Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes

by Victoria Clark

  There was still no acknowledgement of the manner in which tribalism could inhibit the development of state institutions and compromise national security. Evidence piled on evidence - the killing of soldiers by tribesmen defending their ancestral land, the jeopardising of the work of foreign companies involved in oil extraction, the freelancing vigilantism of the tribes and examples of them sheltering wanted jihadists according to the rules of tribal code of hospitality or for simple mercenary gain -had yet to drive home that lesson. Sarah Phillips, an acute Australian observer of Yemen’s political scene, has defined the relationship between the Yemeni state and the tribes as ‘often contradictory, with each at times increasing and at times diminishing the other’s power, but both reinforcing traits in the other that provide considerable obstacles to state-building’.6 Unregulated, ad hoc, highly personalised and utterly opaque would be other ways of describing the manner in which the competing authorities of the state and tribes are constantly being challenged, tested and renegotiated. The steps of the president’s dance on the heads of his snakes are never routine and the dance never ends. The state as embodied by Salih and the tribes as represented by their sheikhs are willing partners in this endless dance. It suits them both well because it is what they both know best.

  REVENGE OF THE PREDATOR

  I wondered if the tribal law governing the sheltering of an outlaw with no questions asked for at least three days meant that even an educated young tribesman like Ibrahim, a person employed by a western company, would feel bound by tribal custom to shelter a person branded ‘a terrorist’ by Yemen’s western allies - bin Laden, for example?

  ‘What do you think of Osama bin Laden, Ibrahim?’ I asked him as we bounced on south across the sand into the former PDRY, in the direction of his family home where we were to spend the night.

  ‘Do you want the truth?’ he said, eagerly leaning forward from the back seat.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I replied.

  ‘Osama bin Laden’s a hero, I think,’ said Ibrahim, cautiously adding that he was sure the need for global jihad would evaporate if only America could bring itself to be more even-handed in the treatment of the Israel-Palestine question.

  ‘Do you thnk there’s any chance that he’s hiding in Yemen?’ I asked, and received an answer that confirmed my belief that, if history was anything to go by, Yemeni tribesmen’s overriding interests were money and land, not any ideology about a restored Caliphate.

  ‘No,’ said Ibrahim, ‘with that big a bounty on his head? Someone would definitely betray him! He wouldn’t risk coming here!’

  ‘If bin Laden called for Yemenis to go and fight jihad in Iraq, would you go?’ I asked him.

  ‘If he asked me to go and kill American or Israeli soldiers, of course, I would love to go, but I wouldn’t go and kill civilians.’

  Ibrahim’s lucrative employment with Oxy and the cluster of excited and happy faces that greeted him when we arrived at his home a few minutes later amply accounted for his failure to beat a path to the jihad in Iraq. As head of the family since his father had died, he was clearly the happy object of at least a dozen women’s deep devotion. His mother, his sisters, his teenage nieces who were happily learning to read at the age of fifteen, his startlingly beautiful but illiterate wife and his one-year-old baby daughter all doted on him. Three small nephews copied every gesture he made.

  Early the next morning Walid piloted the Land Cruiser slowly around the low sand dunes on the outskirts of the Ibrahim’s village, allowing us plenty of time for a good look at a school built with foreign aid but standing empty for lack of any teachers, and then at a circle of men in their pale shirts, patterned futas and faded head-cloths sitting cross-legged in a small patch of shade next to a Toyota pick-up. I thought they must be having their breakfast.

  ‘Breakfast? No. They’re men from my Balharith tribe,’ said Ibrahim. ‘They’re holding a strategy meeting. It’s nothing so special, just that one of those guys owns some land on the coast, on the road between Aden and Abyan. He has paperwork proving his ownership and authorisation from the president, but the officials down there have decided to seize it. About a week ago soldiers removed the posts marking the plot and arrested the man he had employed to guard it. So those guys are planning to cut the road near here, to stop the flow of traffic to and from the oil fields.’

  ‘Will it work, do you think?’

  Ibrahim shrugged. ‘Maybe, probably - because the state hates anything to disrupt the oil business. That’s why the tribes around here are powerful. We’ve got some kind of chance of getting justice!’ Proud of his tribe, he was surprised and pleased when I recalled that the suspected leader of al-Qaeda in Yemen in the period immediately before and after 9/11 had been a fellow Balharith, yet another Afghan War veteran named Qaid Sinan al-Harithi.

  In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when, on account of its lawlessness, Yemen was regarded as the likeliest refuge for jihadists fleeing the western onslaught on Afghanistan, President Salih had warded off a rumoured American invasion by speedily deporting whole planeloads of foreign Afghan War veterans. Anxious not to repeat the costly mistake of siding with Saddam Hussein in 1990, he had also hurried off to Washington to reassure President George W Bush that he was on his side in the new global ‘War on Terror’, but Bush had given him to understand that he would have to prove it, that actions would have to speak louder than words. When Salih offered to help lower the international temperature by mediating a reconciliation between Baghdad and Washington, chattily quoting an old Arab proverb to Bush about taking care not to put a cat in a cage because it might turn into a lion, Bush retorted that the Iraqi cat had rabies which could only be cured by cutting off its head.7 He then upped the pressure by demanding he demonstrate his new commitment to tackling jihadism by arresting a pair of al-Qaeda men suspected of playing leading roles in the attack on the USS Cole the previous year. The more important of the two had been Ibrahim’s fellow tribesman, Qaid Sinan al-Harithi.

  Within a month of his return from Washington, in December 2001, with pledges of millions of dollars, bugging equipment, helicopters, guns and bullet-proof vests as well as a hundred special-forces trainers, Salih duly went to work. Al-Harithi and four other alleged jihadists were tracked down to the Marib desert, to a village called al-Hosun where, outlawed by his own Balharith tribe, he and his companions were being sheltered by members of the powerful Abidah tribe. The president then despatched his son Ahmad at the head of a few hundred freshly American-trained special forces, with helicopters, artillery and tanks, to Marib to winkle them out. For two days the military followed the letter of the tribal law, parleying with local leaders, patiently working to convince them to flout the tribal custom that required them to shelter a fugitive, no questions asked. But either the pressure exerted by the din of helicopters overhead, or the shock of a jet suddenly breaking the sound barrier, seems to have destroyed all confidence and trust, and caused negotiations to break down and fighting to break out. After a three-hour battle that left eighteen dead and twenty-five wounded, the Abidah tribesmen gloried in a victory over the state: only five of them were dead, only seven had been wounded and their troublesome Balharith guest and his friends had made a safe getaway8

  The state did subsequently manage to arrest ten Marib sheikhs who were soon released, but, using an old tactic regularly resorted to by the imams, their sons kept hostage in their place. Three months later four of these boys explained to the Daily Telegraph that they were locked up because their fathers were still refusing to sign a pledge to ‘fight terrorism and hand over al-Qa’eda suspects on an American list’.9 Taken aback by Salih’s unaccustomed determination to exercise some control over the region, and perhaps mollified by a raise in their stipends, twenty sheikhs did eventually agree to co-operate and soon the Marib-Shabwa oil region was bristling with checkpoints and crawling with military and informants in the pay of the Americans as well as Yemen’s PSO.

  Washington’s initial delight at seeing Presid
ent Salih go into action against al-Qaeda was tempered by disappointment at the failure of the operation and a fresh determination that if Yemen lacked sufficient skill, then the US itself would get the job done. The rumoured invasion of Iraq and signs that the Bush administration might once again be eyeing Yemen as the ‘next Afghanistan’, as next in line for invasion, meant that Yemeni sentiment against the US was running high, but Salih found himself having to agree to the US directly intervening in Yemen. On the understanding that no word of the embarrassing surrender of sovereignty ever leaked out, he gave the CIA permission to carry out an Israeli-style targeted assassination of the man who had escaped capture a year earlier, Ibrahim’s outlawed kinsman, Qaid Sinan al-Harithi.

  Intercepted mobile-phone conversations had convinced both the CIA and Edmund Hull, America’s ambassador in Sanaa, that the Marib desert was still the right place to focus the hunt for Yemen’s leading jihadists. An energetic Arabic-speaker with a counter-terrorism background, Hull had quickly got the measure of Yemen and its tribes and figured out the most efficient way of doing business in the country. He regularly travelled the road between Sanaa and Marib, with a full armed escort, sometimes wearing a Texan stetson, to spend hours chewing qat and crossing the palms of local sheikhs in exchange for useful intelligence. But none of those arduous excursions bore much useful fruit until late 2002, very shortly after Qaid Sinan al-Harithi was reported to have pulled off another propaganda coup for al-Qaeda by badly damaging a French oil tanker named the Limburg a few miles off the Hadhramaut coast.

  On the afternoon of Sunday, 3 November, one of Hull’s local spies watched the thickly bearded al-Harithi and five others climb into a black Toyota Land Cruiser and then phoned through the car details to CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia. Final telephone permission for immediate action was then swiftly received from Salih, who was enjoying a holiday cruise in the waters off Aden. With a Predator drone launched from Djibouti ‘loitering’ noiselessly some 15,000 feet above Marib, equipped with a video camera fitted with a 900mm zoom lens that could read car licence plates, the job of locking onto and tracking the car was managed by means of al-Harithi’s mobile phone signal and a global positioning system. Soon CIA operatives 7,000 miles away in Virginia had a real-time, close-up image of the Land Cruiser on their computer screens, and were watching it wind its way down a twisting mountain road towards a main road before it veered off into the desert along a sand track. Within a second of one of those operatives pressing a button, a five-foot-long AG-114 Hellfire missile fixed to the undercarriage of the Predator fired off, locked onto the Land Cruiser and blew it to pieces. The vehicle and all six of its occupants were instantly incinerated. Only Qaid Sinan al-Harithi was subsequently identifiable, by a mark on his leg.

  ‘Did you know that he had a bad leg because, when bin Laden was living in Sudan, he was one of his bodyguards, and got hurt once while shielding him from bullets?’ Ibrahim asked me.

  Sanaa had hastened to put out its agreed cover story: some of Yemen’s most wanted criminals had been hell-bent on sabotage and murder, headed for the oil fields, for pipelines and foreign workers, with a carload of weapons and a particularly dangerous cylinder of propane gas, when their car had simply exploded. The incident might have ended there, with most Yemenis feeling relieved that God in his wisdom had rid the country of some worthless hooligans, and with the CIA taking a quiet professional pride in a strike so surgically precise it had expunged the bad memory of two previous blunders by Predators in Afghanistan. Everything might have been fine if Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz had not spoken out of turn. In an interview with CNN two days after the event, he revealed precisely what both Sanaa and the CIA had been so anxious to conceal: the US’s sole responsibility for a ‘very successful tactical operation’.10 Wolfowitz may have calculated that such a thrilling victory in the ‘War on Terror’, occurring only a day before the mid-term elections, was simply too good a publicity opportunity to pass up, but the admission backfired badly.

  The strike had been a relatively clean one - for a start, no wedding party had been accidentally incinerated - but there was an international outcry at Washington’s double standards; on the one hand the Bush administration was reluctantly condemning Israel’s targeted assassinations of Hamas leaders in the Gaza Strip, while on the other plotting precisely the same actions in other countries it was not even at war with. There were moral qualms about the dawning of a new era of assassination by remote control and about such ‘extra-judicial executions’ constituting a serious violation of international human rights law. The revelation that one of al-Harithi’s five companions had been an American national of Yemeni origin made many Americans wonder how the US could justify summarily executing its own citizens in that way. But the reaction in the western media and parliaments was nothing compared to the repercussions of the affair in Yemen. Security concerns raised by a rash of anti-US demonstrations all over the country led to the hasty evacuation and temporary closure of the US embassy in Sanaa. The president was known to be both furious and alarmed. A high-ranking member of the ruling political party, Brigadier-General Yahya al-Muttawakil, seemed to be speaking for Salih when he complained to a Christian Science Monitor reporter at an afternoon qat chew a few days after the event: ‘This is why it is so difficult to make deals with the United States,’ he began, ‘This is why we are reluctant to work closely with them. They don’t consider the internal circumstances in Yemen.’11 Over a year was to pass before Salih could risk a formal admission that he had authorised the strike. He had braved not only the displeasure of friends in the region, notably Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, but also the wrath of the large bin Laden-loving section of Yemen society in order to support the War on Terror, and this was all the thanks he got.

  Not surprisingly, the dazzling Predator technology has not been employed since in Yemen.a For the two years that remained of his posting Ambassador Hull did what he could to remove the impression he had given to Yemenis who recalled the last years of the British in Aden that he was behaving like a colonial High Commissioner. Between 2001 and 2004 American aid to Yemen far eclipsed Europe’s total aid contribution to the country. Although most of the money was spent on the military equipment which President Salih insisted he needed to secure his grip on the country sufficiently to do battle with al-Qaeda, some was spent on displays of ‘soft power’. Targeted for assassination himself in revenge for the killing of Qaid Sinan al-Harithi, Hull was nevertheless to be seen out and about in Marib during his last summer in Yemen, laying the foundation stone of a $3 million Yemen Civilisation Museum that the US was helping to fund, handing over medical equipment for a new hospital (complete with a plaque indicating that it was the gift of the American people) and donating $40,000 to twenty-six local farmers for improvements in irrigation methods.12

  I asked Walid and Ibrahim if, since we happened to be in the neighbourhood, they would mind going in search of the location of the famous Hellfire missile attack because I remembered passing by the place on my first visit to Yemen, in the winter of the same year Ambassador Hull left Yemen, 2004. The two-year-old incident had still been fresh in locals’ minds, I recalled. The Yemeni manager of Marib’s five-star hotel, the Bilqis Marib, had told me that Ambassador Hull had been a guest of the hotel on the very day of the strike and had received a call from Sanaa informing him of the mission’s success. I had learned that instead of hurrying back to Sanaa, the doughty diplomat had continued his tour around the ancient sites - the ancient dam and the Queen of Sheba’s temples - just as if nothing had happened. Our convoy of Land Cruisers with its armed police escort had set out east from Marib, guided by a local Bedouin in a battered old pick-up, along the same desert track used by the doomed al-Harithi and his five companions. When we stopped to allow the drivers to let more air out of their tyres at just the spot where the missile had struck, members of our police escort pointed out shards of broken windscreen still lying in the sand. One of them knew that Ambassador Hull had stayed at
the Bilqis Marib the night before, but insisted that Qaid Sinan al-Harithi had been there too. Another swore that the smell of roasting flesh had wafted to a distance of three kilometres on that fateful Sunday afternoon, but none of them had had a good word to say about one of al-Qaeda’s favourite martyrs. In their view he had been just a ‘known trouble-maker’, an outlaw from his own tribe, a feckless Afghan War veteran who had eked out a living by smuggling weapons across the Saudi border. They insisted that two years before his incineration by a Hellfire missile, he and his stash of weapons for sale had caused a shoot-out in Marib’s gun market.

  There was no hint of reverence in the way they spoke about their dead countryman, no sense that he and his luckless companions had achieved any glory as well as fame. Instead, they sounded sceptical that such a scruffy ne’er do well as old al-Harithi had had it in him to lead al-Qaeda in Yemen, bemused by his capacity to bring down on himself the wrath of the world’s only superpower in the shape of one of the most advanced weapons systems ever seen.

  9/11 - A SAUDI/YEMENI AFFAIR?

  The deserts and oil fields of the Marib-Shabwa area continue to welcome fugitive jihadists. Seven years after the despatching of Qaid Sinan al-Harithi by Hellfire missile, in February 2009, President Salih was visiting the region for the umpteenth time to complain to the local sheikhs that they were seeing ‘the terrorists’ in their villages but doing nothing to stop them. He had to admit that, for all the armed forces at his disposal, he was powerless to root them out without the tribes’ co-operation.13

  Salih knew as well as the tribes did that this had nothing whatsoever to do with them buying into the jihadists’ brand of Islam, given that the tribes considered themselves and their customs more strong and ancient than Islam of any sort and had never allowed religion to get in the way of their own material interests. But he also knew that there would be no co-operation as long as sheltering jihadists made financial sense, as long as they could pay more, or at least as much as, he could pay in stipends and other benefits. And so he had paid them well. A close adviser to Salih admitted to the Yemen Times that ‘paying the tribal leaders to co-operate was cheaper than any other way’ of spoiling the region’s reputation as a haven for jihadists.14 It was also, of course, the tried and tested way that had worked for centuries, as the imams, the Ottomans, the British and most recently the Egyptians had all discovered to their immense cost. But by early 2009 the president and the tribes were both aware that the country’s oil revenues were shrinking and with them, Salih’s leverage. By the end of June, the grip of the state on the region was so dangerously loose that government forces were skirmishing with al-Qaeda jihadists, the latter killing up to three soldiers, and taking another seven hostages before creating an Internet video entitled ‘The Battle of Marib’- described by Gregory Johnsen, the leading US authority on Yemeni jihadism as ‘by far the most technologically impressive piece of propaganda I have seen it produce to date’.15 The video warns Yemeni soldiers to keep out of the Marib and Abidah tribal regions in future.