Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes (25 page)

The suspicious escape of the twenty-three jihadists from the PSO jail in Sanaa in February 2006 and the wholesale slaughter of seven Spanish tourists and their Yemeni drivers in Marib in July 2007, followed by the killing of two elderly Belgian women tourists and their Yemeni driver by four gunmen hiding behind a pick-up truck in Hadhramaut’s Wadi Doan in Janaury 2008, marked the end of the period in which Salih’s skill at dancing on the heads of a second generation of jihadists by bribing them had kept Yemen free from attack.

Bin Laden’s former bodyguard Nasir al-Bahri suggested a main reason for the change. ‘This is not Sheikh Osama Bin Laden’s strategy at all,’ he told the
Gulf News.
Identifiying a third generation of jihadists who looked to the ruthless Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq since 2006, for guidance and inspiration, he explained: ‘This is the Iraq generation. They are young people who went there for jihad. They are inexperienced, misguided and wrongly mobilised.’
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A tacit aspect of the truce the regime had made with some first- and second-generation jihadists had had a direct bearing on Iraq; if Yemeni jihadists would refrain from attacking Yemeni interests, then the state would put no obstacles in the way of them fighting jihad elsewhere. Sheikh al-Zindani, for example, encouraged Yemeni youths to go and fight in Iraq. Al-Hikma Association, a charity linked to one of Yemen’s political parties, reportedly helped recruit and transport fighters for the great cause.
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Yemenia flights from Sanaa transported dozens of jihadists to Damascus; an Iraqi exile on one flight overheard a forty-strong contingent openly discussing their plans.
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The president’s powerful kinsman, Brigadier-General Ali Muhsin al-Ahmar, reportedly handled the Yemeni jihadist traffic to Iraq after March 2003 as efficiently as he had the traffic between Yemen and Afghanistan in the 1980s. An estimated 2,000
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Yemenis made up the third largest contingent of foreign fighters in Iraq - the largest after the Saudis and Libyans.
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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-Wazir
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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’,
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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’
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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’.
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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.
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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’
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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 there 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.
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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’
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- 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.
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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’.