Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes (22 page)

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.

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.
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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.

Al-Qaeda can be confident that in the desert, oil-producing, tribal region of central Yemen it has found, if not a consistently and actively supportive working enviroment, then at least a non-judgemental one whose twin priorities - rejecting the writ of the state in their areas and financial gain - perfectly suits their purpose. But another aspect of Yemen’s tribal society, its disregard for artificial national borders and identities, has also contributed to the spread of jihadism. Bin Laden’s own impatience with national borders was made plain in the mid-1990s when he toyed with the notion of doing away with both the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Republic of Yemen and replacing them with two more Islamically as well as tribally, convincing entities: a Greater Hijaz
^b
and a Greater Yemen, which would form the core of a reconstituted Muslim caliphate and carve up the rest of the Arabian Peninsula between them.
¹⁶
An examination of the backgrounds of the men bin Laden chose to carry out the prestigious 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, however, is probably the best illustration of the debt al-Qaeda owes to supranational Yemeni tribalism.

Given that impoverished Yemenis were far less likely than wealthy Saudis to be granted the US visas that were a
sine qua non
of the operation, the fact that the majority of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi rather than Yemeni passport holders is not in the least surprising. While all but four of the total of nineteen hijackers were Saudi citizens, five out of the remaining fifteen Saudi ‘muscle’ turned out to hail from just one of Saudi Arabia’s thirteen provinces, Asir, a Yemeni possession during the fourteenth century and again during the coffee-enriched Qasim era of the seventeenth to eighteenth century.

In Asir, which is as mountainous and verdant as much of neighbouring north-west Yemen across the border, ‘you feel you are in Yemen’.
¹⁷
In Asir, according to the journalist and author John Bradley, ’it is not unusual to see women driving pick-up trucks, although Wahhabi custom elsewhere [in Saudi Arabia] means that women are officially banned from driving. Locals, moreover, point the television aerials on their roofs toward Yemen, so they pick up Yemeni TV In the mountains they wear
jambiyas.
’
¹⁸
And Bradley continues, ‘Immediately it [becomes] obvious how different the people of the Asir region are in both character and style to those in the rest of Saudi Arabia.’
¹⁹

A typically Yemeni pride in tribal belonging is far stronger in this comparatively undeveloped and impoverished south-western corner of the country than in the Kingdom’s central provinces. Just as startling is the fact that a further four of the fifteen ‘muscle hijackers’ hailed from the tiny southern Saudi emirate of al-Bahah, also once a Yemeni possession. All four belonged to the large and famous al-Ghamdi tribe whose members had long been covering themselves in jihadist glory. Bradley notes that the Afghan cave in which the plot for 9/11 was hatched was known as the al-Ghamdi house and that the al-Ghamdis‘ superior fighting spirit had received a special mention in a poem bin Laden composed. Leaving aside the four non-Saudi pilots therefore, ’muscle’ hijackers with links to Yemen via their regional backgrounds accounted for well over half the total - nine out of the fifteen.

It has been suggested that al-Qaeda’s earliest attacks, those conducted in the mid- to late 1990s, in Yemen and East Africa and Saudi Arabia, all originated from the mountainous border region of south-west Saudi Arabia and north-west Yemen. The rubber dinghy used to attack the USS
Cole
was imported from the border area; the plot for the Kenya and Tanzania embassy bombings was probably hatched there; the attacks in Saudi Arabia were executed with weapons smuggled over that border.
²⁰
But it was 9/11 and the investigation into the hijackers’ backgrounds that first attracted real attention to the region and, eight years later, it was back in the news. In early 2009, Saudi security men hunting al-Qaeda in southern Asir discovered a remote cave high in the chain of Sarwat mountains straddling the Saudi-Yemeni border. It overlooked the home village of a prominent Saudi jihadist and was stocked with guns, video cameras, spare batteries, military uniforms and food.
²¹

The uneasy and frequently renegotiated balance of power between the heavily armed state and the not only heavily armed but also internationally dispersed tribes supports President Salih’s assertion that ruling Yemen is like dancing on snakes‘ heads. Along with his none too solid grip on power and the limitations imposed by the other urgent threats Yemen is facing, it goes a long way towards accounting for the unorthodox - some would say distinctly half-hearted - way in which he has tackled the job of fighting the jihadists. Non-confrontational, highly personalised, inconsistent and far from transparent, Yemen’s approach to fighting the ’War on Terror’ has raised first some tentative hopes among his western allies, then a great many eyebrows and finally, very serious doubts.

Within a year of 9/11 President Salih had managed to persuade just one of thirty senior Yemeni clerics and judges that Yemen would not be acting as President Bush’s poodle if hundreds of the country’s hurriedly jailed jihadists were subjected to a spell of Koranic re-education. A rehabilitation programme for jihadists was duly set up under the supervision of the single obliging Hamoud al-Hitar, who counted the fact that the Koran contained 124 verses about treating non-Muslims kindly and only one that advocated going to war with them the sharpest weapon in his arsenal.

Soon Judge al-Hitar was jetting off to London and Cairo to share his ‘best practice’ with foreign security services and granting long interviews to western news media. Although initially sceptical, even neighbouring Saudi Arabia warmed to Yemen’s constructive solution to their shared problem and began channelling unlimited resources into a far more comprehensive rehabilitation programme for Saudi jihadists, which often included follow-up care in the shape of payment of wedding dowries, cars and furnished accommodation. Without adequate funding, however, the Yemeni version was showing clear signs of failing by December 2005, when the good judge, having reeducated and released 364 young men, suspended his sessions. Any self-respecting jihadist had long ago worked out that a chat with al-Hitar and a show of repentance was enough to guarantee him a ‘get out of jail free’ card.

Nasir al-Bahri, who had spent a year in jail in Sanaa before renouncing jihad and accepting government help to become a taxi-driver in Sanaa, explained, ‘We all respect Judge Hamoud al-Hitar but he does not have any influence on radical youths. Militants view [Judge] al-Hitar as a safety belt they use to get out from behind bars, but what is in their minds does not change.’
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Al-Bahri went on to divulge that members of the second-generation Yemeni jihadists, men like himself, had not been so much swayed by the judge’s arguments as seduced by the advantageous deal on offer: release from prison and a little money to get started in life, in return for not staging attacks in Yemen, and guarantees of good behaviour by their families and tribal leaders.

If some of those who were freed in this way slipped back into their old jihadist ways, others who stayed in jail because they were considered too high up on Washington’s most-wanted list to be released did not remain there long. At around dawn one morning in April 2003, ten al-Qaeda suspects, most of them charged with involvement in the attack on the USS
Cole
, escaped from a prison in Aden through a hole they later claimed they had managed to make in a bathroom wall. Some of these escapees were recaptured, only to escape again from another prison in Sanaa in February 2006, in a batch of twenty-three that included six Saudi Yemenis. On that occasion the story was that for two months the prisoners had patiently employed a sharpened spoon tied to a broomstick as a spade, and three cooking pots lashed together as a scoop, to tunnel 143 feet, straight to the ideally secluded women’s washroom of a nearby mosque, where they lingered long enough to say the dawn prayer together before tasting freedom. Within little more than a year six of them were dead, another eleven had either been recaptured or had surrendered, but six were still at large.

Both prisons involved in these great escapes happened to be run by the PSO. On both occasions this fact, as well as the large numbers of escapees involved and the implausibility of their stories, led observers to conclude that, still riddled with Afghan War veterans and Iraq-trained military who had been freshly enraged by the western coalition’s invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003, the PSO had aided and abetted the escapes. One of the most persistent and cynical conspiracy theories frequently aired at qat chews in Sanaa was that, if not the president himself, then certainly Brigadier-General Ali Muhsin al-Ahmar, the PSO and leading jihadists were all in cosy cahoots. It was in the interests of the government, those theorists said, to promote and facilitate a certain measure of jihadist mayhem because America was sure to respond by stumping up more financial support and military hardware, which in turn would help Salih to consolidate his power. As one Sanaa lawyer succinctly put it, ‘They [the Salih regime] frighten the USA with these guys and they frighten these guys with the USA.’
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More credence was given to such conspiracy theories in late 2008 when a wanted jihadist who had taken refuge with one of the Marib tribes told a Yemeni reporter that he was ‘ready to prove the reality that some [jihadist] attacks were planned in co-ordination and agreement with Political Security [PSO]’.
²⁴

Yemen’s western allies have never been able to relax in the knowledge that Salih and his PSO, let alone the Yemeni man-in-the-street, view the jihadist threat with as much urgent singlemindedness as they do. Nor, given what American analysts frequently refer to as the president’s ‘revolving door’
²⁵
policy, have they ever been able to gain an accurate idea of the number of leading jihadists behind bars at any given time. What was anyone to make of a report that the father of a man sentenced to ten years in jail for the bombing of the French tanker, the
Limburg
, in 2002 denied his son had spent a single day in jail, and revealed that the president had telephoned the boy on the day of his trial to beg him to play along with the charade by dressing up as a prisoner?
²⁶
A bewildering game of hide and seek seems to have gone on in the case of Khaled Abdul al-Nabi, a leader of the Aden-Abyan Islamic Army (AAIA). In 2003 Sanaa informed Washington that al-Nabi had been killed in a shoot-out, but in 2004 he was revealed to be still at large and, a year later, he had rejoined mainstream society as a farmer. In 2006 he was reported to be busy training jihadists for mercenary work fighting an anti-government rebellion in the north-west of the country. Finally, in August 2008, came the bewildering news that he had been captured after an exhaustive five-year manhunt.
²⁷

The astonishing leniency with which Jamal al-Badawi, one of the masterminds of the attack on the USS
Cole
, was treated after his escape from prison, first in 2003 and then again in 2006, galvanised a furious Washington into hitting President Salih where it hurt. It was simple enough to withhold Yemen’s share of the Millennium Challenge fund, a grant of $20.6 million in October 2007, on the grounds that the country had not reached the required standards of good governance. Washington’s patience had also been sorely tried by Sanaa’s refusal to extradite, or even safely imprison, Jaber Elbaneh, a Yemeni-American jihadist with a $5 million bounty on his head since 2002. After training at an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan, Elbaneh had established an al-Qaeda cell in Lackawanna, NY before returning to Yemen to launch attacks on American oil industry employees in Marib. He was also one of the twenty-three escapees from the Sanaa jail in 2006. When at last he handed himself in to the authorities, shortly after the cancellation of the Millennium Challenge grant, it was in a manner guaranteed to try Washington’s patience beyond endurance. Accompanied by four personal guards, Elbaneh strode into a Sanaa courtroom one morning to announce that he was a free man because he had placed himself under the president’s personal protection. ‘It’s a very traditional thing in Yemen,’ one of the president’s advisers later explained to the
Washington Post
, ‘You surrender yourself to a high-ranking official. His surrender was accepted on the basis that he would cooperate.’
²⁸

Salih was continuing to bank on jihadists behaving in as mercenary a fashion as Yemeni tribesmen had always done, as Tariq al-Fadhli had. He failed to factor the movement’s fanatical integrity and the aggravating impact of a litany of errors by the West - the chaotic aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, and the execution of Saddam Hussein, to name only a few - into this equation. He failed to recognise the fact that he was dancing on the most determinedly poisonous snakes he had yet encountered. It took the slaughter of seven elderly Spanish tourists and their Yemeni drivers at the Queen of Sheba’s temple to the sun in the desert near Marib in July 2007 to make him see that after three years of some success in combating jihadism the unorthodox Yemeni way -by damp-down rather than clamp-down - it was time for a change of tactics, time to try and wield as big a stick as neighbouring Saudi Arabia had been doing since 2003.

^a
Predator raids against Pakistan’s lawless, al-Qaeda and Taliban-ridden western tribal areas have been operating from air bases in Pakistan, and in Iraq. Drones are now only used in Yemen for surveillance purposes.

^b
Hijaz is a coastal emirate of Saudi Arabia, home to the Muslim Holy Places of Mecca and Medina as well as Jeddah.