Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes

YEMEN

YEMEN
DANCING ON THE HEADS OF SNAKES

VICTORIA CLARK

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW HAVEN AND LONDON

Acknowledgements
Introduction

PART ONE
Chapter 1         Unwanted Visitors (1538–1918)
Chapter 2         Revolutionary Roads (1918–1967)
Chapter 3         Two Yemeni Republics (1967–1990)
Chapter 4         A Shotgun Wedding (1990–2000)

PART TWO
Chapter 5         First Generation Jihad
Chapter 6         A Tribal Disorder?
Chapter 7         Keeping Up With the Saudis
Chapter 8         Al-Qaeda, plus Two Insurgencies
Chapter 9         Can the Centre Hold?

Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
Index

In memory of my father, Noel Clark, who died in December 2004, while I was away in Yemen

I have my parents to thank for the genesis of myself and this book because I was born in Britain’s Crown colony of Aden in 1961, while my father was the BBC’s South Arabia correspondent. A happy accident has therefore given me a ready-made reason to take an interest in a place few people know about.

My warmest thanks, of course, go to all the Yemenis I encountered, who were unfailingly generous with their time and suggestions, not to mention their hospitality. Yemenis are not hard to contact and meet, and mobile-phone technology seems to have made them uniquely approachable. Khaled al-Yemani at the embassy in London and Faris al-Sanabani in Sanaa were kind enough to set my research ball rolling with plenty of contacts.

Stephen Day and John Shipman, both of whom spent much of their youths in what is now southern Yemen in the 1960s as members of the Colonial Service, were constantly helpful with contacts, expertise and enthusiasm. Sarah Phillips and Tim Mackintosh-Smith in Sanaa and Henry Thompson and Ginny Hill in the UK were all hugely generous with their insights and suggestions. All passionately bound up with Yemen and especially its people and fearful about its future, they reassured me that a book about an obscure and impoverished country was worth writing. Gregory D. Johnsen and Brian O’Neill in the US, via their excellent blog
Waq al-Waq
, were constantly helpful.

James Meek has been a source of constant support as well as constructive criticism. Charlie Foster-Hall, Joan Baranski and my brother Dominic, likewise born in Aden, all kindly provided material for the photo section.

I owe a large debt of gratitude to Robert Baldock at Yale for commissioning the book but still more to my editor, Phoebe Clapham, who had to exercise a vast amount of patience and forbearance while I fought to arrange my thoughts, impressions and knowledge about Yemen in an order that might be intelligible to a western readership.

‘Ruling Yemen is like dancing on the heads of snakes’

President Ali Abdullah Salih,
interview in London’s
Al-Hayat
newspaper,
28 March 2009

‘More tea?’

The man politely refilling my cup is Nasir al-Bahri, Osama bin Laden’s former chief bodyguard, the person the world’s most wanted terrorist entrusted with the delicate tasks of procuring him a Yemeni fourth wife and shooting him if he was ever in danger of being captured alive.

His manner is warm and lively, embellished with eloquent hand gestures and flashes of a dazzling smile. Charming, urbane and dressed in a freshly pressed shirt, expensive watch and soberly patterned
futa
^a
al-Bahri is far removed from any western idea of a violent jihadist. I can only assume that he has seen the error of his ways and thoroughly reinvented himself.

At the Sanaa home of a mutual acquaintance, in a room lined in the comfortable Middle Eastern way with floor-level cushioned seating, we have been whiling away an afternoon in friendly conversation about his life. The fact that I am an honorary Yemeni by virtue of having been born in 1961 in Aden - now Yemen’s second city but then still a British colony - has helped the flow of conversation. A southern Yemeni himself, al-Bahri has revealed that he was also born in a foreign port city, in Jeddah, where both his father and his grandfather worked as mechanics for the Bin Laden construction company. I have discovered that he left Saudi Arabia in 1990, at the age of eighteen, after hearing Osama bin Laden preach, to fight jihad against the Russians in Afghanistan. In Bosnia, where we both spent time in the early 1990s -he as a jihadist, me as a reporter - al-Bahri was involved in checking the religious motivations of jihadist recruits to the Bosnian Muslim cause.

He joined bin Laden in Kandahar in 1996 but was out of Afghanistan by October 2000, having fallen out with some of his companions when he was arrested and jailed in Sanaa following the attack on the USS
Cole
in Aden. A gold mine of information for visiting US interrogators filling in the background to the 9/11 plot, he was released after agreeing to undergo a short course of religious re-education and making a solemn promise to God that he would do nothing to damage President Ali Abdullah Salih’s government. Since 2002, his activities have included the begetting of four of his five children, some taxi-driving, three friendly meetings with the president and courses in marketing, sales and the fashionable quasi-science of neuro-linguistic programming.

Now this man who once begged bin Laden’s for permission to take part in a martyrdom operation has an exciting business idea to share with me. News has reached him that President Barack Obama will fail to keep his promise to close down the infamous Guantanamo Bay prison camp for suspected jihadists by January 2010. Without firm guarantees that its remaining 215 or so detainees will be incarcerated or closely supervised once back home - guarantees that Yemen, over ninety of whose citizens make up the largest national grouping in the camp, has shown itself incapable of providing - America deems the risk involved in emptying the camp too great. Obama’s conundrum has got al-Bahri thinking: if America’s president cannot trust President Salih to keep Yemeni detainees out of jihad trouble, why should not he commission him, Nasir al-Bahri, to establish and run a secure rehabilitation and re-education centre for them? Who better than an ex-jihadist - now equipped with his neuro-linguistic powers of persuasion - to understand and help other jihadists?

If our conversation had ended there, I might have been persuaded of the viability of such a plan. But it did not, and what al-Bahri went on to say suggested that, personable and energetic as he was, he was not a man the United States could do counter-terrorism business with.

My doubts did not surface immediately, because al-Bahri was certainly not alone in warning that Yemen was shaping up into a second Afghanistan, a vacuum which al-Qaeda would have no trouble exploiting and filling. But I began to notice the glee with which he was laying out a wider vision, of a Saudi Arabia trapped in a hostile pincer movement between an Iraq in which jihadists had filled the vacuum left by departing US troops and a recently created Islamist state of Yemen, with Somalia across the Red Sea going the same way. ‘Then it’ll be “you’re either with us or against us”, like Bush said,’ he declared, his eyes bright with enthusiasm. ‘You see, throughout the Islamic world al-Qaeda is the only group with a coherent programme for the future. We want the whole Muslim world to be united and on a par with the West and China and India!’

‘Wait a minute, Nasir,’ I interrupted, astonished. ‘How can you be thinking of re-educating jihadists for the Americans? Why aren’t you still with bin Laden in Waziristan, or wherever he is?’

‘You are right to ask that question! I freely admit that I am weak,’ he said, placing a hand over his heart to emphasise his sincerity. ‘I do wish now that I had never left Afghanistan, that I was still with my sheikh.’

‘So you were in favour of your sheikh’s attacks on America?’

‘Yes,’ he replied, offering me the stock rationale, ‘because it was time for western societies to taste some of the bitterness that the Muslim world is tasting. But we are against the governments, not the people.’

‘What about all those innocent people dropping out of the Twin Towers?’

‘Westerners are free to replace their governments when they don’t like what they do,’ he countered. Boosted by this reasoning, he went on to declare, ‘I hope that one day I will be able to return to jihad but if I don’t, I hope that my son will fight jihad.’

‘Is he showing any interest yet?’

‘No,’ he laughed, ‘he’s only eleven. Right now, he wants to be a mechanic’

Enlightening as it had been, my afternoon with al-Bahri left me baffled and uneasy. Clearly neither foolish nor naïve, he was forcing me to two conclusions: first, that being an ex-jihadist was not the same as being a reformed jihadist, and second, that enthusiastically embracing western business practices and dreaming of a contract with the US government was no natural barrier to committing divinely sanctioned atrocities against the same US government and the American people. Not for the first time in my five-year acquaintance with the country, I had been reminded of how Yemen manages to challenge and scramble the logical progressions and neat narratives that westerners prefer to deal in.

The limitations this important discrepancy imposes on an outsider’s ability to understand the country and its people may in part explain why Yemen is neither as scrutinised nor as understood as neighbouring Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf States. Security concerns may be another contributing factor. Currently rated by western governments as too dangerous for anyone without essential business there to visit, the poorest and most tribal state on the Arabian Peninsula is awash with weaponry, corruptly governed and racked by two domestic insurgencies, one of them spilling over into neighbouring Saudi Arabia.

For so long briefly dismissed in agency news reports as ‘Osama bin Laden’s ancestral homeland’, Yemen was commanding more of the world’s attention by the beginning of 2010 than ever before. On Christmas Day 2009, a would-be suicide bomber tried - but failed - to bring down a flight from Amsterdam over Detroit. The plot was traced back to Yemen, where, according to the suspect, he had been trained and armed with the device he attempted to set off on board the plane. Now second only to Pakistan and Afghanistan in the business of breeding, training and sheltering terrorists, Yemen is - finally - seen as presenting a serious threat to global security, with an emergency international conference on the country hastily scheduled in London for late January 2010.

My aim in writing this book has been to provide the general western reader with an account of, but also an accounting for, the genesis and growth of contemporary jihadism in this wildest and most obscure part of its Arabian heartland. Much has been written and said about how the United States’ support for Israel and reaction to 9/11 have acted as recruiting sergeants for the movement; much less about the contribution made to the spread of jihadism by conditions in its heartlands. The question of how or if such a country - or, for that matter Pakistan, Afghanistan or Somalia - can be governed as a modern nation state has a crucial bearing on its ruler’s ability to combat jihadism. If, as President Ali Abdullah Salih likes to complain to foreign journalists, ruling Yemen is as delicate and dangerous as dancing on the heads of snakes, the implications for the West are serious. Yemen’s usefulness as an ally of the West in the global campaign against violent jihad is bound to be very limited. But President Salih might, as many Yemenis believe, simply be trying to shift the blame for his own failings as a leader onto them.

The truth may be somewhere in between, but I have set out to present the evidence for both views. The first section of the book, a brief survey of Yemeni history from the mid-sixteenth century until 2000, lays out the case for there being, just as President Salih claims, special difficulties involved in ruling the south-western end of the peninsula. This modern history is not one Yemenis take much pride in, unlike their early story which is richly studded with kingdoms and civilisations grown so wealthy on tolls levied on passing frankincense caravans that one of them, the Sabean kingdom, built a wonder of the world, the great Marib Dam in the eighth century BC. The ancient Romans knew what is now Yemen as such a prosperous and fertile place they called it ‘Arabia Felix’, Lucky Arabia. Generally lucky it remained, until the mid-sixth century AD when the Marib Dam burst and the land flooded, and then dried out and emptied of its inhabitants, an event so cataclysmic that it merited a special mention in the Koran in the following century and scattered a diaspora of Yemeni tribes all over the Arab world. A hundred years later, however, the Prophet Mohammed reportedly described those Yemenis who had remained as faithful and wise, uncommonly quick and eager to espouse his Islam.

Yemenis‘ modern history is less lucky but at least as dramatic. Positioned at the far end of the Arabian Peninsula near the lower opening of the Red Sea, only a short distance from the Horn of Africa, their land has never escaped foreign attention for long. The story of their last half-millennium can be briefly summarised as a series of failed attempts on the part of outside powers to substitute Yemenis’ hardy tribal structures and values with those of first Ottoman and British imperialism, then Nasserite Arab nationalism and Soviet-style Marxism. Although the end of the Cold War enabled Yemenis to unite their fragmented fortunes in a single state at last, the over-hasty merger agreed by Sanaa and Aden in 1990 had led to a short, sharp civil war by 1994. Six years later the odds on the Republic of Yemen prospering were being drastically lengthened again by the spread of jihadism.

By the first decade of the new millennium there were plenty of other indicators pointing to Yemen’s suitability as a recruiting ground for jihadists in both the short and longer term. Its population, already judged to be the largest on the peninsula and set to double by 2035, was growing at an annual rate of 3.46 per cent, with two-thirds of it under the age of twenty-four and each woman producing an average of almost six children. Literacy rates were reported to be 33 per cent among women, 49 per cent for men and unemployment around the 40 per cent mark, with the same proportion of the population reportedly living on only two dollars a day
¹
The country’s modest oil reserves accounted for 90 per cent of its exports and more than three-quarters of its revenues, but production was declining at the rate of 10 per cent a year and was scheduled to end by 2017,
²
at around the same time as Sanaa’s water supply has been forecast to run out. Over a third of the country’s fertile land was given over to the cultivation of qat, an evergreen shrub whose tender top leaves are chewed for hours every day by 72 per cent of Yemeni men and approximately half that number of women for their amphetamine content and mild hallucinogenic properties. It was largely thanks to the qat plant’s thirst that the only country on the peninsula to rejoice in a cool enough climate to be able to feed itself was failing to do so.

The chapters comprising the second part of the book follow a rough chronology from 2000 to 2009. More thematic, they set Yemen’s part in the story of radical Islam today in both a national and regional context. Meetings with Yemen’s best-known jihadist, Tariq al-Fadhli, in the southern governorate of Abyan illuminate the legacy of the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan on Yemen. An expedition to the oil fields east of the capital, around Marib, with a Yemeni oil worker who wishes he had fought jihad in Iraq, provides the setting for a discussion of how Yemen’s largely tribal society has both facilitated and hindered jihadism. From the vantage point of eastern Yemen’s magnificent Wadi Doan, the remote fertile canyon from which Osama bin Laden’s father emigrated to Saudi Arabia in 1930, I examine what Yemen’s powerful Saudi neighbour has contributed to the spread of radical Islam in Yemen. A brief misadventure at an Aden checkpoint while in the company of southern separatists sets the scene for a discussion of the extent to which two deep-rooted and worsening domestic secessionist movements - one in the south, one in the north-west corner of the country - are demanding more of the regime’s limited resources than the West-run campaign against violent jihad. Finally, in the capital, Sanaa, I estimate the degree to which a combination of Yemen’s deepening poverty and the twilight of President Salih’s thirty years of rule are fuelling a popular dissatisfaction which is playing straight into the hands of a consolidated and thriving regional organisation that has made its home base in Yemen - ‘Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’.

^a
A Yemeni sarong, typically worn in southern and eastern regions of the country.