Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes

by Victoria Clark

  The ‘Islamic Jihad’ camps, including one in the al-Huttat mountains, near the town of Jaar, a short distance to the north of Zinjibar in Yaffa tribal land, were reportedly subsidised to the tune of $20 million by bin Laden, via Brigadier-General Ali Muhsin al-Ahmar,2 and bin Laden himself reportedly travelled in and out of Yemen, meeting with his friend Tariq, preaching against the Marxists in mosques, dreaming of mustering a force of 10,000 pious al-Qaeda jihadists there in south Yemen ‘who would be ready at a moment’s notice to march to liberate the land of the two holy places [Saudi Arabia]’.3 He even went so far as to offer hundreds of Saudis of Yemeni descent considerable sums of money to return to Yemen to ‘live as good Muslims’ and is believed to have held a six-hour-long meeting with Brigadier-General Ali Muhsin al-Ahmar, at Sanaa airport.4 He seems to have been considering Yemen as a useful base for his global operations, and with good reason. Not only was it, in the words almost every news agency has used about Yemen since 9/11, his own ‘ancestral homeland’, and not only had Yemenis been greatly loved by Muhammad on account of their wisdom and faith, but the Arabic they spoke was closer to that of the Koran than any other dialect. There were more practical considerations: bin Laden had discovered in Afghanistan that, whatever their citizenship - Yemeni or Saudi - Yemenis made excellent recruits to his cause, proving hardier, braver and better fighters than many over-pampered Saudis. Yemeni jihadists were quick learners, energetic and young and commendably undemanding in the matter of equipment, food and accommodation, more than happy to subsist for months on a diet of stale bread mixed with water and a little sugar, for example. If they already had families, they were uncomplaining about being separated from them. As well as being particularly skilled at night-raiding, they were hard workers, excellent at building roads and tunnels and trenches.

  By 1991 Tariq, with bin Laden’s material backing and moral support, was openly engaged in violent jihad against the old PDRY’s Marxist leadership. When a newly appointed Marxist local party secretary tried to call a halt to the return of land to pre-1967 owners like Tariq’s own family, it was open season. Some of Tariq’s Afghan Arab followers shot the official and tit-for-tat killings escalated. The Marxists got by far the worst of it, Tariq himself confirming their claim to have suffered 150 assassination attempts between 1990 and 1994. Tariq’s activities, which could be construed as doing Sanaa’s dirty work of terrorising the Marxists out of power, were instrumental in sending the country hurtling headlong towards the 1994 civil war. But the spiralling violence was all too easily dismissed as minor post-unification teething troubles and generally escaped the world’s notice until late 1992, when two bombs exploded in Aden’s luxury Movenpick and Goldmohur hotels, killing an Australian tourist and two Yemenis. The intended targets seemed to be not Marxists, for a change, but American soldiers briefly billeted at the hotels while in transit for tours of humanitarian aid duty in Somalia.

  Tariq insisted to me that he did not instigate the bungled attacks, that indeed he had tried to prevent them because he believed that only Marxists - not the United States, which had kindly equipped the Afghan mujahideen with Stinger missiles and the like - were his real enemies. It is believed that bin Laden authorised what is now viewed as al-Qaeda’s first attempted assault on US interests, but whether or not Tariq played a part in the incident, as the acknowledged leader of the Afghan War veterans he was blamed for it. Obligingly murdering Marxists was one thing, but planting bombs in hotels where Americans were staying quite another, as far as the regime in Sanaa was concerned, so Tariq fled inland, into the Maraqasha mountains that were part of Fadhli tribal land, to loyal tribesmen who performed their tribal duty to a fugitive by granting him their protection. There he withstood pressure to surrender to an entire brigade despatched to capture him, but at last agreed to face trial in Sanaa. In the northern capital, a fellow tribal leader, the powerful Sheikh Abdullah al-Ahmar of the Hashid Federation, accommodated Tariq at his home under a pleasant form of house arrest, while the trial was endlessly deferred. Whatever Tariq’s involvement in the hotel bombings, the president clearly felt he owed him a debt of thanks for his unstinting campaign against the Marxists.

  When Tariq returned to the south a couple of years later, during the civil war of 1994, it was as a man completely rehabilitated, as the proud commander of a Second Army Brigade composed of a mixture of Afghan War veterans and Fadhli tribesmen. As determined as President Salih, Brigadier-General Ali Muhsin al-Ahmar and Sheikh al-Ahmarf to see off the godless Marxists for good and all, he was delighted to be co-opted into the project of upholding Yemen’s unity by ridding his homeland of them and helping to impose direct rule from Sanaa, thrilled to be taking Aden because it was something his Fadhli forebears had never managed to do while the British ruled it.

  The civil war was regrettable and costly, and the veteran jihadists‘ revenge on the easy, beer-swilling ways of the Adenis chilling to witness, let alone experience, but some outsiders were impressed by the way President Salih seemed to be taming the Afghan War veterans by drawing them into mainstream Yemeni society. At a time when other Arab countries were closing their doors to home-coming Afghan War veterans, when Algeria, Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt were confronting their jihadists with violence and censorship that only inflamed the phenomenon and swelled their ranks with armies of recruits, a foreign eyewitness to Yemen’s 1994 war and its aftermath was writing, ’Little Yemen may still serve as an important model of how Arab Islamists can cope with democratic principles and how tolerant they can be of secularists once in power.’5 And Tariq al-Fadhli was the perfect poster-boy for this gently inclusive policy. The safe return of his family’s land, a usefully generous stipend from Sanaa and a high military rank, a new Toyota Land Cruiser, membership of the president’s ruling GPC party, a seat in the upper house of the Parliament and a blind eye turned to his maintenance of a twelve-man uniformed armed guard, seemed to cure him of all his jihadist fervour. The assumption in Sanaa was that with the Marxists brought to their knees and fleeing into exile at last, Tariq was just one of a majority of Afghan War veterans sensibly opting for an easy life.

  At our first meeting in 2004 Tariq told me that although he greatly missed the freedom and excitement of jihad in Afghanistan - ‘my wives won’t let me go anywhere these days,’ he joked - he had had no contact whatsoever with Osama bin Laden since 1995 and that he had never wanted anything to do with his old friend’s attacks against the West. On the other hand he was no longer feeling nearly as closely allied to President Salih as he had been a decade earlier. The united Yemen he had fought to preserve in the civil war was proving such a terrible disappointment that he confessed he would love to see the British back in Aden - ‘after lunch today, if possible!’ When we met again three years later, his dissatisfaction with the status quo had intensified to judge by the gist of an old verse about snakes he recited for me: ‘My allegiance is only to those who fill my hands with silver coins… We came to the voice of the Power, and we returned without any snakes even … And those who knew they already had their snakes clasped them closer …’

  I gathered from this gnomic utterance that on top of his disgruntle-ment with the junior position of the old south in united Yemen, he was feeling the financial pinch - in short, that his annual stipend was no longer large enough to keep him on the side of ‘the Power’, that he was on the point of presenting himself as a snake’s head the president would need to dance on. This revelation and the fact that he had turned his back on jihad just as soon as he had regained his family’s land placed Tariq well within Yemeni tribal tradition. The imams, the Ottomans, the British, the Egyptians and the PDRY’s Soviet backers had all had to recognise that what Yemeni tribesmen cared about most was money and land, not peace or religion or any ideology. Like the calming and extremely time-consuming Yemeni custom of chewing qat, these twin tribal priorities are sometimes cited as an important reason why the number of Yemenis actively engaged in jihad today is not a great deal larger than it is.

&nbs
p; THE ABU HAMZA CONNECTION

  By the mid-2000s Tariq al-Fadhli was popularly viewed as the leader of Yemen’s first generation of jihadists who, depending on one’s point of view, had either grown up and opted for a peaceful life, or unforgivably sold out and betrayed the cause.

  The country’s second wave of jihadists were Afghan War veterans who did not follow Tariq’s lead. They were men with little to gain or lose in the way of land or wealth, men who believed that having seen off the Soviet Satan in Afghanistan in 1988 and the Marxists in south Yemen in 1994, it was time to see off the West and any corrupt Muslim regimes too - in effect, to take on the world, as bin Laden was recommending. Some, like Nasir al-Bahri, for example, spent the 1990s fighting jihad wherever Muslims were under threat - in Bosnia, Somalia, Tajikistan, Chechnya - remaining close to bin Laden. Others parted company with him. In Yemen, many were led by an ex-Afghan Arab Yemeni known as Abu Hassan al-Mihdar, leader of the Aden-Abyan Islamic Army (AAIA), who had set up a training camp to the north-east of the Fadhli lands. The name of the movement had special resonance; a little-known hadith had prophesied that a mighty and victorious army of 12,000 faithful fighters for Allah would rise up out of the area comprising Aden and the territory of Abyan. To the extent that it thoroughly shared and publicly approved bin Laden’s aims, the AAIA could be said to be ‘al-Qaeda affiliated’.

  One of the AAIA’s priorities was to ensure that the Sanaa regime did not over-compensate for the costly mistake of not doing America’s will in 1990 with regard to approving the invasion of Iraq by becoming too friendly with the United States. The western superpower was gravely offending Muslims everywhere at the time, not only by its solidly uncritical support for Israel but by its maintenance of a large military base in Saudi Arabia, the home of Islam’s Holy Places. The AAIA would do its best to sabotage Salih’s recent efforts to fill Yemen’s empty coffers by granting the US’s Persian fleet access to the shipping lanes in the Gulf of Aden and inviting her ships to refuel at Aden.

  Simultaneous al-Qaeda attacks against US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in early August 1998 should have served as a warning to the US navy to refuel elsewhere; it soon transpired that one of the bombers who survived the Kenyan attack had called a certain telephone number in Sanaa both before and after the operation. The number belonged to the head of al-Qaeda’s Yemeni cell, yet another Afghan War veteran and friend of bin Laden’s named Ahmad al-Hada.g No sooner had al-Hada received the calls from the al-Qaeda operative in Kenya than he had relayed the news to bin Laden in Afghanistan by a satellite telephone. Identification of that jihadist telephone exchange in Sanaa situated Yemen and Yemenis at the heart of the al-Qaeda enterprise for the first time. A biographer of al-Qaeda, Lawrence Wright, points out that the discovery enabled the FBI ‘to map the links of the al-Qaeda network all across the globe’.6

  Uninvolved in al-Qaeda’s embassy bombings, the AAIA first drew world-wide attention to itself in December 1998 when it claimed responsibility for kidnapping sixteen westerners, most of them Britons, on an adventure holiday in Yemen. The AAIA was hoping to exchange its western hostages for six of its members whom the authorities had recently arrested for plotting to blow up the British consulate, a western hotel and the Anglican church in Aden. Tribal kidnappings of foreign tourists as a means of extracting funds from Sanaa - for a new well or school or road, jobs in the civil service, or a bigger stipend, or the release of prisoners - were one sure sign of how patchily the state institutions of the newly united Yemen were functioning, but they had also been an accepted modus operandi since at least the start of the 1990s. Confident of being treated as honoured guests and graciously entertained by their captors, growing numbers of tourists to Yemen had even begun to relish the idea of being kidnapped as a way of achieving an authentically Yemeni experience.

  That all changed after December 1998. The AAIA men were not common or garden tribal kidnappers. Sanaa was belatedly waking up to the threat posed by the Afghan War veterans; a jihadist who had fought in both Afghanistan and Bosnia had recently murdered three Catholic nuns, two Indians and a Filipino who had been caring for elderly and handicapped Yemenis in Hodeidah. The kidnapping of the sixteen western tourists was not handled in the usual way. Instead of entering into negotiations with the kidnappers, Sanaa despatched a platoon of soldiers on a raid to rescue the hostages, but the operation did not go according to plan. In the ensuing skirmish four of the group were killed, three British and one Australian. Although the leader of the AAIA was swiftly arrested and executed, the group survived to be described by one US analyst in 2006 as ‘one of the more resilient groups in the region’.7 Yemen’s fledgling tourist industry has still not recovered and Fadhli tribal land, much of the province of Abyan, is still considered especially jihad-friendly.

  With three Britons among the dead, London was particularly interested in the bungled rescue and - like the US, after the African embassy bombings - gained from it a useful insight into the new anti-western ideology being propagated by Afghan War veterans. It soon emerged that a half-blinded, hook-handed Afghan War veteran who had spent some time in Yemen, an Egyptian preacher at north London’s Finsbury Park mosque, had been closely involved in the faraway kidnapping. Abu Hamza al-Masri, as he was known, was not only in the habit of recruiting for the AAIA in London but had spoken to its leader on a satellite telephone he had bought for him and equipped with £500 of air-time both before and immediately after the kidnapping. More incriminating still, one of the six prisoners whose release the AAIA kidnappers had been demanding turned out to be Abu Hamza’s stepson and another his son.h Abu Hamza was arrested and jailed under Britain’s new anti-terrorism laws, but President Salih was soon requesting that he be extradited to Yemen for a string of other long-distance misdemeanours, including plotting to blow up a Yemeni and his donkey by having a bomb placed under the animal’s saddle. However, Britain held onto him until 2004 when, armed with evidence that he had planned to set up a jihadists‘ training camp in Oregon, the US labelled him ’a terrorist facilitator with a global reach’8 and demanded his extradition there instead. The request was granted in 2008, to come into force as soon as Hamza has finished his British prison sentence. Meanwhile he is reportedly still preaching jihad to his fellow Muslims via pipes connecting the cells in his Belmarsh prison.9

  The tragic episode gave Britain an unpleasant taste of how difficult it was to do business with Yemen, to identify those with responsibility and sift the salient from the meaningless. What were Scotland Yard and the Foreign Office to make of a credible report from one of the kidnapped Yemeni drivers that the chief jihadist kidnapper had used the satellite telephone Abu Hamza had given him to make direct and personal contact with the second most powerful person in the land, old Sultan Nasir al-Fadhli’s son-in-law and Tariq’s brother-in-law, the promoter of jihad in Afghanistan, Brigadier-General Ali Muhsin al-Ahmar?

  WHOSE SIDE IS WHO ON?

  The death of the four western tourists rattled and embarasssed the virtuoso dancer on snakes’ heads, but it did not cause Salih to lose his footing. A few renegade Afghan War veterans with little but bloodshed, vengeance against the West and Paradise on their minds were far from being the liveliest or biggest snake he had to contend with in the late 1990s. In the space of six months, between June and December 1998, the guns and bombs of disgruntled tribesmen in the north-eastern oil-producing Marib region of central Yemen had blown nineteen holes in an oil pipeline Yemen was dependent on for 40 per cent of her revenue.10

  Helping to explain why the jihadi threat was very far from the top of any Yemeni agenda was the fact that Yemen’s security service, the Political Security Office (PSO), was itself a bastion of anti-western, tending towards pro-jihadist feeling, staffed as it was in large part by retired Afghan War veterans who had transferred their anti-Soviet feelings onto the West and Iraqi-trained army officers whose hostility towards the West had been fuelled by the humiliation of the first Gulf War. It was only to be expected that such people would at best
play down or ignore, at worst aid and abet jihadist activities. So it came about that bin Laden’s Egyptian second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was permitted to come and hold meetings in a public hall in Sanaa, and that al-Qaeda’s best counterfeiter was free to run classes in forging documents. Egyptian intelligence officers, determined to root out the jihadism that was threatening their tourist trade and Hosni Mubarak’s regime, found their Yemeni counterparts extremely tricky to do business with: ‘There were always problems,’ one told the Wall Street Journal, because ‘they [Yemenis] shared the same values of the people they were supposed to be arresting.’11

  This was no exaggeration. An in-depth Wall Street Journal investigation revealed that early in 1998, before either the African embassy bombings or the AAIA’s kidnapping of the western tourists of the same year, an Egyptian Afghan War veteran who had tired of jihad, or was desperately short of cash, visited the PSO headquarters in Sanaa to offer what any western intelligence agency and many Arab ones would have given millions of dollars and their right arms for: solid, detailed intelligence about the whereabouts, capacity and future plans of al-Qaeda and its affiliates. He divulged that Ayman al-Zawahiri was then in Yemen’s southern highland city of Taiz, rather than in Afghanistan, and he offered to go and spy on the AAIA down in Abyan. But, instead of thanking him for his help and putting him to work, the PSO immediately contacted jihadist friends to warn them of a traitor in their midst. It was decided that the turncoat must be punished by swift deportation to Afghanistan where he would be murdered. Fortunately for him, he managed to escape to Egypt instead.

  In 2000 - the year in which bin Laden sent Nasir al-Bahri to Ibb in Yemen’s southern highlands to collect a new young bride and Yemeni members of his organisation tried but failed (because heavy explosives sunk the fibreglass boat they were being transported on) to blow up the USS Suttivans in Aden - Italian counter-terrorism agents had an astounding success. They tapped snatches of a bizarre telephone conversation between a Yemeni PSO officer (who was also a tribal sheikh and a businessman) and al-Qaeda’s best forger in Sanaa.