rv supply warehouse New York Times Magazine: Yemen could become the next Afghanistan
“New York Times Magazine” This month's cover
Before 2007, even more dangerous begin a new generation of al-Qaeda militants in Yemen rise. Different from their predecessors, these people openly committed to overthrow the Yemeni government, refused to engage in any dialogue. Some of them are coming back from Iraq, and brought back valuable battlefield experience. Attacks become more bloody and frequent. Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh tried through intermediaries to persuade militants to lay down their weapons, but has never been a mediator with the Yemeni branch of Al Qaeda leader Gamal Abdel Nasser – Wu Haixi or his senior aides made no progress.
At the same time, the United States more and more of the al-Qaeda forces in Yemen, the growth, Saleh tried to resolve the issue through dialogue and a tendency to worry. Jihadists in Afghanistan and Somalia to Yemen is alleged. U.S. General David Petraeus, commander in the Middle East visit last summer, the capital of Sana'a, Yemen, Yemeni anti-terrorism force to help the number of U.S. military instructors have also quietly increased. A U.S. delegation met with Saleh last fall, showed him the al-Qaeda attempt on his and his family start with the hard evidence. Government of Yemen in the al-Qaeda after the start of the goals to take a more active combat operations. Yemeni al-Qaida target the United States unmanned combat air operations also began in December last year.
But the air strikes and raids are only short-term tactics. The real question is, if something does not change, Yemen certainly further into chaos, rampant corruption in Yemen, there are multiple groups of armed elements, oil, and water nearly exhausted, further exacerbated poverty. Including Obama and many anti-terrorism experts agree this, but so far there is no call for action to make any progress. In Washington, U.S. officials and diplomats in Sana'a in Yemen, said there is no real strategy, in part because very few people have experience of working in Yemen, no American diplomats visited al-Qaeda members hiding in the province.
Official concerned, the policy of the United States in Yemen has two components: air strikes and raids in order to help eliminate the al-Yemeni army organized crime groups, on the other hand to increase development and humanitarian assistance efforts to address the root causes of extreme technology. Yemen, the White House by the end of June that will triple the amount of assistance to 42.5 million U.S. dollars. Taking into account the needs of Yemen, this amount is still too small. Diplomats acknowledged that they have not figured out how to solve the Yemeni government competence is low, corruption, economic and other central theme approach.
Al-Qaida has a clear strategy for Yemen. Al-Qaeda in January 2009 announced that it would al-Qaeda branch in Yemen into Saudi Arabia and the Arabian Peninsula al-Qaeda branch. Branch of the Arabian Peninsula al-Qaeda targets in the region as a base for attacks, with a theocratic state to replace the pagan government of Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Al Qaeda propaganda video released by the people most impressed by the contents of it to the Yemeni tribes who issued the call, it calls for tribes to resist the Yemeni government and its supporters, the United States and Saudi money and stress.
is yemen the next afghanistan?
just before dawn on dec. 24, an american cruise missile soared high over the southern coast of the arabian peninsula, arced down toward the dark mountains above the rafadh valley in yemen's shabwa province and found its mark, crashing into a small stone house on a hillside where five young men were sleeping. half a mile away, a 27-year-old yemeni tribesman named ali muhammad ahmed was awakened by the sound. stumbling out of bed, he quickly dressed, slung his ak-47 over his shoulder and climbed down a footpath to the valley that shelters his village, two hours from the nearest paved road. he already sensed what had happened. a week earlier, an american airstrike killed dozens of people in a neighboring province as part of an expanded campaign against al qaeda militants. (although the us military has acknowledged playing a role in the airstrikes, it has never publicly confirmed that it fired the missiles.)
ahmed soon came upon the shattered house. mangled bodies were strewn among the stones; he recognized a fellow tribesman. scattered near the wreckage were bits of yellow debris with the words “us navy” and long serial numbers written on them. a group of six or seven young men were standing in the dawn half-light, looking dazed. all were members of al qaeda. among them was fahd al-quso, a longtime militant who is wanted by the fbi for his suspected role in the bombing of the uss cole in 2000. the missile had struck in one of the most remote and inaccessible valleys on earth, in a place where al qaeda has been trying to establish a foothold. quso was the local cell leader and had been recruiting young men for years. ahmed knew him well.
i met ahmed several weeks later in sana, the yemeni capital, where he works part time as a bodyguard. by that time, al qaeda's yemeni branch had claimed credit for a failed effort to detonate a bomb in a detroit-bound jetliner on christmas day , igniting a global debate about whether yemen was the next front in the war on terror. yemen's once-obscure vital statistics were flashing across tv screens everywhere: it is the arab world's poorest country, with a fast-growing and deeply conservative muslim population of 23 million. it is running out of oil and may soon be the first country in the world to run out of water. the central government is weak and corrupt, hemmed in by rebellions and powerful tribes. many fear that al qaeda is gaining a sanctuary in the remote provinces east of sana, similar to the one it already has in afghanistan and pakistan.
on the day i met him, ahmed – a small, rail-thin man with a bony face – seemed still awed and a bit frightened by what happened in his valley. he was dressed in a tattered blazer and a futa, the patterned cloth skirt yemeni men often wear. he sat on a sofa leaning forward with his hands on his thighs, glancing occasionally at me. we were in a small, sparely furnished office belonging to ahmed's employer and friend abdulaziz al-jifri, who had given him permission to speak. it was evening, and in the room next door men could be heard laughing and chatting as they drank tea and chewed khat, the narcotic leaf yemenis use to relax.
“We took the bodies under the trees,” ahmed continued in a quiet voice. “One was from my tribe. He had just joined al qaeda, and that was his first night sleeping with them.” He paused, and i caught a hint of defensiveness, perhaps also of anger, in his eyes. he seemed reluctant to stray from his narrative, but it was clear that he felt the bombing was an injustice. “we knew they were qaeda, but they were young, and they hadn ' t done anything, and they were locals, “he said.” they came and went at checkpoints, and the government didn't seem to care. so we dealt with them normally ….
“Later i took the bodies to the graveyard,” he went on to say. “Then i talked with fahd's cousin about what we should do about him.”
within an hour, ahmed said, the discussions expanded, and ali al-asowad, the aging sheik of the abdullah tribe, was summoned from his house. the sun was rising over the arid brown hills around rafadh and soon almost 100 people were sitting under the spreading boughs of an acacia tree for an emergency tribal meeting.
dozens of people spoke. some were angry. most people in the valley were related to the dead men or knew them. the victims had scarcely stood out in rafadh, where everyone carried weapons and hatred of the yemeni government was nothing unusual. what did it matter that they hated america and called themselves qaeda? some of the tribesmen also spoke in defense of fahd al-quso, who moved to the area in 2007. his grandfather had a house there, so he had a right to the tribe's protection. but others stood up and shouted angrily that quso had put the whole tribe in needless danger by basing himself in their village; more american bombs might be coming soon.
the people of rafadh had decisions to make, ones that might soon ramify across all of yemen's remote mountains and deserts and even half a world away in the pentagon. what did al qaeda mean to them? was it worth protecting? a bargaining chip to be used against a neglectful government? or just an invitation to needless violence?
sana resembles a fortress, not just in its architecture but in its geography. it is set on a high plateau, surrounded by arid, craggy mountains. at its heart is the old city, a thicket of unearthly medieval towers and banded spires that stands out sharply in the dry desert air. this was the entire city until a few decades ago, its high walls locked every evening at dusk. today sana is a far more sprawling place, with internet cafes and swarms of beat-up taxis and a sprinkling of adventure tourists. the old city gates are mostly gone now, and although men still carry the traditional daggers known as jambiyas in their belts, they also wear blazers, often with cheap designer logos on their sleeves. like other arab capitals, it is full of policemen, and there are occasional checkpoints manned by bored-looking soldiers in camouflage uniforms.
but yemen is different. beneath the familiar arab iconography, like pictures of the president that hang in every shop, there is a wildness about the place, a feeling that things might come apart at any moment. a narcotic haze descends on yemen every afternoon, as men stuff their mouths with glossy khat leaves until their cheeks bulge and their eyes glaze over. police officers sit down and ignore their posts, a green dribble running down their chins. taxi drivers get lost and drive in circles, babbling into their cellphones. but if not for the opiate of khat, some say, all of yemen – not just those areas of the south and north already smoldering with discontent – would explode into rebellion.
one morning in sana, i discovered a crowd of people protesting in the stone courtyard outside the cabinet building. many had shackle scars on their wrists and ankles. they came from an area called jaashin, about 100 miles south of the capital. but some of them, i found, did not even know that jaashin was in the republic of yemen. their only real ruler was the local sheik, muhammad ahmed mansour, who is, it turns out, a kind of latter-day marquis de sade. mansour is also a poet, who earns extra license for his cruelties by writing florid odes to yemen's president. some pilgrims from jaashin said they were imprisoned, shackled and beaten by the sheik – who maintains his own army and several prisons – after refusing to relinquish their property to him. i asked ahmed abdu abdullah al-haithami, a bent old farmer in a tattered green jacket, what country he was living in. he looked up at me with imploring eyes. “all i know is that god rules above, and the sheik rules here below, “he said. all of this, i later learned, was documented by yemeni lawyers, who have been working on behalf of the people of jaashin for years to little effect. as one lawyer, khaled al-alansi, put it to me, “if you can't fight sheik mansour, how can you possibly fight al qaeda?”
two thousand years ago, the area east of sana held one of the earth's most prosperous kingdoms, a lush agricultural region of spices and fruits, fed by irrigation canals from a vast man-made dam. the romans called yemen “arabia felix,” or happy arabia. today, the eastern region is an arid wasteland. most people scrape by on less than $ 2 a day, even though they live atop yemen's oil and gas fields. there are few ways to make a living other than smuggling, goat-herding and kidnapping. the region is also, chronically, a war zone. tribal feuds have always been part of life here, but in recent years they have grown so common and so deadly that as much as a quarter of the population cannot go to school or work for fear of being killed. the feuds often devolve into battles with bands of raiders mowing down their rivals with machine-gun fire or launching mortars into a neighboring village. no one knows how many people die in these wars, but khaled fattah, a sociologist who has studied yemen's tribes for years, told me that hundreds of victims a year is a conservative estimate.
every time i drive out of sana i get an ominous sense of going backward in time to a more lawless era. as the city's towers fade in the distance, the houses drop away into level desert and occasional piles of construction rubble. the traffic thins out and consists mostly of pickup trucks carrying tribesmen with patterned cloth kaffiyehs tied around their heads. you pass the first of several checkpoints, where skinny soldiers in ill-fitting uniforms warily circle the car, looking for weapons or kidnapping victims. you pass towering, desolate mountains of black and brown igneous rock. once you're out of sana province, there are virtually no signs of the yemeni state. every able-bodied man seems to carry an ak-47 rifle over his shoulder; it's not uncommon to see rocket -propelled-grenade launchers. only the oil and gas fields, hidden behind wire fences and vigilantly watched over by the yemeni military, seem to merit the government's attention.
every time i drive out of sana i get an ominous sense of going backward in time to a more lawless era. as the city's towers fade in the distance, the houses drop away into level desert and occasional piles of construction rubble. the traffic thins out and consists mostly of pickup trucks carrying tribesmen with patterned cloth kaffiyehs tied around their heads. you pass the first of several checkpoints, where skinny soldiers in ill-fitting uniforms warily circle the car, looking for weapons or kidnapping victims. you pass towering, desolate mountains of black and brown igneous rock. once you're out of sana province, there are virtually no signs of the yemeni state. every able-bodied man seems to carry an ak-47 rifle over his shoulder; it's not uncommon to see rocket -propelled-grenade launchers. only the oil and gas fields, hidden behind wire fences and vigilantly watched over by the yemeni military, seem to merit the government's attention.
rafadh, several hundred miles southeast of the capital, is in some ways typical of the areas where al qaeda found refuge in yemen. it is set among dry mountains populated by baboons, there are no paved roads and cars must travel laboriously along dirt tracks that wind among the hills. there is no public water supply or electricity and no functioning school. the valley was largely peaceful during the 1970s and '80s, when the socialist government that ruled south yemen – a separate country until it united with the north in 1990 – tried to eradicate tribalism. but since then yemen's president, ali abdullah saleh, has encouraged tribal practices, and the feuds have returned. rafadh itself has been devastated by a tribal conflict that has raged for years, killing at least a dozen people and wounding many more in an area with only a few hundred inhabitants.
ahmed played a central role in the feud. in 2006, ahmed's father and older brother were gunned down by men posing as customers at the father's market stall. afterward, he told me, he drove the bullet-riddled bodies to the nearest police station to ask for justice. the police captain in charge waved him off dismissively, he said, telling him, “you tribes are always causing trouble – deal with it yourself.”
he did. ahmed gathered five cousins and together they hunted down and shot two men they believe were among the killers and three other men who were sheltering them. the feud briefly threatened to escalate into a broader war. the government promised to mediate but failed to do so, and the feud grew with further kidnappings and clumsy army suppression. many local people felt the government was largely to blame.
it was then that fahd al-quso, the al qaeda figure, arrived in the valley. he had roots in the area but, perhaps more important, he was an outlaw to the yemeni authorities, and that alone earned him a welcome in rafadh. the united states wanted him in connection with the bombing of the uss cole, which killed 17 american sailors. the yemeni police arrested his younger brother, a tactic aimed at pressuring quso to turn himself in.
“Fahd was a victim in the eyes of the tribes,” ahmed told me. “They accepted what he said. People distrust the government here, so those who have problems with it will get sympathy.”
last summer, as al qaeda's arabian branch began setting off alarms in washington, quso became more active, ahmed told me. “we saw lots of al qaeda guys coming and going from his house,” ahmed said. they tended to keep to themselves, refusing to give rides to others from the village.
but the tribesmen of rafadh continued to shelter quso and his men and not just because of their shared hatred of the government. quso had offered to supply teachers for the village school. local families knew he was with al qaeda but welcomed the news for a simple reason: there were no teachers in the school at all. “the people were saying, 'we would rather have our kids get an al qaeda education than be illiterate,'” jifri told me. after hearing about quso's offer, jifri went to officials in sana and delivered a blunt message: “right now you have one al qaeda guy in rafadh, tomorrow you will have 700.”
initially, jifri said, the government refused to provide teachers, saying any town that was willing to accept help from al qaeda was beneath contempt. finally, they relented.
“The government agreed to send 6 teachers,” jifri told me. “Fahd brought 16.”
when people talk about the government in yemen, they really mean one man: ali abdullah saleh. despite the country's many political parties – islamist, socialist, arab nationalist – the country is run almost entirely by saleh, and he runs it exactly like a sheik : using his own tribe as a power base and constantly making deals to head off his rivals. saleh came to power in 1978; pictures of him at the time show a skinny young man in a military cap that looks too big for him, his eyes covered by aviator sunglasses.
at the time, most of yemen was still just emerging from isolation. in 1962 a group of military officers, inspired and aided by gamal abdel nasser in egypt, overthrew the xenophobic religious dynasty that, from its northern base, ruled much of yemen for centuries . some of the young officers hoped to modernize yemen and make it more like other arab countries. in the mid-1970s one yemeni president, ibrahim al-hamdi, tried to tame the powerful tribal sheiks, extend the state's power throughout the country and unify with south yemen, which emerged from british occupation in 1967. yemeni intellectuals still talk about hamdi with nostalgia. but the sheiks and their saudi backers were not pleased. in october 1977, hamdi was found riddled with bullets in his sana home. the killers had thrown the bodies of murdered french prostitutes beside him to blacken his legacy.
saleh was not a man to make such mistakes. he fought in a tribal army as a teenager and then made his way up through the ranks of the military, impressing superiors with his ruthlessness and charm. he became a tank commander – a crucial skill at a time when tanks were a new and essential weapon. when hamdi's successor, ahmad al-ghashmi, was blown up by a bomb hidden in a briefcase, saleh was a compromise replacement. no one expected him to last long.
three decades later, saleh retains a stiff, military bearing, with a strong jaw and glinting eyes. in person he conveys an impression of fierce pride and gruffness and the natural defensiveness of a man from a small tribe who fought his way up with no more than an elementary-school education. when i interviewed him in 2008, he seemed impatient and almost angry. his eyes darted around the room as he fired off commands to his aides in a guttural voice. he bridled at questions about the american role in yemen . “arrogant,” he said, staring at me, then adding disdainfully in english, “cowboys.”
some say saleh has lasted so long because, unlike his predecessors, he knew not to take on the tribes directly. “saleh survived by mastering the tribal game as no one else had,” khaled fattah, the tribal expert, said. he did so in two ways. first, he coddled the big tribal sheiks, bringing them into the capital and building them large homes. he created a patronage network that grew substantially after yemen began pumping oil in the 1980s, paying large sums to sheiks, military leaders, political figures and anyone who might pose a threat to his power. much of yemen's budget now goes into corruption and kickbacks – worth billions of dollars – that fuel this network, according to diplomats, analysts and oil-industry figures in sana.
second, saleh adopted what some yemenis call “the policy of management through conflicts.” if a tribe was causing trouble, he would begin building up its rivals as a counterweight. if a political party became threatening, he would do the same thing, sometimes even creating a cloned version of the same party with people on the government payroll. “the government plays divide and rule with us,” arfaj bin hadban, a tribal sheik from jawf province, north of sana, said. “if one tribe will not do what he wants, he gets the neighbors to pressure it. sometimes it's money, sometimes it's weapons, sometimes it's employment for the tribesmen. “
(Unfinished, full text, see: New York Times Magazine)
(Jie Yu)
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