It pays to be patient when approaching the United States embassy in Sana’a: perimeter security is in the hands of Yemeni police; next come soldiers in camouflage gear, toting machine guns and chewing qat; then there are civilian guards at concrete barriers — all before the visitor reaches the marine sentry at the core of the compound.
Battered cars beep deafeningly in the dusty streets but it is quiet inside: non-essential staff were sent home after mortar bombs hit the girls’ school next door in March. Blasts rocked the Italian embassy and a Canadian oil company in May. And the United Kingdom Foreign Office has advised Britons who are not on urgent business to stay away.
Yemen became an uneasy partner in George Bush’s “war on terror” after 9/11, presaged by al-Qaeda’s bombing of the USS Cole in Aden in 2000, when 17 sailors died. Osama bin Laden’s ancestral homeland has long had its own style of handling the men of violence — an Arabian “Sinatra doctrine”, the joke goes. Now it has become a target for working with the West.
“It is alarming,” said Abu Baker al-Qirbi, the Yemeni foreign minister, speaking in his office in Sana’a. “You can never predict when or where attacks will happen. Al-Qaeda’s tactic is to undertake these actions to prove that they are still there.”
The US and other Western countries are concerned, too. And so, closer to home, are the Saudis, who have largely succeeded in crushing their own al-Qaeda militants and fret about a lawless route for arms, men and money across the long desert border with their neighbour.
In the latest incident, a soldier and three civilians were killed on Friday when Ahmed al-Mashjari, a sallow-faced youth with a thin moustache, rammed a Fiat Kia van packed with explosives into a security headquarter in the eastern province of Hadramaut. The suicide bomber was hailed as a “heroic martyr” by al-Qaeda’s Soldiers of Yemen BrigadesÂ.
Al-Qaeda may be in trouble in Iraq and elsewhere, but a second generation of terrorists is now thriving in Yemen, “better organised and more ambitious”, according to the American expert Gregory Johnsen. Its slick online magazine, Sada al-Malahim (Echoes of Battles), urges jihadists to kidnap Western tourists to secure the release of jailed members, and videotape their actions.
Two Belgian tourists were shot dead in January. But the worst incident so far was in July 2007, when a group of Spanish tourists and their drivers were blown up at an ancient temple in Marib. It is thought that 10 people died. Attacks like these, and on oil installations, have been devastating for this wild, remote and desperately poor country.
“Terrorism is being dealt with in the best way possible given our limited resources,” insisted Faris Sanabani, an aide to President Ali Abdullah Salih. “If the Saudis need to buy $200-million worth of communications equipment for security, they can. But if we need to spend $1-million we have to squeeze and save.”
Scarce resources are not the only problem. In a land where loyalty is bought and Saudi-inspired Salafi or Wahhabi thinking influential, Salih is said to have had quiet “understandings” with al-Qaeda that it would be left alone to recruit fighters for Iraq if it did not attack inside Yemen.
The president has links with, and debts to, some very radical Islamists: thousands of Yemeni mujahideen fought in Afghanistan and came home to help defeat southern rebels — billed as socialist “infidels” — in 1994. Salafi militants have been used to fight Shia Houthi rebels in the north.
Suspicions of official complicity with jihadists grew when 23 al-Qaeda prisoners managed to tunnel their way out of a Sana’a jail in 2006. One of them, Nasir al-Wahishi, once Bin Laden’s secretary, became head of the group’s Yemen operations, replacing a man who was killed in a CIA Predator drone strike in 2002.
Political and tribal constraints mean Salih cannot meet US demands to hand over the best-known of the escapees, Jamal al-Badawi, who was convicted in Yemen of masterminding the USS Cole attack, but served only two years of his 15-year term.
“The opposition in this country does not believe we should be cooperating with the US in the war on terror,” explained Sanabani. But highly influential figures in the regime, including the army commander and Salih clansman Ali Mohsen, are said to feel the same.
It was Salih’s instinct to accommodate and co-opt rather than confront that led to Yemen’s pioneering “dialogue” with detained jihadists. “Extremists have the power of faith but they are wrong,” said the programme’s founder, Judge Hamoud al-Hittar, minister for religious affairs, resplendent in white robe, turban, and curved jambiya dagger.
“Before we started this in Yemen no scholar in the Muslim world said al-Qaeda was wrong.”
But Western experts are sceptical about Hittar’s claim of a 98% “de-radicalisation” rate, as they are about the programme of “surrender and release” for terrorists, which the US officially describes as “lenient” .
“Yemen has dealt with some of those affiliated with al-Qaeda because they say they are prepared to cooperate with the government and help fight other extremists,” said a defensive al-Qirbi. “It’s Yemen’s way. But when it is necessary to confront them — we are ready.”
Even Yemenis critical of Salih say they sympathise with this softly-softly approach. “It is the right way to deal with it,” said one professional. “We can’t fight other peoples’ wars for them.”
Yet signs are that a resurgent al-Qaeda with a new strategy of repeated small-scale attacks is turning this into Yemen’s war as well. “There was a deal [with the jihadis] but it’s not working any more,” said Nadia al-Sakkaf, editor of the Yemen Times.
“Now there are just fanatics who want to be hired by al-Qaeda, people who have come back from Iraq or Afghanistan and have no skills, who are not integrated into society and have no education. They are brainwashed. Jihad is all they know.”
The danger, say government officials, is of focusing too narrowly on terrorism when Yemen faces such grave economic and social problems. And there is open anger that the US blocked millions of dollars in aid to Sana’a from the Millennium Challenge Corporation because of the deadlock over the Badawi case.
For Abdel-Karim al-Arhabi, the deputy prime minister, the link between poverty and extremism is alarmingly clear. “Most young people have no prospects in life. Those fanatics offer them the illusion that they can take power and implement authentic Islam — and if they get killed they go to paradise. It’s a win-win situation for them.”
Majid Fahed, who heads the Civil Democratic Foundation, an NGO, warns that the Americans are exaggerating the threat of terrorism. “As Yemenis there are other things that we should care about more. Because of al-Qaeda our governÂment has forgotten all about development.” —