Strapped into the Blackhawk helicopter on the runway soon afterwards, I listened through the headphones as Yousef the pilot, a British-trained officer, went through the interminable pre-flight safety checks before starting the engines and turning the rotor blades. ‘Guess what the in-flight movie is?’ remarked Stew just before take-off. ‘Blackhawk Down.’ Nobody laughed. With the window open beside me, we took off to the east and flew fast and low over sand dunes that threatened to bury a road beneath us. I remembered hiring a car here twenty years ago and having to turn back when the road was blocked completely by drifting sand, while still more started to pile up behind me. Soon we were passing over low foothills and then mountains, rising up blue and hazy. Yousef banked over a hillside dotted with thorn bushes, then put us down in a swirl of dust on a tiny military helipad high up in the hills, in what must be one of the remotest landing sites in the whole of Arabia. It was an isolated, lonely outpost overlooking a nearby valley that marked the border with Yemen.
When the dust had settled and the Blackhawk’s engines had powered down, I made out the silhouette of helmeted border guards standing up in the back of a pick-up truck, manning a .50-cal heavy machine gun. These were powerful, long-range weapons, but were apparently not enough to deter the drug-smugglers of Yemen, who constantly tried to send their illicit cargo across this border – on donkeys, on men disguised as women, and even inside people. A young officer handed us a printout of the latest statistics. The quantities seized just this year on this stretch of border alone were staggering: 146,547 rounds of ammunition, 1,248 firearms, 15,021 kg of hashish and just under 4,000 tonnes of the narcotic leaf qat, grown in Yemen, illegal in Saudi.
‘Yemen is very close,’ said the officer, pointing out a hilltop less than a mile away. ‘See that ridge? It is in Yemen. But on their side of the border they don’t stop anything coming over, especially since the Arab Spring.’ This was becoming a constant refrain: that in the wake of the mass protests which eventually drove Yemen’s unpopular President Saleh out of office in 2012, that country had turned in on itself and Yemeni border security had simply evaporated.
We were summoned for the obligatory feast, laid out on the floor of the guard house and shared with thirty guards, brigadiers mixing with corporals, all using their right hands to scoop up the vegetable stew with flaps of bread. It may have been a bleak, lonely existence up here on this mountain border, but these Saudi guards knew how to make themselves comfortable. On a balcony overlooking a plunging valley they had a thick red carpet spread out and half a dozen well-padded armchairs. A major general arrived, called, rather fetchingly, Blaidan Al-Blaidan, and settled into one of them as coffee was fetched. He looked absurdly young, but was apparently highly popular with his troops, coming as he did from the major local tribe, the Bani Yam. He told me he came up here to check up on his troops several times a week, which is also probably why he was so well liked.
By now our hosts were getting edgy about our safety, worrying that our presence may have been observed and attract some unwanted attention. They hurried us into powerful 4x4 jeeps and we wound down the mountain in convoy, negotiating hairpin bends and soft sand corners, a fine film of dust working its way inside the vehicles and making our teeth gritty. We passed more national border guards manning heavy machine guns, and local guards carrying rusty AK-47s that did not look as if they could be relied upon to perform if needed. An unarmed figure appeared, no more than a boy, wearing the wizra, the traditional black and embroidered wrap-around garment worn by men in Yemen. He said he was guarding the local school. ‘From what?’ I asked. Just guarding it, he said. We moved on, down from the mountains and through low, undulating hills dotted with thorn trees. A troop of baboons watched us as we wound past, some of them sitting upright in trees, the males on lookout duty. ‘For us border guards,’ said our driver, a lieutenant colonel in the Interior Ministry, ‘it’s very dangerous because, as everybody knows, there are a lot of Al-Qaeda personnel staying now in Yemen and also there are a lot of smugglers willing to use weapons against us.’ I asked him if there was any cooperation between Al-Qaeda and the smugglers. ‘Al-Qaeda need money,’ he replied, ‘and the way to get the money is by smuggling drugs and weapons. This is one way they collect money for their activities.’
In the late afternoon we pulled up at the Thuwwal border crossing, where a large awning spanned the road bearing portraits of the king and senior princes. Beyond lay Yemen and the road to Harad, the nearest town across the border. A girlfriend and I once made the mistake of staying there, while backpacking round Yemen after university in 1985. I remembered it as being full of smugglers and pushy money-changers, and our hotel room was infested with flying cockroaches that managed to get inside our rucksacks. We had to purge them later, high up in the fresh air of the Hajjah mountains.
But now we were being beckoned inside the Saudi border post for yet another feast. This was, of course, both generous and flattering, and it sounds ungrateful now, but inwardly our team groaned. With the sunlight fading and more filming to be done, our lack of enthusiasm for stuffing lumps of slippery, stringy mutton into our mouths may perhaps have been detectable to the discerning eye. But this, we accepted, was the Saudi way: nothing could be done until hospitality was honoured and we had all ‘broken bread’ together. As an Indian waiter went past with a tray bearing a whole cooked sheep’s head, stained yellow, with teeth and eye sockets intact, I told him this was a favourite dish of Adam, our producer. It was duly placed before him with a flourish, but the joke backfired on me as, far from alarming him, he tucked into it with alacrity, pronouncing the neck and tongue particularly good.
I asked the brigadier in charge of the border post if they currently had any prisoners in custody. They did – about twenty-five illegals caught trying to sneak in from Yemen – and they turned out to be incarcerated next door. ‘I think,’ interjected Adam, ‘that now would be the time to do our interview about human rights.’ Everyone we had tried so far to raise this sensitive topic with had dodged it and today was no exception. Colonel Omar, as a senior officer from the Ministry of Interior’s spokesman’s office, was the natural candidate to answer our questions, but he smoothly delegated the job to a more junior and very reluctant officer, who made a vain plea to get out of the interview. ‘I think these questions are best addressed to Colonel Omar,’ he said, looking frantically around for him. The colonel, who had been watching and listening, quickly turned his attention elsewhere. It was far from ideal. I fired as many questions as I could at the officer, but he was only able to talk about border security.
‘When we catch the illegal immigrants we process them,’ he said, showing me the room where the captives are fingerprinted and photographed. ‘If they have no criminal record we send them back to Yemen, and again a second time, but they just keep coming back. If we catch them a third time, then we hold them here for twenty-five days. And yes, the human rights inspectors have full access to them.’ I peered through a grille set in a steel door to see two dozen miserable-looking prisoners squatting in silence in two rows. Some were quite old, all looked desperately poor. They certainly did not look dangerous.
We piled back into the vehicles to visit a border observation post on this bleak, windswept desert frontier, where the fence had already been erected that was planned to stretch all the way from the Red Sea to the edge of Oman. It really was a miserable place. The triple coils of barbed wire were festooned with litter, mostly plastic bags, lending it a filthy, abandoned air. A lonely Saudi guard stood watch on top of a three-storey tower, staring out at Yemen in the fading light with the help of some night-vision goggles.
It was dark by the time we set off back up the coast to Jizan, yet by contrast, in the light of the rising moon I could make out a scene of great beauty. We were driving alongside the Red Sea, the shallow waters twinkling silver and lapping at the very edge of the sandy track, while the tangled mangroves closed in beside us, dark and mysterious. We jolted on northwards, back to the base.
The next morning we left the balmy heat of the Tihama coast for the dry desert air of Najran, over the mountains and on the edge of the Empty Quarter, the vast desert that covers much of the southern half of the Arabian Peninsular. Naively, we all assumed this next flight in the Blackhawk would be low and slow, like yesterday’s, but Yousef took us quickly up to 11,000 feet (3,300 metres), and with the window open once more there was a freezing draft blowing in. The Ministry of Interior captain next to me, who had spent the previous year working in tropical Jizan, was shivering uncontrollably and had to be given a flying jacket, then sat there swaddled up like an old lady on an a Sunday outing. My own hands became numb with cold, but the scenery below was so stunning that I was too distracted to worry. We passed right over Jabal Faifa, a remote mountain dotted with white buildings and criss-crossed with impossibly steep switchback tracks that snaked down into the valleys far below. I was once told this was the only place in Saudi Arabia where citizens can legally grow and chew qat, the narcotic leaf so beloved of Yemenis and Somalis. Twenty years ago I hired a car and drove up here, past the National Guard checkpoint that was making sure no one brought any qat into the rest of the country. I got about three-quarters of the way up, but then my hire car couldn’t take the gradient and I felt it starting to slip backwards down the mountain, so I had to give up and inch back down again. Today, from up in the Blackhawk, it was easy to see how some communities up here had remained so isolated from the rest of Saudi Arabia.
Slowly, the rugged Asir mountains gave way to black, volcanic outcrops and drifting skeins of sand. We circled the neat, pale buildings of Najran, and Yousef chose this moment to let his co-pilot do his first landing. ‘Power cables to the left,’ warned the flight engineer into the headset, ‘water tower at 2 o’clock.’ In fact, the co-pilot executed a perfect landing on the parade ground of the Najran border guard HQ, where a posse of colonels and photographers came out to greet us. We had assumed, wrongly, that ‘staying on the base’ would mean roughing it with wooden slat bunks, communal latrines and the odd cold shower, but this place is set up with VIP visitors in mind. We sat sipping sweet tea in a row of gilt highbacked chairs while Colonel Omar went off to inspect the accommodation. ‘I have told them this is not good enough for you,’ he announced grandly. ‘I have insisted they give you the royal suite.’ This was absurd: I was now being given almost an entire wing of the building to myself. The bedroom was vast and adorned with glitzy chandeliers, mirrors and a giant TV screen; the bathroom had its own jacuzzi, I felt like Hugh Hefner.
Sadly, I had little time to savour the royal suite as we now headed out to film in the Souq Al-Janaabi, the Dagger Market. It was a wide indoor corridor of shop fronts and workshops, where craftsmen, young and old, were fashioning fabulous ornamental curved daggers, known as jambiyya, worn in the belt both here and across the nearby border in Yemen. ‘See this one?’ said a man enthusiastically. ‘It costs maybe 100,000 rials!’ (£17,500.) ‘This one is 150,000!’ (£26,000.) If this was true, then it struck me what an enormous waste of money this was, when it could have been put towards, say, building a house. But then again, in a part of the world that has been flooded with cheap plastic imports from Asia, it was reassuring to see a traditional craft like this still flourishing and getting handed down from father to son.
A man with a big, bristly moustache came up and shouted quite loudly, ‘Yes! British! I love Britain!’ A small crowd started to gather. ‘My name is Abu Muhannad,’ he continued, ‘and I trained to teach English in Bognor Regis in 1983. You must come to my house now for lunch, I insist!’ We explained that we were on a bit of a schedule and that anyway we were under the care of the Ministry of Interior. ‘Never mind about the stupid police,’ he said, dismissing Colonel Omar and his guards with a wave. ‘You must come. I will drive you now, it is only 120 kilometres from here. Not far. Do not be afraid, I am from the Bani Yam tribe and Najran people are the most hospitable in the world, there is no terrorism here.’ Tempting as it was to drive 240 kilometres on a round trip for lunch, we had to decline, but I did not get ten metres further into the souk before I was hailed by an elderly shopkeeper holding out a felt-covered box emblazoned with the Saudi national emblem of two crossed swords and a palm tree. The elderly shopkeeper was smiling silently but his friend explained, ‘He wants you to have this, as a gift from the people of Najran.’ I opened the lid and gasped. Inside lay a decorated dagger in a sparkly scabbard. I was deeply touched by this generosity, so I thanked the shopkeeper, did a quick piece-to-camera ending with the words, ‘So we’d better get out of here before anyone else donates something valuable.’ Too late. Before I had even finished speaking, a young man came up with a long box. I opened it to find a gold-coloured sword with filigree hilt and tassel. It was impossibly generous and typical of the people down here. I was overwhelmed and slightly embarrassed, but it reminded me that despite the horrors that happened to us in Riyadh nine years ago, I have received more hospitality and generosity in this country than anywhere else in the Middle East, which is saying something.
What happened next was deeply unnerving. It was nearly midday when we arrived to film at the open-air sheep market, where some people were friendly, some were not. Most were packing up for the day and heading home. Feeling the call of nature, I looked round for a toilet and, since I couldn’t see one, thought, right, I’ll just pop behind those parked trucks over there for a bit of privacy. I had not been away two minutes when I heard a sudden screech of tyres and a shout, and two loud shots rang out. My heart jumped. Not again, I thought. This can’t possibly be another terrorist attack! A lot of thoughts went through my mind very quickly. We were right on the border with Yemen, and if any terrorists were going to try to infiltrate Saudi Arabia they would quite possibly use Najran as a crossing point. Had someone spotted us in the market and made a call on their mobile phone? I cursed myself for not letting my police escort know where I was, and now I was isolated and defenceless. I just could not believe I had got myself into the same situation twice. At that moment, Colonel Omar appeared round the corner, breathless and understandably angry. ‘Where did you disappear to?’ he exclaimed, no doubt imagining his ministry career going up in flames. ‘We feared for your safety.’ The screech of tyres, the shouts and the bangs all turned out to have a logical and harmless explanation. It was just a shepherd heading off to lunch, shouting goodbye to his friends, then his pick-up truck backfiring. I promised to stay close to our escorts from then on.
Well, almost. Despite the helpful cooperation of the Ministry of Interior, we knew there were still some delicate conversations about human rights that we were going to have to film out of earshot of any government minders. When we got to the city of Jeddah, Adam fixed up for us to go and see two prominent human rights activists, but our Information Ministry minder refused to let us go. ‘It is not in the schedule,’ he protested angrily. It was fairly obvious that he wanted to prevent us from seeing two of the government’s most vocal critics, so we feigned tiredness and sent him home, then invited them round for an interview at our hotel late at night. Their stories were sobering. Samar Al-Badawi, who sat opposite me on a sofa, petite but clearly very strong-willed, described how when she was fourteen her abusive, drug-taking father would hit her and lock her in the bathroom for two weeks at a time, pushing food through a gap like a prison warden. ‘He even came in and smashed the light so I would have to suffer in the dark,’ she told me. ‘He stopped my education and when I was older he refused to let me marry.’ Samar took her father to court, but the judge sided with him and – unbelievably – sentenced Samar to seven months in prison ‘for disobeying her male guardian’, while her abusive father walked free. ‘The prison was terrible,’ she said calmly. ‘The food was horrible and the guards would beat us and insult us.’ I asked her if this sort of gross miscarriage of justice in favour of men against women was common here. ‘Sadly, yes, it is,’ she replied. ‘Judges can interpret the law however they want.’ Since emerging from prison
in 2010, Samar had become a leading campaigner for Saudi women’s rights, receiving an award from the US State Department. She told me there was no legal protection for minors in Saudi Arabia and that if a woman has a domestic dispute with an abusive husband and goes to the police, their standard response is to phone the husband to come round and ‘reconcile’ with his wife, putting pressure on her to go home and be off their hands.
I turned to Samar’s husband, Waleed Abu’l Kheer. A recent recipient of the Olaf Palme Award from Sweden for his human-rights work, he had had an indefinite travel ban slapped on him for criticizing the government to the media. Unable to travel to Sweden to collect his award because of the travel ban, he had had to ask a friend to collect it for him. ‘But won’t you get into trouble for talking to us now?’ I asked him, worried about what would happen after we left and our film was aired.
‘Probably, yes.’ He shrugged. ‘But I don’t care, I have to speak out.’
There were a lot of people in government I would have liked to put questions to, but in the end the only senior official who was prepared to talk to us on camera had the unpromising title of Deputy Minister of Petroleum. But Prince Abdulaziz Bin Salman Al-Saud was rather more than that. His father was crown prince, deputy premier and defence minister, the second most powerful person in the whole country. He had almost certainly given the nod for this interview to take place, so Prince Abdulaziz’s words carried weight. Yet this was awkward for me. His father had only recently become crown prince; before that he had spent over forty years as governor of Riyadh. When I got shot in that city in 2004, he had ordered its best medical team to come to my rescue, which undoubtedly saved me. I owed him my life. So now I needed first to thank this family . . . and then put some tough questions to the prince.
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