. What’s more, a really well-trained unit of Houthis rolled up in a vehicle the first or second day, went to an apartment complex just outside the gates of the embassy compound, which friends told me had long been suspected of harboring an al-Qaeda cell that monitored the embassy, and pulled three or four al-Qaeda personnel out of the building, questioning them and then executing them in the street.