Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes

by Victoria Clark

  Forger: How is the family?

  PSO officer: What family? I spend all my time with the mujahedeen brothers?

  …

  Forger: Are you talking about a jihad operation?

  PSO officer: Remember this well. In the future, listen to the news and remember well the words ‘above your head’. Listen to the people who are bringing news.

  …

  PSO officer: This is a terrifying thing… It is a thing that will drive you mad. Whoever has come up with this program is mad as a maniac. He must be a mad man but he is a genius. He is fixed on this program. He will turn everyone to ice.

  Forger: God is great and Muhammad is his prophet. They’re sons of bitches.

  …

  PSO officer: The danger in airports.

  Forger: Rain, rain.

  PSO officer: Ah yes, there are really big clouds in the sky in international territory. In that state the fire is already lit and is just waiting for the wind.12

  Understandably, the Italians decided these runic pronouncements were too vague to be immediately useful, but, fresh from his tenth anniversary of unification celebrations, Salih was about to be forced into a recognition of the fact that his Afghan War veterans were a clear and present danger. Mid-morning on 12 October 2000, a little fibre- glass motorboat loaded with 500lb of explosives drew alongside a gigantic billion-dollar American warship that was refuelling in Aden harbour and blasted a 32 by 36-foot-wide hole in its side, killing seven-teen American sailors.

  As a David versus Goliath coup de théâtre the attack on the USS Cole made spectacularly good propaganda, better even than the Afghan War veterans’ much-boasted defeat of the Soviet Union. New converts flocked to bin Laden’s global jihad, especially Yemenis, who took a natural awed pride in seeing their obscure and impoverished homeland capture the world’s headlines for the first time since the British pull-out from Aden almost forty years earlier. The former deputy chief of bin Laden’s bodyguards, Nasir al-Bahri, insisted to London’s al-Quds al-Arabi four years later that al-Qaeda was an overwhelmingly Yemeni organisation:

  It can be said that the majority of al-Qaeda members are Yemenis. This is a fact no one can deny. The leader of al-Qaeda is of Yemeni origin. His bodyguards are Yemenis. The trainers in the camps are Yemenis. The commanders at the fronts are Yemenis. All the operations that were directed against the United States were coordinated with Yemeni members. Yemenis are spread all over al-Qaeda13 -

  He was overstating the case, but it is fair to say that Yemenis were furnishing the movement with most of its muscle and much of its popular support at this time. Al-Bahri did confirm to me that Yemenis and Saudis outnumbered all other nationalities in the movement in that pre-9/11 period. In terms of authority and influence within the organisation, however, they were outdone by the Egyptians who tended to be older and to have more and longer experience of clandestine political activity. Tensions among bin Laden’s followers normally involved Eygptians and Yemenis. According to al-Bahri, Yemenis nicknamed the Egyptians ‘pharoahs’ on account of their patronising, haughty manner and boasted about how during the civil war in Yemen in the 1960s they had cut off 40,000 Egyptian noses and how happy they would be to cut off the rest them now in Afghanistan. The Egyptians meanwhile resented the Yemenis‘ vigour but lack of intellectual rigour, nicknaming them ’dervishes‘. At this stage, each operational section of al-Qaeda seems to have been headed by an experienced Egyptian, assisted by a Yemeni deputy. ’Before 9/11 changed everything,‘ al-Bahri told me, ’it looked as if bin Laden was slowly easing the Egyptians out and replacing them with Yemenis everywhere.’

  Whatever the Americans’ strong suspicions, al-Qaeda’s responsibility for the attack on the USS Cole was impossible to prove immediately. President Salih seemed more reluctant than anyone else to recognise the fact that a home-grown terrorist problem looked set to ruin Yemen’s tentative rapprochement with the US and spoil Aden’s slowly reviving reputation as a safe refuelling port. In a telephone conversation with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright Salih blustered that the attack on the Cole seemed to have been an accident, ‘not a deliberate act’.14 Within a couple of days an FBI team of sixty, led by John O’Neill, a man who had no doubt whatsoever that al-Qaeda was behind the incident, arrived in Aden to investigate, but President Salih was still in denial, wildly surmising to a Newsweek reporter that Israel might have been responsible.15 One senior Yemeni official, perhaps recalling the devious manner in which Britain had taken possession of Aden in 1839, even opined to Egypt’s Al-Ahram al-Arabi that the United States had blown up its own warship, as a pretext to capture Aden.16

  In spite of some hindrance from Yemeni officials who naturally resented the sudden invasion of US policemen, with their bullying hurry and flash talk of technological miracles like DNA, despite almost as much resistance from Barbara Bodine, the American ambassador to Sanaa, who resented clumsy New York policemen ruining the US’s delicately nurtured new relations with Yemen, it took the FBI team just a month to establish al-Qaeda’s responsibility for the attack. They managed to link one of its masterminds - a Saudi-Yemeni named Walid Mohammad bin Attash but known as ‘Khalid’, an Afghan War veteran who had lost a part of one leg in Afghanistan and wore a metal prosthesis - to bin Laden.

  Much later it would transpire that yet another Afghan War veteran and Saudi-born Yemeni named Abdel Rahim al-Nashiri, who had been working on the plans for a year and a half, training the local team and calibrating the bomb to inflict maximum damage, had escaped north, to the southern highland city of Taiz after the attack and received high-level protection from arrest there. In early 2002 al-Nashiri was seen out and about in Sanaa with the deputy director of the PSO,17 and went on to plan an attack against a French oil tanker, the Limburg, near the Hadhramaut port of Mukalla in October that year.18 It also transpired that prior to the attack on the Cole, al-Nashiri had been provided by no less a person than Yemen’s interior minister with an invaluable laissez-passer saying, ‘All security forces are instructed to co-operate with him and facilitate his mission.’19 In addition, the FBI managed to extract a useful confession from another conspirator, in spite of the fact that he was protected by the PSO colonel who had demonstratively kissed him on both cheeks before the interview began.20 Later still it was discovered that ‘Khalid’ and Ramzi bin al-Shibh,i a former Sanaa bank clerk with a German passport who later planned the 9/11 hijackings, had discussed the USS Cole operation at an al-Qaeda summit meeting in Kuala Lumpur a few months earlier.

  By the end of 2000, when President Bill Clinton was preparing to vacate the White House, the average American knew more about Yemen than he or she had ever wanted to and President Ali Abdullah Salih had accepted two glaringly obvious truths: first, that his country was home to members of a global jihadist movement with access to enough funding and know-how to wreak serious damage on Yemeni as well as western interests, and second, that his PSO was unfit for the purpose of combating the nuisance.

  However, unlike the new American president, George W. Bush, Salih was neither temperamentally inclined nor sufficiently powerful to confront the jihadists head on by declaring all-out war on them. Dancing on the heads of snakes rather than setting out to destroy the reptiles had always been more his style. Knowledge of the climate of opinion inside his PSO but also chats over qat with jihadist sympathisers like Brigadier-General Ali Muhsin al-Ahmar and the cleric Sheikh Abdul Majid al-Zindani, for example, would also have discouraged him from taking direct action. And then he had to consider the tribes whose custom it was to offer shelter to outlaws and whose cold appetite for cash he knew well. Furthermore, the jihadists‘ David-like determination to take on a Goliath West whose soldiers had been trampling the Muslim Holy Land since the First Gulf War, whose planes were still enforcing a no-fly zone over Iraq and whose dollars were still bankrolling Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land, played far too well with far too many Yemenis at all levels of society for him even to contemplate a wholesale military crackdown. An
yway, how could one begin to police the contents of peoples’ minds and hearts?

  In order to avoid Yemen becoming an international pariah again as it had been on the eve of the first Gulf War, in order to remove any risk of invasion by the US and instead access a few million dollars’ worth of military equipment and surveillance technology, Salih had to convince America’s new Republican president that he was willing and able to slay the jihadism snake, although that had never been and could never be his modus operandi. In effect, President George W. Bush was one more snake-head he was having to learn to dance on.

  a Yemeni sarong

  b Known as a beyhan chair, any circular band of fabric slipped around the knees while sitting cross-legged to act as a comfortable support.

  c Edward Shackleton, the Labour peer and Minister without Portfolio tasked with the handover of Aden to the NLF in 1967.

  d Sultan Nasir al-Fadhli died in a Saudi hospital in November 2008, and was flown home for burial in a private plane, courtesy of the Saudi royal family.

  e Today famous as the father of Islamic Radicalism, the Egyptian intellectual who first argued that rebellion against one’s temporal ruler might be justified. Extremely popular among young Saudis outraged by the perceived hypocrisy of their worldly princes and Wahhabi clergy.

  f The shared al-Ahmar name is a coincidence - the two men are not related.

  g Al-Hada’s daughter was married to one of the future 9/11 hijackers.

  h Abu Hamza’s son, Mohamed Kemal Mostafa, served three years in an Aden prison before returning to Britain, where he worked for London Underground until 2006 when his foreign criminal record as a would-be terrorist was uncovered. In mid-2009, he and two brothers were convicted of stealing a million pounds’ worth of luxury cars.

  i Ramzi bin al-Shibh is the highest-value Yemeni prisoner at Guantanamo, charged with planning the 9/11 attacks.

  CHAPTER SIX

  A TRIBAL DISORDER?

  INTO THE DESERT

  Like most Yemeni offices, it was mysteriously, worryingly bare of papers and computers and empty of staff, but I had no choice except to hope and trust. Whatever this enterprise was, its boss, Mohammed Salih Muhsin, represented my best chance of visiting Yemen’s central Marib desert, home to oil fields and famously restive tribes, and haven of fugitive jihadists. To my great relief, he arrived at precisely the time he had promised he would, with a fashionable mobile phone in one hand, some prayer beads in the other and no qat cud swelling his cheek.

  The absence of that cud was an important clue, but there were others to alert me to the fact that I was meeting no ordinary Yemeni. Bearded, beatifically smiling but avoiding both my eye and the physical contact of a handshake, Muhsin was the Muslim equivalent of a born-again Christian. He was a person who believed he was practising his faith in a manner resembling as closely as possible that of the Prophet and his companions; technically speaking therefore he was a Salafist. But there were at least two varieties of Salafist. If I was lucky he was not the al-Qaeda jihadist sort like Osama bin Laden but the more common and moderate variety. I surprised myself hoping he confined himself to restricting his womenfolk’s freedom while waging harmless spiritual jihad against himself and refraining from politics rather than believing it his bounden Muslim duty to wage lethal violent jihad against the West and all her Muslim allies. On the simple grounds that he seemed to bear me no obvious grudge, I decided I was safe.

  After graciously reiterating his willingness to be of assistance, he divulged a few facts. As the owner of a company involved in transporting supplies to Marib’s oil fields, he was indeed in a position to procure me the requisite tasrih permit from the interior ministry without which I could not travel in a region renowned for its instability and frequent kidnappings. Better still, he could pass me off as a guest of one of the oil companies and, best of all, he would arrange for his nephew Ibrahim to show me around. When I enquired about payment for all these kind and valuable services, he smiled and raised a languid hand. I understood that we would not debase our new friendship with squalid money talk until I returned to Sanaa, satisfied.

  Two days later, my taciturn northern highlander tribesman driver Walid and I drove east out of Sanaa in the direction of Marib with twenty photocopies of the requisite tasrih safely stowed in his Land Cruiser’s glove compartment, one for every checkpoint we were likely to encounter. While we idled in the capital’s chaotic rush-hour traffic, tut-tutting about the primary-school-age children dodging dangerously between the lines of cars to hawk their boxes of tissues, bottles of water and newspapers, Walid observed that although he bore no personal grudge against our friend Mohammed Salih Muhsin, he himself had no time for Salafism of any kind. A Salafist neighbour of his had paid for his puritanical zeal with his life when another neighbour had hurled a great lump of cement at him, he told me with quiet satisfaction, before adding that he had expressly forbidden his teenage son to loiter around the mosque after Friday prayers when such notions were easily picked up.

  Taking advantage of Walid’s rare talkativeness, I moved our conversation on to another ‘ism’- tribalism. Although handsomely dressed from head to toe as a tribesman, Walid surprised me by declaring that he had about as little patience with tribalism as he did with Salafism. When I questioned him about his own highland Khawlani tribe, through whose land a part of our route to Marib lay, he insisted that it meant nothing to him, that there was no point in visiting his village because there was nothing to see, that he had no contact with his sheikh, a businessman who spent most of his time in Sanaa. A few months spent working as a driver for the team of Americans investigating al-Qaeda’s attack on the USS Cole had - thanks be to God! - left him rich enough to build his large family of seven daughters and only son a home in Sanaa, where the power of the tribe was greatly reduced, he explained. Thank God he could think and act for himself, without the help of any sheikh. ‘What are sheikhs good for?’ he demanded of me, one hand on the steering wheel and the other resting lightly on the hilt of his jambiyah, before embarking on a long tale aimed at proving to me that only greedy sheikhs profited from lethal tribal feuds.

  In about 1980 a member of Walid’s northern highland tribe who lived about a mile from his village, a young man recently returned, wealthy and self-confident, from working in Saudi Arabia, took a fancy to a shepherdess from a neighbouring tribe who lived five miles away. Soon the pair - he with a group of his young men friends, she with a group of her girlfriends - were regularly meeting up to picnic in the mountains, greatly enjoying themselves out of sight of their elders. Inevitably, a male of the shepherdess’s tribe got wind of these delightful goings on but decided that the whole business was altogether too dishonouring, too shameful - ayb (shame, dishonour, disgrace) is a key tribal word - to tackle head on. But tribal custom law, urf, dictated that some form of revenge had to be taken. Hostilities were duly opened by way of a minor provocation; a sheep belonging to the shepherdess’s tribe was slaughtered and Walid’s kinsman blamed for killing it. Unfortunately, even this expedient escalated alarmingly into a land dispute, the most serious of all kinds of dispute, in which the sheikhs of both tribes became involved, at great expense to both communities. Every year for a decade, Walid told me, the two tribes would go to war for two or three days. He himself had fought in two of those mini campaigns. ‘We used to climb into the mountains at night, about a hundred of us, wearing camouflage, and just bang away at anything that moved. For all I know the dispute’s still unresolved,’ he said, ‘and the sheikhs still profiting by mediating, although I do know for a fact that the man involved is dead and the shepherdess long married.’

  Yemen would be much better off without her tribes, he told me, before changing the subject to gloomily forecast that we would be lucky to clear the first checkpoint on the edge of town without acquiring the tiresome encumbrance of an armed police escort, and he was right. After an hour or so idling at the checkpoint, we learned we would be sharing such an escort with a group of elderly Taiwanese to
urists who were headed to Marib too, to view the meagre vestiges of an engineering wonder of the ancient world, the eighth-century BC Marib Dam. As soon as a blue and white Toyota pick-up complete with a posse of police and a mounted heavy machine gun appeared, we were all on our way again. Under a clear blue winter sky, only our strange caravan and the odd stray donkey moved. In that craggily lunar landscape coloured a uniformly Martian russet, nothing grew. It seemed to me that a hardiness honed by a determination to survive in this, the land their forefathers had inhabited, coupled with an imperative drive to avail themselves of the resources to be found in the kinder southern highlands and Tihama coast, were the keys to the Zaydi highlanders’ centuries-old supremacy in this corner of south Arabia.

  The descent from the mountains to the Marib desert was sudden enough to set my ears popping. We were both hungry and Walid almost visibly twitching for his daily qat by the time we arrived in the town of Marib, the province’s capital. The place where we had arranged to meet Mohammed Salih Muhsin’s young nephew, Ibrahim, was not so much a restaurant as a canteen - a large, strip-lit room with white bathroom-tiled walls and ceiling fans where serving boys who looked no more than ten hurled burning hot flat-breads and battered tin plates of bean stew onto Formica-top tables that were littered with newspaper and pestered by flies. Men, only men, gestured angrily at them, barking their orders above the already deafening background roar of the furnace oven.