Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes by Clark Victoria

Author:Clark, Victoria [Clark, Victoria]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2010-02-18T05:00:00+00:00

THE ABU HAMZA CONNECTION

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.

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