Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes

by Victoria Clark

  A wizened old man squatting in some rubble against a wall of the fort, with a dusty red car safety-belt circling his knees,b did not bother to register our arrival by looking up from the hubbly-bubbly pipe he was puffing on. Naturally assuming that we would find the venerable Fadhli patriarch lounging comfortably on cushions in the fort’s cool interior, I took the old smoker for an ancient family retainer, until Ahmad presented him to me as ‘Sultan Nasir of the Fadhlis’. Rising from his dusty corner, the man whom the British had honoured with gun salutes and stipends and rifles and even appointed justice minister of their still-born Federation of South Arabia, greeted me kindly and shepherded us into a reception room which was situated to one side of the main building. More like a car port than any reception room I had ever seen, dusty but comfortably open-ended to let a breeze tunnel through, it was furnished with low mattress seating scattered with bright silk cushions.

  Between fretting and fiddling with a succession of malfunctioning pipes he had made himself, old Sultan Nasir made fascinating conversation. He and Ahmad squabbled amicably about how many times he had been married. Ahmad insisted it was forty-seven times. Nasir could not believe it, but knew he had only really loved his second wife, who had died half a century earlier. Neither he nor Ahmad could be bothered to calculate how many children he had fathered. What they could agree on was that since returning home from his Saudi exile in 1995 Nasir had been married five times, but only the last union, to a girl of eighteen by whom he had sired three children in the past six years, had been happy. ‘The proof is in the pudding,’ laughed Ahmad, pointing out that Nasir had treated this latest wife to a generator, a television and even a washing machine. I glimpsed her briefly inside the mud fort. Wearing a pair of fluorescent pink plastic sandals, a tomato-red silk dress with a solid gold belt and a lumpy brown henna face-mask, she was reclining in a darkened upstairs room with a low ceiling and packed-earth floor, watching television with her children, little more than a child herself, while her prized washing machine went about its noisy business, but without the help of piped water. Nasir clearly loved his young family. ‘That Haroun!’ he said, shaking his head and chuckling over his five-year-old son, ‘he’s always threatening to stone me if I refuse to give him money to buy more pet rabbits!’ ‘Have you changed your mind yet about sending them to school?’ interjected Ahmad, who had confided to me in the car his growing anxiety that his youngest cousins would never learn to read and write, let alone understand computers or English. ‘Pah!’ was old Nasir’s only reply.

  Although educated to university level himself in British-ruled Sudan, Nasir was no fan of learning or, for that matter, much else about the modern world. Nor did he think much of Yemeni unification. Like so many southerners, he resented the new order as ‘an occupation’ by the northern tribal ascendancy in Sanaa. On the other hand, he did respect President Ali Abdullah Salih personally. Determined to eradicate any last trace of Marxism from the south by fostering a revival of the old tribal order, the president was paying Nasir an annual stipend equivalent to a government minister’s salary and even dropped by to see him from time to time. Nasir had responded by astutely allying his family to the regime, marrying one of his daughters into Salih’s northern high-lander tribe, to the man generally reckoned to be the second power in the land, the military commander of the north-west district of the country which included Sanaa, Brigadier-General Ali Muhsin al-Ahmar. Nasir recounted how, shortly before the 2003 parliamentary elections, the president had dropped in to have a publicity shot taken of himself in friendly conversation with Nasir as he squatted there cross-legged in the dust as usual, puffing on his pipes. Plastered all over Sanaa, the resulting campaign poster had soon been spotted by one of Nasir’s grandsons, a student in the capital, who instantly recognised his grandfather but failed to notice that his fiita had fallen open. It had been a friend who exclaimed, ‘Who on earth is that old man with his balls on display?’ Uncle and nephew roared with laughter at the memory.

  Nasir’s lack of self-importance and his remarkable good health, which he demonstrated by mock-challenging his stout nephew to a quick sprint, were impressive. Asked for the secret of his contented longevity, he slyly joked, ‘I did not have very much sexual intercourse when I was younger - you see, I never had the permitted four wives, only ever one at a time.’ A simple Muslim piety, frequent recourse to the well-thumbed paperback Koran he kept in the breast pocket of his shirt, seemed to be his mainstay. His ribald recreation of the Muslim holy book’s version of the birth of Jesus - particularly his demonstration of the way Jesus had rocketed out of Mary’s womb while she lay resting under a date tree - had us all laughing again, but the performance was cut short by the appearance of one of his seventeen sons, not Tariq the jihadist but a handsome and neatly dressed young captain in the local police. Young Mustafa al-Fadhli said he needed his father’s advice: should he or should he not take a second wife? Both Nasir and Ahmad impatiently urged him to do no such thing. Wives were expensive and they did not always see eye to eye, they said. He should not follow the example set by his older brother Tariq, with whom, Ahmad reminded me, we would shortly be lunching.

  Born three months before the British withdrew from Aden, Tariq had been a helpless babe in arms in 1967 when the Marxist NLF declared the Fadhli sultanate overthrown and its capital Zinjibar their new headquarters. Shaking their heads over the painful memory, Ahmad and Nasir recalled how, shocked by that British betrayal of the old treaties of friendship and both in London at the time, they had requested a meeting with Lord Shackletonc at the House of Lords and been dismayed to hear that in his, as it turned out extraordinarily prescient, opinion, it would not be a couple of months but possibly as much as twenty-five years before they saw their home again. After hastily withdrawing a large sum of cash from his London and Zurich banks and spending a few months in Beirut, Nasir and his extended family had had little choice but to resettle in Saudi Arabia, living off the generous monthly stipends the Saudi royals paid to all the ousted former rulers of the Aden protectorates. ‘Which, by the way, we are still being paid now we’ve moved back here,’ Ahmad said, as we drove back up the dusty, rocky track towards the main road again.

  Soon we were approaching a British-era roundabout on the far side of town. There, on its edge stood another fort-like structure, a still unfinished grey concrete three-storey edifice surrounded by a high wall: Tariq’s new residence.d

  TARIQ AL-FADHLI

  Appearing at the grand entrance to his fort to welcome us, surrounded by a handful of his eleven children, Tariq al-Fadhli’s demeanour was as genially serene and modest as Osama bin Laden’s. Although a decade or so younger and shorter than the world’s most wanted man, he even looked like him but he was dressed in a manner that, with hindsight, perfectly reflected his allegiance to the new, united Yemen: his prettily patterned fiita was complemented by a large and richly decorated jambiyah.

  Smiling his welcome, he enquired kindly after a mutual friend, a former political officer and retired diplomat who had kindly arranged for Tariq to come to Britain in 1999 to study English and have some shrapnel removed from his nose. ‘At that time I was not welcome in Arab countries like Jordan and Egypt,’ he recalled, ’They didn’t like mujahideen who’d fought in Afghanistan, but I had no trouble getting visas for Britain or the United States.‘ He told me that he had liked England very much, but not either the language school he attended or the family he was lodging with so he had not learned much English. My arrival was giving him a good idea, one that would never have occurred to his father: ’Perhaps you will stay here and teach English to me and my children?‘ he suggested, ’I can arrange an apartment and a car, and a driver for you.’

  Leading us into a sitting room whose plush wall-to-wall carpet was spread with a square of plastic sheeting and covered with dishes of meats, fruits, salads, yoghurt, dates, great rounds of flat bread and mounds of saffron rice, he invited us to make ourselves comfortable. Although anxious to question him about both hi
s past and his present, I observed the Arab custom of not speaking while eating and marvelled instead at the steady stream of servants moving in and out of the room bearing yet more dishes. On the alert for possible culture clashes, the infinitely courteous Ahmad made quite sure I was not offended when, according to Arab custom, Tariq finished his meal, got to his feet without a word and left the room.

  We all reconvened to relax for the rest of the afternoon in a reception room quite unlike his father’s breeze-block wind-tunnel. Elegantly hung with chandeliers and heavy velvet curtains, it was also richly carpeted and large enough to accommodate sixty or so on the green velvet cushions lining its walls. Tariq settled down with his mobile phone to hand. On a low table in front of him was another telephone, a copy of the Koran, a litre bottle of water, a packet of cigarettes and a generous bundle of freshly rinsed qat. While he rhythmically, steadily, plucked at his bundle of twigs, picking off the most tender green shoots of the shrub and popping them into his mouth, while his left cheek slowly swelled with the masticated residue, while he chewed and sucked on his cud and his gaze grew wider and brighter, he talked and talked and the reasons why he was not behind bars grew gradually clearer to me.

  There are two stories about how Tariq became a jihadist. One, which I had heard from two sources before I met him, suggested that as a bored and disaffected teenager in Saudi Arabia, he had wrapped a car around a lamp post while out joy-riding one night and fled the country to join the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan in order to escape a jail sentence. But the story he tells himself is different. According to Tariq his transformation into a jihadist started in 1985 when he was eighteen, with a desire to emulate an older brother who was studying in the United States but spending his college vacations piously fighting the Soviet infidel in Afghanistan. At his brother’s suggestion Tariq began reading the seminal works of Sayyid Qutb,e listening to religious tapes, learning the Koran by heart and saving part of his Saudi army salary for the journey to Afghanistan.

  Whatever the true catalyst for his espousal of jihad Tariq arrived in Peshawar, on the Pakistan side of the Afghan border in 1985, to find hundreds of other young Arab fighters, or ‘Arab Afghans’ as they were popularly known - Algerians, Egyptians, Libyans, Moroccans and Yemenis from both the north and south - all aflame with zeal for battling the godless Soviet Union, all inspired by pious tales of battlefield miracles, all looking for adventure, a higher purpose in life and perhaps martyrdom, most of them reliant on Saudi funding. ‘I wanted to go to Paradise too!’ Tariq said, but his disarmingly ironic grin suggested he had long ago mastered that youthful appetite.

  Yemenis escaping poverty and unemployment at home and following their inborn bent for warfare in terrain as rugged and beautiful as much of their own were well represented among the Arab mujahideen in Peshawar. Close proximity to the Marxist PDRY meant that northerners were guaranteed to be at least as alert as the United States and Saudi Arabia to the moral and political evil represented by Soviet Communism. Most found that the road to adventure, religious righteousness and a steady income in Afghanistan was an easy one to take, especially when it carried with it two important blessings. First, they had been stirred into a fever of aggressive piety by some of their clergy who preached the puritanical Saudi Wahhabism that President al-Hamdi had begun encouraging in the mid-1970s as a means of combating the Marxism emanating from the PDRY, and of eliminating Zaydi elitism and securing Saudi funds for social welfare. Second, they had the support and encouragement of a powerful man, President Salih’s distant cousin, Tariq al-Fadhli’s future brother-in-law, Brigadier-General Ali Muhsin al-Ahmar, who was actively assisting Osama bin Laden’s recruitment drive by funnelling jihad-minded youths his way. As far as the regime in Sanaa was concerned, it was only natural, only right and proper, that a portion of its unemployable youth would prefer to take themselves off to Afghanistan to cover themselves with glory doing what they did best, rather than slaving for the Saudis as domestic servants or labourers.

  Tariq noticed that, although fewer in number, southerners were even more intensely committed to the anti-Soviet jihad than northerners. Usually they were political dissidents as well as religious zealots. Most zealous of all though were dispossessed exiles like Tariq himself, young men who had not set foot in their homeland since babyhood, if at all, but who dreamed of avenging the past and retrieving their birthright by taking the jihad on home to the Marxist PDRY just as soon as they were done in Afghanistan. These hybrid Saudi Yemenis, generally of southern Yemeni origins, were among bin Laden’s keenest and most loyal followers. As bin Laden’s former bodyguard, Nasir al-Bahri, put it to me, ‘Bin Laden found a pool of young men who were second-generation exiles brought up by their parents on religion and jihad just ready and waiting. Many of their fathers had fought the British for independence and then the Marxist NLF in the 1960s, before accepting defeat and going into Saudi exile.’ He went on to recall the closeness of the deracinated émigré community, how his father had worked for the bin Ladens and how, as a child in Jeddah, he had been hauled off to pay his respects to Tariq’s father, Sultan Nasir al-Fadhli.

  After a few months of military training in Pakistan, Tariq had ventured into Afghanistan, but only as far as Jaji where he had encountered a brigade of Arab fighters led by Osama bin Laden who had forged especially close friendships with southern Yemenis. Osama and Tariq had still more in common, of course; both of southern Yemeni origin, they had both been brought up in Saudi Arabia and experienced the quiet alienation of being forever on the fringes of Saudi society, of knowing that all the bin Laden wealth and all the al-Fadhli sultanate’s prestige could not counteract what outsiders experienced as the haughty exclusiveness of the ruling Saudi Nejd elite. Tariq lingered three months at the camp and presumably discussed their shared dream of liberating the PDRY with bin Laden before penetrating on into central Afghanistan in search of a live battle front and action.

  In May 1988, after nine years of ruinous warring against the mujahideen, Moscow acknowledged its expensive failure in Afghanistan and began a slow withdrawal. Convincing themselves that it was their divinely sanctioned intervention that had tipped the balance and defeated one of the world’s superpowers, Afghan War veterans like al-Fadhli and bin Laden rejoiced in this sure proof that Allah was on their side. Bin Laden and his Egyptian physician ally, Ayman al-Zawahiri, began looking to the future and founded al-Qaeda, plotting to extend and export the jihad. Back in Saudi Arabia the following year, bin Laden tried to initiate the cleansing of the Arabian Peninsula of its infidels by suggesting to the head of the Saudi intelligence service, Prince Turki al-Saud, that the Kingdom give him and his Afghan War veteran followers a green light to rid the region of its single Marxist regime, the PDRY. He was shocked and angered by the prince’s unequivocally negative response to the proposal. Meanwhile, busier fighting than politicking, Tariq soldiered on through the ensuing messy conflict between the Afghan mujahideen and the Afghan government left behind by the Soviets, acquitting himself sufficiently heroically at the Battle of Jalalabad in the spring of 1989 to secure his reputation as Yemen’s bravest jihadist. At last, news of the demise of the PDRY and the sudden union of the two Yemens in May 1990 was his prompt to leave behind not only Afghanistan but his childhood home in Saudi Arabia and return to his ancestral home in south Yemen.

  What he found there surprised and angered him. The godless Marxists he blamed for his family’s humiliating exile and the pathetically impoverished condition of his homeland had not been comprehensively purged in the course of unification but were clearly still in power, controlling the local police and security services and maintaining their separate military establishment. Understandably, those Marxists were no more delighted to see Tariq than he was to see them. With ample justification, they feared that he had returned to Zinjibar to launch jihad against them and would wreak a horrible revenge before reinstating himself as the heir to the Fadhli sultanate and reviving the tribal order they had been struggling to eradicate for th
e past couple of decades. Tariq, almost undoubtedly with support and encouragement from Sanaa, courted confrontation with them by championing the revival of old tribal habits of gun-ownership and channelling funds collected from wealthy southern Yemenis living in Saudi Arabia into dispensing charity and building new mosques. Soon he had gathered enough support among Fadhli tribesmen who remembered his father Nasir’s wise rule to be elected paramount sheikh of Abyan, and was crowned in the traditional Fadhli manner by having the fuse of a matchlock gun placed around his turban. He had also been joined by an army of up to 29,0001 Afghan War veterans (most, but not all of them Yemenis) whom he gathered together into a loose but virulently anti-Marxist Islamist movement known as ‘Islamic Jihad’.

  Sanaa raised no objection, of course. The overriding urge to rid Yemen of any last vestige of the old Marxist order, added to a determination to fill the resulting ideological vacuum with a reinvigorated tribal order that would smooth the process of merging the two states into one, meant that President Salih was content to accommodate this small army of hardened jihadists when no one else in the region would have them. For Salih, ever the nimble dancer on the heads of snakes, it was a simple case of the enemy of my enemy (the Marxist leadership of the former PDRY) is my new best friend.