Although Sharaf acknowledged that Shaye used his connections to gain access to al Qaeda, he added that Shaye also “boldly” criticized Zindani and his supporters: “He said the truth with no fear.” Shaye had done in-depth profiles on Wuhayshi and Shihri, the leaders of AQAP, and had documented their bomb-making capabilities. In one story, Shaye nervously tried on a suicide vest that AQAP had made. He was the leading chronicler of the rise of the movement. His journalism was famous inside Yemen and across the world.
Shaye had long been known as a brave, independent-minded journalist in Yemen, and his collision course with the US government appeared to have been set when al Majalah was bombed. As the story spread across the world, Shaye traveled to the village. There he discovered the remnants of the Tomahawk cruise missiles and cluster bombs, neither of which were in the Yemeni military’s arsenal. He photographed the missile parts, some of them bearing the label “Made in the United States,” and distributed the photos to international media outlets and human rights organizations. He reported that the majority of the victims were women, children and the elderly. After conducting his own investigation, Shaye determined that it was a US strike, and he was all over the media telling anyone who would listen. The young journalist was becoming a thorn in America’s side. But when he started interviewing Anwar Awlaki, he would become a target.
BIN FAREED AND SHAYE WERE RIGHT. Al Majalah was the opening salvo in America’s newest war. Unlike the CIA’s “covert action” programs, which require formal notification to the House and Senate intelligence committees, this operation was done under a military “Special Access Program,” which gives the armed forces wide latitude to conduct lethal, secret operations with little, if any, oversight. In Yemen, the operations were all being coordinated by US Special Operations Forces based at the US-Yemen joint operations center in Sana’a, with JSOC’s intelligence division coordinating the intel, directing Yemeni forces in on-the-ground raids and providing coordinates for US missile strikes. Inside the facility, US and Yemeni military and intelligence officials had access to real-time electronic and video surveillance, as well as three-dimensional terrain maps. The US personnel inside Yemen fed intel and operational details back to the NSA in Fort Meade, the Special Operations Command in Tampa and to other intelligence and military agencies.
This is how al Majalah went down. It was December 17 in Yemen. Soon after Obama’s committee met in Washington and approved the operation to assassinate Kazemi and the other al Qaeda members on Admiral McRaven’s kill list, JSOC launched surveillance aircraft to monitor the intended targets. The operation kicked off in the early morning hours, as Tomahawk cruise missiles were fired from a submarine positioned in the waters off Yemen’s coast. It was armed with cluster munitions. The missiles slammed into a collection of dwellings in al Majalah. Meanwhile, another strike was launched in Arhab, a suburb of the capital, Sana’a, followed up by raids on suspected al Qaeda houses by Yemeni special ops troops from the US-trained CTU, backed by JSOC. Authorization for the US strikes was rushed through President Saleh’s office because of “actionable” intelligence that al Qaeda suicide bombers were preparing for strikes in the Yemeni capital. The target in Arhab, according to intel reports, was an al Qaeda house believed to be housing a big fish: AQAP leader Qasim al Rimi. In Abyan, an anonymous US official told ABC News, “an imminent attack against a U.S. asset was being planned.”
A military source familiar with the operation told me al Majalah was a “JSOC operation with borrowed Navy subs, borrowed Marine Corps, Air Force and Navy surveillance aircraft and close coordination with CIA and DIA on the ground in Yemen. Counting the crew of the sub we’re talking 350–400 [people] in the loop.”
When word of the strikes first broke, Saleh’s government publicly took responsibility. Yemen’s defense ministry said its forces had mounted “successful pre-emptive operations” against al Qaeda, saying they had killed thirty-four terrorists and arrested seventeen others. The Pentagon refused to comment, directing all inquiries to Yemen’s government, which released a statement taking credit for the coordinated strikes, saying in a press release that its forces “carried out simultaneous raids killing and detaining militants.” President Obama called Saleh to “congratulate” him and to “thank him for his cooperation and pledge continuing American support.” Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak also phoned to express his satisfaction to Saleh.
But as images of the al Majalah strike emerged, some military analysts who reviewed the footage of the aftermath questioned whether Yemen had the type of weapons used in the Abyan hit. Al Jazeera broadcast video of artillery shells with visible serial numbers and speculated that the attack was done with a US cruise missile. Abdulelah Haider Shaye was interviewed on the network describing the dead civilians he had seen in al Majalah. Among the munitions found at the scene were BLU 97 A/B cluster bomblets, which explode into some two hundred sharp steel fragments that can spray more than four hundred feet away. In essence, they are flying land mines capable of shredding human bodies. The bomblets were also equipped with an incendiary material, burning zirconium, that set fire to flammable objects in the target area. The missile used in the attack, a BGM-109D Tomahawk, can carry more than 160 cluster bombs. None of these munitions were in Yemen’s arsenal.
As news of the strike spread, Admiral Mike Mullen, the chair of the Joint Chiefs, sat aboard his military aircraft returning from a trip to Iraq and Afghanistan and praised what he characterized as Yemeni operations supported by the United States. “We’ve actually done quite a bit there. I think we’re on a pretty good track,” he said. Referring to the attacks, Mullen said, “I really do applaud what they did, who they went after and specifically going after the Al Qaeda cell which has grown significantly over the last couple of years there.”
But the vast majority of the victims killed in the strike were not, in fact, al Qaeda terrorists. Many of the victims, according to a classified US diplomatic cable, were “largely nomadic, Bedouin families who lived in tents near the AQAP training camp.” A senior Yemeni defense official described them as “poor people selling food and supplies to the terrorists, but were nonetheless acting in collusion with the terrorists and benefiting financially from AQAP’s presence in the area.” For al Qaeda, the takeaway was clear: the strikes were a US operation. AQAP could use the images of the aftermath, including those of dead and disfigured children, to rally Yemenis to their cause.
SALEH BIN FAREED WAS LIVID as he watched the way the al Majalah bombing was covered in the international media. Virtually every Western news outlet that covered the story said that Yemen had targeted an al Qaeda training camp and that the strike had been a success. But bin Fareed had been there. He’d helped scrape the remains of poor Bedouin villagers off of trees. He had seen the bodies of dead children pulled from rubble. He had promised newly orphaned children that he would take care of them, and he had seen the markings on the missile parts that showed they came from the United States. He was determined to make sure that the world understood that the victims of the strike were not al Qaeda—and that America was responsible.
On December 20, bin Fareed organized a massive gathering of tribal leaders from across Yemen—nearly 150 of Yemen’s most powerful sheikhs. It was no small feat. There were age-old disputes, current feuds and lethal hatred among some of the powerful tribesmen in attendance. But bin Fareed persuaded them all to pledge that they would put aside their differences for the task at hand. “We made an open invitation to many sheikhs from all tribes. They came from Marib, al Jawf. They came from the North, they came from the South,” he recalled. “We drove all the way from everywhere to Majalah, just to prove, and show all media that what our government says is not true. The Majalah disaster was done by the Americans. And there was not al Qaeda whatsoever.”
Bin Fareed’s goal was to gather tens of thousands of Yemenis from across the country in al Majalah to show their solidarity with the victims of the missile strike. One of his estates was about one hundred miles f
rom al Majalah, and he offered all of the visiting tribal leaders hospitality the night before, so that they could travel together as one unit to the demonstration the next day.
At about 9:30 at night, as the tribesmen finished up their dinner and discussion of the logistics for the following day, one of bin Fareed’s guards approached him. He whispered to the sheikh that there were about a half dozen men who had pulled up to the compound. “They want to see you,” the guard told bin Fareed, who waved for them to be allowed into the house. “But they are heavily loaded with machine guns, with hand grenades, with rocket launchers,” the guard told him. “Does not matter,” bin Fareed replied. “We are equipped the same. They are not enemies.”
The men entered the house. They were young and well dressed, clean-cut. They made small talk. Bin Fareed asked them their names. He knew their tribes, but not the individuals. He asked them what they did for a living. The men laughed and looked at each other. “We are unemployed,” one said. Then he added, “They say we are al Qaeda.” “Are you?” bin Fareed asked. The men eventually admitted they were. “There is not one single American, or one single Israeli, or one single Brit, here in Shabwah,” bin Fareed admonished them. “You are making a lot of trouble for your people. You are giving a bad reputation, to us and to our tribe. If you want to fight the Israelis, then I will buy you some tickets and I will send you to Palestine.”
Bin Fareed was losing his patience. “What can I do for you?” he asked. The men told him that they had heard about the gathering in al Majalah and asked bin Fareed if they could address the crowd. “If you are coming tomorrow, as ordinary tribesmen, you are welcome,” bin Fareed told them, but not as al Qaeda representatives. “No,” one of them responded. “We want to come and give a speech and talk about al Qaeda.” Bin Fareed lost his temper. “This means that you are really idiots. Really idiots,” he told the young men. “Our gathering is to prove to the whole world that there is no al Qaeda” in al Majalah and that “those people who were killed were innocent.” If they came, he told them, the “media will say that all of us, we are al Qaeda.” He warned them not to show up. “If you do come,” he told them, “you shave my beard, if you survive three days.” It was a grave warning. In Yemen, under tribal customs, to have one’s beard shaved in public by another man is to be humiliated for life. Bin Fareed was telling the young al Qaeda men that he would have them killed if they stepped foot in al Majalah.
The next morning at 4:30, bin Fareed and the scores of tribal leaders he had gathered at his home caravanned to al Majalah. When they arrived, tens of thousands of Yemenis had already assembled. Tents had been set up and there were cars as far as the eye could see. “We estimate that day, that the gathering was between 50,000 and 70,000, some estimate it was more,” bin Fareed said. As bin Fareed settled into one of the massive tents and began going over the program for the day, his guards burst in. They told him that the men from last night—the members of al Qaeda—were standing on a car, giving a speech through a megaphone. Bin Fareed grabbed his automatic weapon and darted out of the tent. His men held him back. “Either they will kill me or I will kill them,” bin Fareed said. “I warned them.” It was too late. The al Qaeda men had already achieved their goal.
As bin Fareed was grabbing his machine gun, one of the al Qaeda men, Muhammad al Kilwi, was standing on a car speaking to a crowd on the periphery of the demonstration. With a henna-dyed beard and a military jacket, he declared, “Al Qaeda’s war in Yemen is against the United States, not against the Yemeni military.” Standing aside the other al Qaeda men, who were wielding rifles, Kilwi vowed to avenge the deaths at al Majalah. “Our issue is with the Americans and their lackeys.” He finished his brief speech, and then he and his cohorts jumped back in the vehicles and disappeared into the mountains. That night, video of the speech was broadcast across the globe. Bin Fareed’s gathering was portrayed as an al Qaeda rally, just as he had feared.
“They really spoiled our meeting,” bin Fareed recalled. But he was vindicated in the end. The men who had hijacked his rally were killed a few days later when the United States launched another cruise missile attack. Maybe the Americans had tracked them after they showed up at the rally, bin Fareed speculated. “They were killed,” he said. “All of them.”
IN YEMEN, outrage about al Majalah was spreading, fueled largely by the assumption that it was a US bombing. The Yemeni parliament dispatched a delegation to do an on-the-ground investigation. When they arrived in the village, they “found that all the homes and their contents were burnt and all that was left were traces of furniture” along with “traces of blood of the victims and a number of holes in the ground left by the bombing...as well as a number of unexploded bombs.” Their investigation determined that the strike had killed forty-one members of two families, including fourteen women and twenty-one children. Some of the dead were sleeping when the missiles hit. The Saleh government insisted that fourteen al Qaeda operatives were killed, but the Yemeni parliamentary investigators said the government could only provide them with one name of an al Qaeda operative killed in the bombing—Kazemi, the “leader” known as Akron on JSOC’s list. Various Yemeni journalists and security analysts I interviewed were puzzled as to why Kazemi was being portrayed as an al Qaeda leader, pointing out that he was an aging veteran of the earlier wars in Afghanistan and was not a major figure within AQAP.
After the strike, a senior Yemeni official told the New York Times, “The involvement of the United States creates sympathy for Al Qaeda. The cooperation is necessary—but there is no doubt that it has an effect for the common man. He sympathizes with Al Qaeda.”
On December 21, ambassador Stephen Seche sent a cable from Sana’a back to Washington. Referencing the strikes, he said the Yemeni government “appears not overly concerned about unauthorized leaks regarding the U.S. role and negative media attention to civilian deaths.” Seche said that Deputy Prime Minister Rashad al Alimi told him that “any evidence of greater U.S. involvement such as fragments of U.S. munitions found at the sites—could be explained away as equipment purchased from the U.S.” But the United States and Yemen knew Saleh’s forces did not have those bombs. In his cable, Ambassador Seche asserted that Yemen “must think seriously about its public posture and whether its strict adherence to assertions that the strikes were unilateral will undermine public support for legitimate and urgently needed CT operations, should evidence to the contrary surface.”
Indeed, months after the strike, Amnesty International published photographic evidence of the US bombs found at the scene. The Pentagon would not respond to the group’s inquiries about the munitions. “A military strike of this kind against alleged militants without an attempt to detain them is at the very least unlawful,” said Philip Luther, deputy director of Amnesty International’s Middle East–North Africa division. “The fact that so many of the victims were actually women and children indicates that the attack was in fact grossly irresponsible.” Amnesty noted that neither Yemen nor the United States had signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions, a treaty designed to ban the very weapons used in the strikes. Without publicly confirming the strike was a US operation, unnamed American officials “cited strained resources” in the decision to use the cruise missile, alleging that with “the C.I.A.’s armed drones tied up with the bombing campaign in Pakistan...cruise missiles were all that was available at the time.”
Yemeni officials told the US ambassador they had given the governor of Abyan $100,000 to pay off the victims and the families of the dead. Meanwhile, anonymous senior US counterterrorism officials defended the strikes. One told the New York Times they had been “conducted very methodically” and that reports of civilian deaths were “very much exaggerated.” But according to journalist Daniel Klaidman, Jeh Johnson, the Pentagon lawyer who signed off on the strikes, reportedly said of his role in the al Majalah bombing, “If I were Catholic, I’d have to go to confession.” For his part, Saleh told the United States he wanted such operations to continue
“non-stop until we eradicate this disease,” with Alimi adding that Yemen “‘must maintain the status quo’ with regard to the official denial of U.S. involvement in order to ensure additional ‘positive operations’ against AQAP,” according to a US cable sent four days after the strike. Yemen’s foreign minister, Abu Bakr al Qirbi, asked the United States to “stay quiet” on its role in the strikes, saying it “should continue to refer inquiries to the Yemeni Government, highlight the [Yemeni government’s] indigenous CT capabilities, and stress that al-Qaeda represents a threat not only to the West, but also to Yemen’s security.” While US diplomats continued to develop the cover story with their Yemeni counterparts, more operations were being planned.
The role of the US government in the attacks in Yemen was only revealed through leaks. But it was clear who was calling the shots. Amid demands from the Yemeni parliament to explain the al Majalah massacre, Deputy Prime Minister Alimi started spinning an updated version of the story, saying, “Yemeni security forces carried out the operations using intelligence aid from Saudi Arabia and the United States of America in our fight against terrorism.” Although closer to the truth, that version of events was also false. “It was cruise missile strikes in combination with military units on the ground,” said Sebastian Gorka, an instructor at the US Special Operations Command’s Joint Special Operations University, who had trained Yemeni forces. “It was a very distinct signal from the Obama administration that they are serious in assisting Yemen to remove these al Qaeda facilities from its soil. That was very much something executed by the United States, but with heavy support by the Yemeni government.”
According to senior US military and intelligence officials, during the ground raid that followed the December 17 Arhab strike near Sana’a, Yemeni Special Operations Forces working with the JSOC team discovered someone they claimed was a surviving al Qaeda would-be suicide bomber, who still had his vest on. He was taken into custody and interrogated, producing what the United States believed was actionable intelligence. A week after the deadly Abyan air strike and the ground raids near Sana’a, President Obama signed off on another hit, based in part on information provided by the prisoner taken in the Arhab raid. This time the target was an American citizen.
Dirty Wars Page 44