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Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes

Page 25

by Victoria Clark


  The America-led invasion of Iraq presented all the Muslim world with such a powerfully strong argument for jihad that even my prosperous tribesman oil-worker friend, young Ibrahim, had longed to be off there battling American forces. Ahmad al-Fadhli had told me about a young Saudi cousin of his who had made his way to Iraq via Yemen and Syria and only began to doubt his commitment to the cause when he was invited to become a suicide bomber. A treasure trove of documents captured by US forces on the Syrian border in 2007 included lists of foreign jihadists, complete with details of how they had reached Iraq, from where and with how much money. Most of the Yemenis hailed from Sanaa, but one of the lists described a twenty-three-year-old Hadhrami named Salim Umar Said Ba-Wazire who, like so many of his Hadhrami forebears, had travelled from Yemen by way of the Far East, via Malaysia. After supplying his home telephone number in case his family needed to be informed of his death, he had poignantly added in brackets, ‘do not inform the women’. Most of these jihadists had listed their occupations simply as ‘martyr’, ‘fighter’ or ‘suicide bomber’,32 and had donated hundreds, in Ba-Wazir’s case 1,500, dollars to the cause. After Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s death by American targeted assassination in June 2006, some began making their way home again. Russian spies hunting for the men who had killed four Russian diplomats in Baghdad, tracked one of them down to Aden where he and another Iraq veteran were in the process of forming a ‘Brigade of Martyr Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’ to fund-raise and recruit more jihadists.

  This third generation were not amenable to golden handshakes and deals as Tariq al-Fadhli and Nasir al-Bahri had been. They were committed to the violent destruction of anyone and anything that ranged itself on the side of the West: President Salih, some Spanish tourists, some Belgian tourists, a foreign-owned oil facility, Yemeni police and security officers. All were now fair game. Judging by a plethora of statements on their websites, jihadist groups were proliferating so fast and energetically that it was impossible to know where one ended and another began, which one was in alliance with which, or which was affiliated to al-Qaeda proper and how closely, or whether Osama bin Laden exercised any control at all any longer. If it was the case that Yemenis featured prominently in what Jason Burke calls the ‘al-Qaeda hard core’33 that had monopolised the jihadist scene between 1996 and 2001, they were at least as well represented in this more diffuse and fragmented phase of the generation of jihadists who had won their spurs in Iraq between 2003 and al-Zarqawi’s demise in mid-2006.

  Al-Qaeda in Yemen (AQY) was the name of the organisation led by Qaid Sinan al-Harithi, who was killed by an American Predator in the Marib in 2002. Down but - while there was jihad to be waged in Iraq - not entirely out, AQY had received a new lease of life in 2006 thanks to the jailbreak of the twenty-three second-generation jihadists. By March 2008, its ranks boosted by veterans of the war in Iraq, it was thriving again, putting out a slick online magazine titled Sada al-Malahim (‘Echo of Epics’) which was very similar in both design and content to the more established Saudi Sawt al-Jihad [Voice of Jihad] but more geared to criticising Salih’s regime and to trying to appeal to the tribes for support than its Saudi counterpart. A sample issue contained articles titled ‘Seven Years of Crusader Wars’, ‘The Ruling on the Soldiers and Helpers of the Pharoah of Our Time’, ‘The Power is in Firing [Guns]’, ‘The Ruling on Escaping from the Tyrants Prison and its Persecution’, ’Letter from the Daughter of a Mujahid‘ and ’Preventing and Treating Colds’.34 Another group, calling itself the ‘Unification Battalions’, planned attacks on the British and Italian embassies and the French Cultural Centre in Sanaa in 2005. Yet another, the Yemeni Soldiers‘ Brigades (YSB), was first heard from after the attack on the Spanish tourists in 2007, and again in March 2008 when it misfired three mortars at the US embassy in Sanaa and succeeded only in injuring a dozen schoolgirls, to whom it then politely wished a speedy recovery. YSB also claimed to be part of a group named ’Qaeda al-Jihad‘, and went on to attack a foreigners’ compound in Sanaa in April 2008. A month later it seemed to have joined forces with AQY in Yemen, but then to have fallen out over strategy, with YSB carrying out a number of little assaults on oil installations and police stations and AQY apparently preferring to conserve its energies for more dramatic, global headline-grabbing attacks. By July 2008 yet another group - ‘Yemeni Islamic Jihad’ (YIJ), or perhaps ‘Al-Tawheed Battalions of Yemeni Islamic Jihad’ - appeared to have merged with YSB. An absurdly unprincipled organisation, the YIJ demanded $5 million of protection money from Saudi Arabia and the UAE to refrain from carrying out attacks.

  Yemen’s malfunctioning security and legal structures are acting as excellent recruiting sergeants for jihadism in its third phase. Privation and torture are a well-documented feature of jails run without supervision by Yemen’s PSO and the National Security Bureau (NSB), a rival security structure founded in 2002, with American funding, after it had become clear that the PSO was riddled with jihadist sympathisers. The slaughter of the two Belgian women tourists and their driver in the Wadi Doan in January 2008 was justified as retaliation for the alleged death by torture of a fellow jihadist while in jail. Relatives of wanted jihadists were taken as hostages. The case of a well-known jihadist, an Arabic professor known as Abu Zubayr, was highlighted by international human-rights groups; in July 2007 his three younger brothers - Amir, Mouad and Mohammed al-Abbaba - were all arrested and placed in solitary confinement for two months. Almost two years later, they were still being held without trial and their brother was still at large.35 If Yemen’s jails were exacerbating the jihadist problem so was President Salih’s sudden change of tack, the abandonment of conciliation tactics and his authorisation of a violent crackdown on dozens of suspected jihadists who were thrown into jail for years on end, without any hope of a fair trial.

  The new campaign began in July 2008, after a suicide ramming of a police compound in Seiyun, only a few miles’ drive from Tarim in the Wadi Hadhramaut itself, by a third-year medical student who had been raised in Saudi Arabia and longed to fight in Iraq. When his jihadist group carelessly posted a photo of the happy martyr on a website, the PSO wasted no time in using it to facilitate a bumper trawl of thirty jihadists in Hadhramaut, fifteen of whom reportedly confessed to planning operations in Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Fresh leads gleaned through their interrogation pointed to another nest of jihadists residing in Mukalla; stores of arms, military uniforms and women’s clothing were found at a house in Hadhramaut’s main port. From Mukalla, police followed the trail back inland, across the empty plateau, down into the Wadi Hadhramaut, to a house in Tarim where, after a two-hour gun battle that cost the lives of two policemen and five suspected jihadists (one of whom had escaped in the mass jailbreak of 2006), a search unearthed more arms, ‘fifty large sacks loaded with gun powder and large amounts of TNT explosives’36 as well as computers and paperwork relating to planned attacks.

  Nevertheless, on 17 September that year, jihadists staged their most dramatically sophisticated operation since the attack on the USS Cole eight years earlier: an assault on the American Embassy in Sanaa. It was the third try at the target, the second attack in six months. At approximately nine in the morning, half a dozen suicide bombers - three of them wearing explosive vests and all dressed in military uniforms - managed to drive two police cars through the outer ring of the embassy compound’s reinforced perimeter defences. No Americans, but nine Yemenis and an Indian - four civilians and six security guards - were killed in the blast. The loud-mouthed leadership of one jihadist group proudly claimed responsibility for the attack, but it transpired that the more impressively organised, funded and staffed AQY was its perpetrator.

  By the year’s end it was abundantly clear to both Salih and his western allies that, almost two decades on from the fateful influx of thousands of Afghan War veterans into the country, AQY was thriving again and Yemen once again serving as a refuge for jihadists from all over the Muslim world. The lists of those arrested in various police trawls showed that ther
e were Syrian, Kuwaiti, and Saudi veterans of the war in Iraq as well as fugitives from countries where campaigns aimed at eradicating jihadism had been going on far longer and with greater efficiency than in Yemen. In the coming year, as American Predator attacks began an efficient culling of jihadists for whom Pakistan’s ungoverned western tribal areas had been a sanctuary, there would be more and more reports of an escaping flow in the direction of Yemen.37

  The country’s jihad scene was changing, the confusion created by a profusion of groups gradually clearing as passions roused by scenes of carnage and prisoner abuse by US forces in Iraq grew calmer. A few months before the attack on the US embassy in Sanaa, in March 2008, AQY’s on-line magazine had carried an article by a wanted Saudi jihadist who suggested that, since most members of al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia were either dead or locked up, it would make sense for those left alive and free to join forces with AQY. They could all help each other out, he argued, by combining the ‘life and the money of the Saudi mujahideen’ with the ‘land, life and experiences of the Yemeni brothers’38 - a suggestion that was soon endorsed by bin Laden’s right-hand man, Ayman al-Zawahiri. The formal merger, along with some personnel changes, was declared in a video recording accompanying the web-posting of the January 2009 edition of Sada al-Malahim.

  The head of AQY, a second-generation Yemeni jihadist, one of the twenty-three escapees from jail in 2006 and bin Laden’s former secretary, Nasir al-Wahayshi, assumed the leadership of the freshly amalgamated Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Much to the embarrassment of the Saudis, Said Ali al-Shihri, a Saudi citizen of Yemeni tribal origin who had graduated from a Saudi re-education centre after six years at Guantanamo, was appointed his deputy. Within the month al-Wahayshi was calling for a jihad uprising of Yemen’s tribes against a new invasion of ‘the land of faith and wisdom’ (the Prophet Mohammed’s famous description of Yemen) by ‘French, British and Western Crusaders’, his own take on the joint action by navies from all over world to rid the Arabian Sea and Gulf of Aden of Somali pirates. He mentioned that training camps for jihadists destined for Palestine were being set up in Yemen and he reiterated that tourists, Yemenis guarding western embassies and, of course, representatives of any Muslim regime (including Yemen’s) that was doing the West’s bidding, were now all valid targets. In the opinion of one foreign analyst, the merger had injected ‘gravitas’ into a previously shambolic jihadist scene.39

  In March 2009, AQAP claimed responsibility for two suicide attacks - the first, by a nineteen-year-old from Taiz, killed four South Korean tourists in the Hadhramaut town of the mud-skyscrapers, Shibam; the second, three days later, targeted a visiting delegation of South Korean diplomats and investigators en route for Sanaa airport, but harmed no one except its teenage attacker. The co-ordination and careful targeting of the attacks were unnerving; the mystery of why South Koreans had been selected as victims was cleared up when it was recalled that South Korea was lined up to be the brand new LNG plant’s first customer a few months later.

  Al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia’s strategy to beat a retreat back into Yemen, in order to be able to plan operations in the Kingdom from a safe base, was test-driven in August 2009 with a first bold plot to assassinate a member of the Saudi royal family. Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, chief of counter-terrorism in the Kingdom, had been contacted by a Saudi member of al-Qaeda who had fled to Yemen but claimed to have seen the error of his jihadist ways, and to be ready to turn over a new leaf and take advantage of Saudi Arabia’s generous re-education facilities, just as another Saudi jihadist on the run in Yemen had recently done. The twenty-three-year-old Abdullah Hassan al-Asiri’s approach was kindly welcomed, his attitude of repentance construed as entirely appropriate to the holy month of Ramadan. The prince graciously agreed not just to receive him at his own home in Jeddah, but to send his jet to collect him from Najran, close to the border. On arrival at the evening Ramadan gathering at the royal mansion, al-Asiri was presented to the prince. He informed him that several of his fellow jihadists in Yemen were also ready to turn themselves in, suggesting that the prince reassure one of them directly by speaking to him on al-Asiri’s mobile phone. Clearly, that call was the agreed signal for detonation. A plastic bomb weighing between 100g and half a kilo that he had either inserted into his rectum or secreted in his underpants exploded and tore him to pieces but somehow failed to harm the prince. Bin Nayef declared that his close shave with death would not force him to review Saudi Arabia’s forgivingly generous carrot and stick counter-terrorist strategy, the same strategy that Yemen had pioneered but had to abandon in 2005 for lack of adequate carrots. Yemen’s foreign minister revealed that al-Asiri had travelled to Najran from Marib. By the autumn of 2009 Yemen was competing with the tribal border area between Pakistan and Afghanistan and Somalia for the title of ‘The World’s Most Welcoming Jihadist Sanctuary’.

  The economic gulf separating Saudi Arabia and Yemen, which enabled the former to run a lavish and reasonably efficient re-education for its jihadist delinquents while the latter had had to abandon the effort, might have been the most salient difference between the countries and an important reason why jihadism was on the rise rather than waning in Yemen, but it was not the only one. Saudi Arabia was a functioning state, governed in its entirety to the satisfaction of a substantial portion of its population. Yemen, by contrast, was a chronically malfunctioning entity, patchily governed with the acquiescence and to the satisfaction of a rapidly shrinking percentage of its population, home to two domestic insurgencies as well as al-Qaeda by the end of 2009.

  a Frankincense, also known as olimbanum, was used in worship by both pagans and monotheists for millennia. It is the resin of the hardy Boswellia sacra tree which thrives in south Arabia.

  b Devastating floods in October 2008 killed a number of beekeepers and destroyed some 37,000 beehives in the Wadi Doan (Yemen Times, 17–19 November 2008).

  c All US troops in Saudi Arabia were withdrawn after thirteen years, in 2003.

  d Abu Bakar Bashir, Abdullah Sungkar and Jafar Umar Thalib.

  e Typically, Hadhrami family names begin with ‘ba’.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  AL-QAEDA, PLUS TWO INSURGENCIES

  ON THE ROAD TO RADFAN

  After a fine lunch in the air-conditioned sanctuary of the Aden Hotel, we were all behaving as if we were off on a jaunt to the seaside. But we were headed to Radfan, a sharp thorn in the side of the British in Aden back in the 1960s, a hotbed of the souths renewed bid for secession from Sanaa half a century later in the spring of 2008.

  Squeezed tightly together on the back seat of the luxury Land Cruiser so that I could be decently segregated in the front passenger seat, my three male companions joked and laughed and ordered the driver to turn up the air-conditioning. One last fiddle with the controls, and we were off. Through the sleepy baked centre of Aden we sped in our refrigerator on wheels, its tinted windows protecting us from the blinding white sunlight and the dazzle off the Arabian Sea which was visible to our right in the gaps between apartment blocks and new government buildings hung with outsize portraits of President Salih. Round the English-made roundabouts we went on past Crater, the extinct volcano heart of Aden with its neat grid of British-built streets where FLOSY and the NLF had slugged it out and Mad Mitch’s Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders had bagpiped a temporary conquest, past the British-built blocks of Maalla where British servicemen had once lived.

  At last I was feeling free to discard the black scarf I had been wearing in token Benazir Bhutto style for weeks in Sanaa. Traces of Aden’s British and Marxist times gone by, when women had felt free to study, work and go out alone and unveiled, had been fading fast since the north tightened the union of the two Yemens following the war of 1994, but they were still not completely erased, and the sea views helped. Even northerners found it easier to breathe, to relax, here in Aden. Sanaa’s jeunesse dorée with time on their hands and money to burn were in the habit of racing down in their Land Cruisers from their highland
eagle’s nest of a capital to let their hair (and themselves) down by drinking and clubbing and going to the beach. The acme of comfort in British times, the old Crescent Hotel, had weathered the immediate post-Marxist period as a brothel but was now scheduled for a makeover.

  The owner of our Land Cruiser and so the de facto leader of our expedition was a military psychiatrist but also a wealthy émigré businessman whose Emirates passport seemed to be no obstacle to his continuing to act as a sheikh of his gigantic Yafai tribe by dispensing largesse and political advice and influence. Impressively attired in a striped business shirt with cufflinks, a futa worn like a bath-towel around his wide girth, flip-flops, gold-rimmed spectacles and a tribal head-cloth, Dr Mundai al-Affifi was instantly likeable. The initiator of the expedition was Ahmad bin Ferid, a serious young journalist and a scion of the former ruling family of the once restive Upper Aulaqi Sheikdom which bordered on Dr al-Affifi’s Lower Yafai. Our third travelling companion, described to me by Dr al-Affifi as a ‘prominent citizen of Aden’, turned out to be the proprietor of Aden’s oldest bookshop.

 

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