Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes (19 page)

Tariq insisted to me that he did not instigate the bungled attacks, that indeed he had tried to prevent them because he believed that only Marxists - not the United States, which had kindly equipped the Afghan mujahideen with Stinger missiles and the like - were his real enemies. It is believed that bin Laden authorised what is now viewed as al-Qaeda’s first attempted assault on US interests, but whether or not Tariq played a part in the incident, as the acknowledged leader of the Afghan War veterans he was blamed for it. Obligingly murdering Marxists was one thing, but planting bombs in hotels where Americans were staying quite another, as far as the regime in Sanaa was concerned, so Tariq fled inland, into the Maraqasha mountains that were part of Fadhli tribal land, to loyal tribesmen who performed their tribal duty to a fugitive by granting him their protection. There he withstood pressure to surrender to an entire brigade despatched to capture him, but at last agreed to face trial in Sanaa. In the northern capital, a fellow tribal leader, the powerful Sheikh Abdullah al-Ahmar of the Hashid Federation, accommodated Tariq at his home under a pleasant form of house arrest, while the trial was endlessly deferred. Whatever Tariq’s involvement in the hotel bombings, the president clearly felt he owed him a debt of thanks for his unstinting campaign against the Marxists.

When Tariq returned to the south a couple of years later, during the civil war of 1994, it was as a man completely rehabilitated, as the proud commander of a Second Army Brigade composed of a mixture of Afghan War veterans and Fadhli tribesmen. As determined as President Salih, Brigadier-General Ali Muhsin al-Ahmar and Sheikh al-Ahmar
^f
to see off the godless Marxists for good and all, he was delighted to be co-opted into the project of upholding Yemen’s unity by ridding his homeland of them and helping to impose direct rule from Sanaa, thrilled to be taking Aden because it was something his Fadhli forebears had never managed to do while the British ruled it.

The civil war was regrettable and costly, and the veteran jihadists‘ revenge on the easy, beer-swilling ways of the Adenis chilling to witness, let alone experience, but some outsiders were impressed by the way President Salih seemed to be taming the Afghan War veterans by drawing them into mainstream Yemeni society. At a time when other Arab countries were closing their doors to home-coming Afghan War veterans, when Algeria, Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt were confronting their jihadists with violence and censorship that only inflamed the phenomenon and swelled their ranks with armies of recruits, a foreign eyewitness to Yemen’s 1994 war and its aftermath was writing, ’Little Yemen may still serve as an important model of how Arab Islamists can cope with democratic principles and how tolerant they can be of secularists once in power.’
⁵
And Tariq al-Fadhli was the perfect poster-boy for this gently inclusive policy. The safe return of his family’s land, a usefully generous stipend from Sanaa and a high military rank, a new Toyota Land Cruiser, membership of the president’s ruling GPC party, a seat in the upper house of the Parliament and a blind eye turned to his maintenance of a twelve-man uniformed armed guard, seemed to cure him of all his jihadist fervour. The assumption in Sanaa was that with the Marxists brought to their knees and fleeing into exile at last, Tariq was just one of a majority of Afghan War veterans sensibly opting for an easy life.

At our first meeting in 2004 Tariq told me that although he greatly missed the freedom and excitement of jihad in Afghanistan - ‘my wives won’t let me go anywhere these days,’ he joked - he had had no contact whatsoever with Osama bin Laden since 1995 and that he had never wanted anything to do with his old friend’s attacks against the West. On the other hand he was no longer feeling nearly as closely allied to President Salih as he had been a decade earlier. The united Yemen he had fought to preserve in the civil war was proving such a terrible disappointment that he confessed he would love to see the British back in Aden - ‘after lunch today, if possible!’ When we met again three years later, his dissatisfaction with the status quo had intensified to judge by the gist of an old verse about snakes he recited for me: ‘My allegiance is only to those who fill my hands with silver coins… We came to the voice of the Power, and we returned without any snakes even … And those who knew they already had their snakes clasped them closer …’

I gathered from this gnomic utterance that on top of his disgruntle-ment with the junior position of the old south in united Yemen, he was feeling the financial pinch - in short, that his annual stipend was no longer large enough to keep him on the side of ‘the Power’, that he was on the point of presenting himself as a snake’s head the president would need to dance on. This revelation and the fact that he had turned his back on jihad just as soon as he had regained his family’s land placed Tariq well within Yemeni tribal tradition. The imams, the Ottomans, the British, the Egyptians and the PDRY’s Soviet backers had all had to recognise that what Yemeni tribesmen cared about most was money and land, not peace or religion or any ideology. Like the calming and extremely time-consuming Yemeni custom of chewing qat, these twin tribal priorities are sometimes cited as an important reason why the number of Yemenis actively engaged in jihad today is not a great deal larger than it is.

By the mid-2000s Tariq al-Fadhli was popularly viewed as the leader of Yemen’s first generation of jihadists who, depending on one’s point of view, had either grown up and opted for a peaceful life, or unforgivably sold out and betrayed the cause.

The country’s second wave of jihadists were Afghan War veterans who did not follow Tariq’s lead. They were men with little to gain or lose in the way of land or wealth, men who believed that having seen off the Soviet Satan in Afghanistan in 1988 and the Marxists in south Yemen in 1994, it was time to see off the West and any corrupt Muslim regimes too - in effect, to take on the world, as bin Laden was recommending. Some, like Nasir al-Bahri, for example, spent the 1990s fighting jihad wherever Muslims were under threat - in Bosnia, Somalia, Tajikistan, Chechnya - remaining close to bin Laden. Others parted company with him. In Yemen, many were led by an ex-Afghan Arab Yemeni known as Abu Hassan al-Mihdar, leader of the Aden-Abyan Islamic Army (AAIA), who had set up a training camp to the north-east of the Fadhli lands. The name of the movement had special resonance; a little-known
hadith
had prophesied that a mighty and victorious army of 12,000 faithful fighters for Allah would rise up out of the area comprising Aden and the territory of Abyan. To the extent that it thoroughly shared and publicly approved bin Laden’s aims, the AAIA could be said to be ‘al-Qaeda affiliated’.

One of the AAIA’s priorities was to ensure that the Sanaa regime did not over-compensate for the costly mistake of not doing America’s will in 1990 with regard to approving the invasion of Iraq by becoming too friendly with the United States. The western superpower was gravely offending Muslims everywhere at the time, not only by its solidly uncritical support for Israel but by its maintenance of a large military base in Saudi Arabia, the home of Islam’s Holy Places. The AAIA would do its best to sabotage Salih’s recent efforts to fill Yemen’s empty coffers by granting the US’s Persian fleet access to the shipping lanes in the Gulf of Aden and inviting her ships to refuel at Aden.

Simultaneous al-Qaeda attacks against US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in early August 1998 should have served as a warning to the US navy to refuel elsewhere; it soon transpired that one of the bombers who survived the Kenyan attack had called a certain telephone number in Sanaa both before and after the operation. The number belonged to the head of al-Qaeda’s Yemeni cell, yet another Afghan War veteran and friend of bin Laden’s named Ahmad al-Hada.
^g
No sooner had al-Hada received the calls from the al-Qaeda operative in Kenya than he had relayed the news to bin Laden in Afghanistan by a satellite telephone. Identification of that jihadist telephone exchange in Sanaa situated Yemen and Yemenis at the heart of the al-Qaeda enterprise for the first time. A biographer of al-Qaeda, Lawrence Wright, points out that the discovery enabled the FBI ‘to map the links of the al-Qaeda network all across the globe’.
⁶

Uninvolved in al-Qaeda’s embassy bombings, the AAIA first drew world-wide attention to itself in December 1998 when it claimed responsibility for kidnapping sixteen westerners, most of them Britons, on an adventure holiday in Yemen. The AAIA was hoping to exchange its western hostages for six of its members whom the authorities had recently arrested for plotting to blow up the British consulate, a western hotel and the Anglican church in Aden. Tribal kidnappings of foreign tourists as a means of extracting funds from Sanaa - for a new well or school or road, jobs in the civil service, or a bigger stipend, or the release of prisoners - were one sure sign of how patchily the state institutions of the newly united Yemen were functioning, but they had also been an accepted modus operandi since at least the start of the 1990s. Confident of being treated as honoured guests and graciously entertained by their captors, growing numbers of tourists to Yemen had even begun to relish the idea of being kidnapped as a way of achieving an authentically Yemeni experience.

That all changed after December 1998. The AAIA men were not common or garden tribal kidnappers. Sanaa was belatedly waking up to the threat posed by the Afghan War veterans; a jihadist who had fought in both Afghanistan and Bosnia had recently murdered three Catholic nuns, two Indians and a Filipino who had been caring for elderly and handicapped Yemenis in Hodeidah. The kidnapping of the sixteen western tourists was not handled in the usual way. Instead of entering into negotiations with the kidnappers, Sanaa despatched a platoon of soldiers on a raid to rescue the hostages, but the operation did not go according to plan. In the ensuing skirmish four of the group were killed, three British and one Australian. Although the leader of the AAIA was swiftly arrested and executed, the group survived to be described by one US analyst in 2006 as ‘one of the more resilient groups in the region’.
⁷
Yemen’s fledgling tourist industry has still not recovered and Fadhli tribal land, much of the province of Abyan, is still considered especially jihad-friendly.

With three Britons among the dead, London was particularly interested in the bungled rescue and - like the US, after the African embassy bombings - gained from it a useful insight into the new anti-western ideology being propagated by Afghan War veterans. It soon emerged that a half-blinded, hook-handed Afghan War veteran who had spent some time in Yemen, an Egyptian preacher at north London’s Finsbury Park mosque, had been closely involved in the faraway kidnapping. Abu Hamza al-Masri, as he was known, was not only in the habit of recruiting for the AAIA in London but had spoken to its leader on a satellite telephone he had bought for him and equipped with £500 of air-time both before and immediately after the kidnapping. More incriminating still, one of the six prisoners whose release the AAIA kidnappers had been demanding turned out to be Abu Hamza’s stepson and another his son.
^h
Abu Hamza was arrested and jailed under Britain’s new anti-terrorism laws, but President Salih was soon requesting that he be extradited to Yemen for a string of other long-distance misdemeanours, including plotting to blow up a Yemeni and his donkey by having a bomb placed under the animal’s saddle. However, Britain held onto him until 2004 when, armed with evidence that he had planned to set up a jihadists‘ training camp in Oregon, the US labelled him ’a terrorist facilitator with a global reach’
⁸
and demanded his extradition there instead. The request was granted in 2008, to come into force as soon as Hamza has finished his British prison sentence. Meanwhile he is reportedly still preaching jihad to his fellow Muslims via pipes connecting the cells in his Belmarsh prison.
⁹

The tragic episode gave Britain an unpleasant taste of how difficult it was to do business with Yemen, to identify those with responsibility and sift the salient from the meaningless. What were Scotland Yard and the Foreign Office to make of a credible report from one of the kidnapped Yemeni drivers that the chief jihadist kidnapper had used the satellite telephone Abu Hamza had given him to make direct and personal contact with the second most powerful person in the land, old Sultan Nasir al-Fadhli’s son-in-law and Tariq’s brother-in-law, the promoter of jihad in Afghanistan, Brigadier-General Ali Muhsin al-Ahmar?

The death of the four western tourists rattled and embarasssed the virtuoso dancer on snakes’ heads, but it did not cause Salih to lose his footing. A few renegade Afghan War veterans with little but bloodshed, vengeance against the West and Paradise on their minds were far from being the liveliest or biggest snake he had to contend with in the late 1990s. In the space of six months, between June and December 1998, the guns and bombs of disgruntled tribesmen in the north-eastern oil-producing Marib region of central Yemen had blown nineteen holes in an oil pipeline Yemen was dependent on for 40 per cent of her revenue.
¹⁰

Helping to explain why the jihadi threat was very far from the top of any Yemeni agenda was the fact that Yemen’s security service, the Political Security Office (PSO), was itself a bastion of anti-western, tending towards pro-jihadist feeling, staffed as it was in large part by retired Afghan War veterans who had transferred their anti-Soviet feelings onto the West and Iraqi-trained army officers whose hostility towards the West had been fuelled by the humiliation of the first Gulf War. It was only to be expected that such people would at best play down or ignore, at worst aid and abet jihadist activities. So it came about that bin Laden’s Egyptian second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was permitted to come and hold meetings in a public hall in Sanaa, and that al-Qaeda’s best counterfeiter was free to run classes in forging documents. Egyptian intelligence officers, determined to root out the jihadism that was threatening their tourist trade and Hosni Mubarak’s regime, found their Yemeni counterparts extremely tricky to do business with: ‘There were always problems,’ one told the
Wall Street Journal
, because ‘they [Yemenis] shared the same values of the people they were supposed to be arresting.’
¹¹

This was no exaggeration. An in-depth
Wall Street Journal
investigation revealed that early in 1998, before either the African embassy bombings or the AAIA’s kidnapping of the western tourists of the same year, an Egyptian Afghan War veteran who had tired of jihad, or was desperately short of cash, visited the PSO headquarters in Sanaa to offer what any western intelligence agency and many Arab ones would have given millions of dollars and their right arms for: solid, detailed intelligence about the whereabouts, capacity and future plans of al-Qaeda and its affiliates. He divulged that Ayman al-Zawahiri was then in Yemen’s southern highland city of Taiz, rather than in Afghanistan, and he offered to go and spy on the AAIA down in Abyan. But, instead of thanking him for his help and putting him to work, the PSO immediately contacted jihadist friends to warn them of a traitor in their midst. It was decided that the turncoat must be punished by swift deportation to Afghanistan where he would be murdered. Fortunately for him, he managed to escape to Egypt instead.

In 2000 - the year in which bin Laden sent Nasir al-Bahri to Ibb in Yemen’s southern highlands to collect a new young bride and Yemeni members of his organisation tried but failed (because heavy explosives sunk the fibreglass boat they were being transported on) to blow up the USS
Suttivans
in Aden - Italian counter-terrorism agents had an astounding success. They tapped snatches of a bizarre telephone conversation between a Yemeni PSO officer (who was also a tribal sheikh and a businessman) and al-Qaeda’s best forger in Sanaa.

Understandably, the Italians decided these runic pronouncements were too vague to be immediately useful, but, fresh from his tenth anniversary of unification celebrations, Salih was about to be forced into a recognition of the fact that his Afghan War veterans were a clear and present danger. Mid-morning on 12 October 2000, a little fibre- glass motorboat loaded with 500lb of explosives drew alongside a gigantic billion-dollar American warship that was refuelling in Aden harbour and blasted a 32 by 36-foot-wide hole in its side, killing seven-teen American sailors.

As a David versus Goliath
coup de théâtre
the attack on the USS
Cole
made spectacularly good propaganda, better even than the Afghan War veterans’ much-boasted defeat of the Soviet Union. New converts flocked to bin Laden’s global jihad, especially Yemenis, who took a natural awed pride in seeing their obscure and impoverished homeland capture the world’s headlines for the first time since the British pull-out from Aden almost forty years earlier. The former deputy chief of bin Laden’s bodyguards, Nasir al-Bahri, insisted to London’s
al-Quds al-Arabi
four years later that al-Qaeda was an overwhelmingly Yemeni organisation:

It can be said that the majority of al-Qaeda members are Yemenis. This is a fact no one can deny. The leader of al-Qaeda is of Yemeni origin. His bodyguards are Yemenis. The trainers in the camps are Yemenis. The commanders at the fronts are Yemenis. All the operations that were directed against the United States were coordinated with Yemeni members. Yemenis are spread all over al-Qaeda
¹³
-

He was overstating the case, but it is fair to say that Yemenis were furnishing the movement with most of its muscle and much of its popular support at this time. Al-Bahri did confirm to me that Yemenis and Saudis outnumbered all other nationalities in the movement in that pre-9/11 period. In terms of authority and influence within the organisation, however, they were outdone by the Egyptians who tended to be older and to have more and longer experience of clandestine political activity. Tensions among bin Laden’s followers normally involved Eygptians and Yemenis. According to al-Bahri, Yemenis nicknamed the Egyptians ‘pharoahs’ on account of their patronising, haughty manner and boasted about how during the civil war in Yemen in the 1960s they had cut off 40,000 Egyptian noses and how happy they would be to cut off the rest them now in Afghanistan. The Egyptians meanwhile resented the Yemenis‘ vigour but lack of intellectual rigour, nicknaming them ’dervishes‘. At this stage, each operational section of al-Qaeda seems to have been headed by an experienced Egyptian, assisted by a Yemeni deputy. ’Before 9/11 changed everything,‘ al-Bahri told me, ’it looked as if bin Laden was slowly easing the Egyptians out and replacing them with Yemenis everywhere.’

Whatever the Americans’ strong suspicions, al-Qaeda’s responsibility for the attack on the USS
Cole
was impossible to prove immediately. President Salih seemed more reluctant than anyone else to recognise the fact that a home-grown terrorist problem looked set to ruin Yemen’s tentative rapprochement with the US and spoil Aden’s slowly reviving reputation as a safe refuelling port. In a telephone conversation with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright Salih blustered that the attack on the
Cole
seemed to have been an accident, ‘not a deliberate act’.
¹⁴
Within a couple of days an FBI team of sixty, led by John O’Neill, a man who had no doubt whatsoever that al-Qaeda was behind the incident, arrived in Aden to investigate, but President Salih was still in denial, wildly surmising to a
Newsweek
reporter that Israel might have been responsible.
¹⁵
One senior Yemeni official, perhaps recalling the devious manner in which Britain had taken possession of Aden in 1839, even opined to Egypt’s
Al-Ahram al-Arabi
that the United States had blown up its own warship, as a pretext to capture Aden.
¹⁶

In spite of some hindrance from Yemeni officials who naturally resented the sudden invasion of US policemen, with their bullying hurry and flash talk of technological miracles like DNA, despite almost as much resistance from Barbara Bodine, the American ambassador to Sanaa, who resented clumsy New York policemen ruining the US’s delicately nurtured new relations with Yemen, it took the FBI team just a month to establish al-Qaeda’s responsibility for the attack. They managed to link one of its masterminds - a Saudi-Yemeni named Walid Mohammad bin Attash but known as ‘Khalid’, an Afghan War veteran who had lost a part of one leg in Afghanistan and wore a metal prosthesis - to bin Laden.

Much later it would transpire that yet another Afghan War veteran and Saudi-born Yemeni named Abdel Rahim al-Nashiri, who had been working on the plans for a year and a half, training the local team and calibrating the bomb to inflict maximum damage, had escaped north, to the southern highland city of Taiz after the attack and received high-level protection from arrest there. In early 2002 al-Nashiri was seen out and about in Sanaa with the deputy director of the PSO,
¹⁷
and went on to plan an attack against a French oil tanker, the
Limburg
, near the Hadhramaut port of Mukalla in October that year.
¹⁸
It also transpired that prior to the attack on the
Cole
, al-Nashiri had been provided by no less a person than Yemen’s interior minister with an invaluable laissez-passer saying, ‘All security forces are instructed to co-operate with him and facilitate his mission.’
¹⁹
In addition, the FBI managed to extract a useful confession from another conspirator, in spite of the fact that he was protected by the PSO colonel who had demonstratively kissed him on both cheeks before the interview began.
²⁰
Later still it was discovered that ‘Khalid’ and Ramzi bin al-Shibh,
ⁱ
a former Sanaa bank clerk with a German passport who later planned the 9/11 hijackings, had discussed the USS
Cole
operation at an al-Qaeda summit meeting in Kuala Lumpur a few months earlier.

By the end of 2000, when President Bill Clinton was preparing to vacate the White House, the average American knew more about Yemen than he or she had ever wanted to and President Ali Abdullah Salih had accepted two glaringly obvious truths: first, that his country was home to members of a global jihadist movement with access to enough funding and know-how to wreak serious damage on Yemeni as well as western interests, and second, that his PSO was unfit for the purpose of combating the nuisance.

However, unlike the new American president, George W. Bush, Salih was neither temperamentally inclined nor sufficiently powerful to confront the jihadists head on by declaring all-out war on them. Dancing on the heads of snakes rather than setting out to destroy the reptiles had always been more his style. Knowledge of the climate of opinion inside his PSO but also chats over qat with jihadist sympathisers like Brigadier-General Ali Muhsin al-Ahmar and the cleric Sheikh Abdul Majid al-Zindani, for example, would also have discouraged him from taking direct action. And then he had to consider the tribes whose custom it was to offer shelter to outlaws and whose cold appetite for cash he knew well. Furthermore, the jihadists‘ David-like determination to take on a Goliath West whose soldiers had been trampling the Muslim Holy Land since the First Gulf War, whose planes were still enforcing a no-fly zone over Iraq and whose dollars were still bankrolling Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land, played far too well with far too many Yemenis at all levels of society for him even to contemplate a wholesale military crackdown. Anyway, how could one begin to police the contents of peoples’ minds and hearts?

In order to avoid Yemen becoming an international pariah again as it had been on the eve of the first Gulf War, in order to remove any risk of invasion by the US and instead access a few million dollars’ worth of military equipment and surveillance technology, Salih had to convince America’s new Republican president that he was willing and able to slay the jihadism snake, although that had never been and could never be his modus operandi. In effect, President George W. Bush was one more snake-head he was having to learn to dance on.

^a
Yemeni sarong

^b
Known as a beyhan chair, any circular band of fabric slipped around the knees while sitting cross-legged to act as a comfortable support.

^c
Edward Shackleton, the Labour peer and Minister without Portfolio tasked with the handover of Aden to the NLF in 1967.

^d
Sultan Nasir al-Fadhli died in a Saudi hospital in November 2008, and was flown home for burial in a private plane, courtesy of the Saudi royal family.

^e
Today famous as the father of Islamic Radicalism, the Egyptian intellectual who first argued that rebellion against one’s temporal ruler might be justified. Extremely popular among young Saudis outraged by the perceived hypocrisy of their worldly princes and Wahhabi clergy.

^f
The shared al-Ahmar name is a coincidence - the two men are not related.

^g
Al-Hada’s daughter was married to one of the future 9/11 hijackers.

^h
Abu Hamza’s son, Mohamed Kemal Mostafa, served three years in an Aden prison before returning to Britain, where he worked for London Underground until 2006 when his foreign criminal record as a would-be terrorist was uncovered. In mid-2009, he and two brothers were convicted of stealing a million pounds’ worth of luxury cars.