al-qaida chief ayman al-zawahiri the coordinator 2015 part 4-1-aqap-21

By Capt (Ret) C de Waart, feel free to share: in Confidence

Al-Qaida chief Ayman al-Zawahiri The Coordinator 2015 Part 4-1-AQAP-21

While we are looking somewhere else, Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula al-Qaeda in Yemen, AKA Ansar al-Sharia or AQAP has promised "total war on all crusaders"

Previous: A rival caliphate emerges? Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has begun to partner with local tribes in Yemen’s eastern Hadramawt governorate and is consolidating control over territory. AQAP militants continue to hold parts of al Mukalla city, the capital of Hadramawt, and recently seized Dhabah oil terminal in al Shihr, along with military installations. AQAP has delegated governance to local tribal councils.

"The truth is that the situation has become like an Islamic Republic, where al Qaeda operates freely to impose its deviant version of hardline Islamic Law,"

Al-Qaeda has certainly taken advantage of the recent collapse of Yemen's government and subsequent war to expand its influence.

Even in the years leading up to the current crisis, al-Qaeda's numbers were estimated to have tripled.

An important part of al-Qaeda's persistent appeal over recent years lies in what it does when it is not busy waging violent jihad or churning out position statements and theological treatises.

Securing tolerance in its tribal heartlands is vital for al-Qaeda's outreach programme. As one local from Mukalla explained: "What do you expect us to do? Fight them? They are our kinsfolk. We let them go about their business."

At the same time, in what might ironically be termed a recent charm offensive, al-Qaeda has dissociated itself from the savage brutality of Islamic State and apologised for its own beheadings of soldiers and killing of unarmed health workers last year.

Just as al-Qaeda adapts its military tactics to suit different target locations, so its propaganda communications must be diverse enough to suit different cultural and geographical contexts.

June 3, The Saudi regime has sent large quantities of weapons and ammunition to al-Qaeda terrorists operating in Yemen, local media say.

According to Yemeni media reports on Tuesday, Riyadh funded and armed al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the Yemen-based branch of the terror group, in a bid to help it fight against the Ansarullah fighters of the Houthi movement. The Saudi regime smuggled 36 trucks through the Wadia border crossing in the eastern Yemeni province of Hadhramaut, 16 of them were loaded with arms and ammunition. The terrorists were also provided with medicine and funds, the reports added. Back in May, reports said Saudi air force also dropped weapons to al-Qaeda militants in the southwestern Yemeni province of Ta’izz. Meanwhile, Mohammed al-Attab, Press TV's correspondent in the Yemeni capital Sana’a, reported that some elements affiliated with the Riyadh regime have released al-Qaeda terrorists from prisons in Hadhramaut and the southern province of Aden.

May 28, Cairo/Dubai: Yemen may never emerge as a united country from a civil war pitting a northern Shi`ite Muslim militia and its allies in the army against fighters in the mostly Sunni south. The latest conflict, now in its third month, has exacerbated long-standing grievances that are regional but also increasingly religious in a country whose unity has always been brittle. Secessionist sentiment in the south, stoked by what southerners see as

Cees: Intel to Rent of 16 15/04/2023

http://zeenews.india.com/tags/yemen.html


decades of marginalisation by the north, is deepening as result of the damage inflicted upon Aden and other southern cities in assaults by the northern Houthi militia.

Sunni Muslim Arab states have maintained an air bombing campaign against the Houthis, allied to arch rival Shiìte Iran, but the Houthis retain the upper hand in battles in the south.Southern combatants fight under the flag of their formerly independent state, and residents spurn the idea of again joining those they see as northern invaders.

"What unity could there be after the destruction we see on our streets and wars of extermination against the south? Forget it," said Saleh Hashem, a resident of Aden, a port city whose historic commercial district lies in ruins.Once a British protectorate turned satellite state of the Soviet Union, South Yemen joined North Yemen to form a united country in 1990 under then President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who took power in the north in 1978.

Many in the south, home to most Yemeni oil facilities, felt northerners had commandeered their resources and denied them their identity and political rights. The South then sought to break away in 1994, but Saleh re-united the country by force.Resentment has festered since the unification and has grown with the ongoing war, taking on more religious overtones."We want there to be one people, but in two states with open borders between their citizens," Fuad Rashed, a leader of the southern secession movement, told Reuters. "The ongoing war has bloodied and slaughtered what little remained of the national unity that has been bungled for over two decades," he said. Despite Saleh`s overthrow during the 2011 Arab Spring protests, he and loyalists in Yemen`s army have made common cause with the Houthis, helping their drive from northern strongholds into the capital Sanaa in September and further south. Northern Entente The Houthis say their advance is part of a revolution against Sunni Islamist militants and corrupt officials. Saleh says he seeks reconciliation and denies accusations that he wants to settle old scores. The northerners` alliance against Yemen`s government, whose base of support is in Aden, may reflect a new unity of purpose in the heavily tribal north, where Shiìte Islam`s Zaydi sect, to which the Houthis belong, prevails."A sectarian and regional polarization is under way. When the Houthis took over Sanaa and beyond, it showed that the Zaydi tribesmen were again vying for control)," a northern Yemeni politician, who requested anonymity for security reasons, told Reuters by telephone from Sanaa. "The majority of the military command, being northerners, quickly fell in with this agenda," the politician said.The northern advance is firing religious zeal in the south. "The Houthis are a Shiìte religious movement, and the whole south is Sunni. This has caused the religious to support the idea of secession more, so that the authority remains Sunni and they avoid living in a united state run by Shiìtes," said Mahmoud al-Salmi, a history professor at Aden University. Unstable While the idea of secession has gained ground, a security vacuum brought on by the split of Yemen`s army into pro- and anti-Houthi factions may make a viable southern state harder.Religious hardliners may be poised to make the most gains. After pro-Saleh troops evacuated last month, a council of conservative Sunni tribesmen and clerics emerged to govern southeastern Hadramawt province, Yemen`s largest and home to the modest oil reserves that keep its finances afloat. Residents of Hadramawt`s main city, Mukalla, say the



council has made a pact with al Qaeda`s Yemen branch, allowing it to hold recruitment rallies, set up informal Islamic courts and carry their weapons in public.Southern activists worry that the new prominence of the group, whose goal of attacking the Yemeni state and Western targets, could turn the region into a hotbed of strife rather than the state they seek. "The truth is that the situation has become like an Islamic Republic, where al Qaeda operates freely to impose its deviant version of hardline Islamic Law," activist Mohammed al-Sharqi said by telephone from Mukalla. All this will only add to the worries of the United States, which poured aid and military assistance into Yemen, including drone strikes, to counter al Qaeda`s rise but has had to scale back due to this year`s conflict.

How does al-Qaeda attract Yemenis? Despite vast sums spent on counter-terrorism operations in Yemen, al-Qaeda has continued to grow in the country. Oxford University analyst Elisabeth Kendall looks at how the group has achieved this. Al-Qaeda has certainly taken advantage of the recent collapse of Yemen's government and subsequent war to expand its influence. Last month about 300 al-Qaeda militants escaped from one prison alone and proceeded to take over the eastern city of Mukalla. Al-Qaeda has also drawn strength from alliances with tribes in Yemen's south and east in a marriage of convenience to combat the advances of their common Houthi enemy. But even in the years leading up to the current crisis, al-Qaeda's numbers were estimated to have tripled. How did this occur in the face of the group's steady losses owing to drone strikes and its own suicide operations?

'Robin Hood' An important part of al-Qaeda's persistent appeal over recent years lies in what it does when it is not busy waging violent jihad or churning out position statements and theological treatises.


http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/02/al-qaida-frees-senior-terrorist-in-yemen-prison-swoop


Young men from Yemen's east have told of being lured by camping trips, offers of help with their studies and sports activities While analysts tend to focus on the latter, or on recruitment activities inside prisons or mosques, locals are more likely to be enticed by al-Qaeda's mix of soft-culture approaches. Al-Qaeda facilitated its outreach programme through introducing the Ansar al-Sharia brand in 2011. The name, meaning Supporters of Islamic Law, can be more easily equated with pure Islamic aims and a locally-geared agenda free from any controversial baggage attached to al-Qaeda's global brand.In its central and eastern strongholds, al-Qaeda has reached out to disadvantaged communities by providing basic services such as water, electricity and education. Despite the vast amounts of aid that have flowed into Yemen over recent years, £185m ($282m) of it from the UK alone, rampant corruption prevents the benefits of it filtering down to many of those in greatest need. This can give al-Qaeda a Robin Hood-like appeal or at least mean that it is tolerated, even by those who do not share its strict interpretation of Islamic law.

Enticements Securing tolerance in its tribal heartlands is vital for al-Qaeda's outreach programme. As one local from Mukalla explained: "What do you expect us to do? Fight them? They are our kinsfolk. We let them go about their business." Tribal structures can offer al-Qaeda protection and can inadvertently produce a pyramid-like recruitment model, since potential sympathisers are best approached by someone they know and respect. Al-Qaeda tends to field relatively young leaders with whom impressionable youths can more easily identify. Young men from Yemen's east have told of being lured by camping trips, offers of help with their studies and sports activities, during the course of which religious discussion naturally features as potential sympathisers are groomed.The ensuing sense of camaraderie and righteous common purpose is seductive, particularly when it comes with cars, weapons and money. Yet as al-Qaeda's power grows, it can afford to turn to more bullying tactics. In the eastern city of Mukalla, reports are already circulating of al-Qaeda gangs snatching young men off the streets. But it hasn't resorted to the same level of intimidation used by al-Qaeda in Syria - yet. In fact, there is evidence to suggest that heavy handed tactics provoke local resistance.At the same time, in what might ironically be termed a recent charm offensive, al-Qaeda has dissociated itself from the savage brutality of Islamic State and apologised for its own beheadings of soldiers and killing of unarmed health workers last year. This spells bad news for counter-terrorism efforts in two ways. First, it broadens al-Qaeda's appeal among sectors of the population increasingly desperate to counter Houthi advances on the ground.Second, it pushes al-Qaeda's most extreme elements into the arms of Islamic State, which also appears to be growing in Yemen amid the current chaos. In late April it released its first video from Yemen.

Who is fighting whom in Yemen? Houthis - The Zaidi Shia Muslim rebels from the north overran Sanaa last year and then expanded their control. They want to replace Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, whose government they say is corrupt. The US alleges Iran is providing military assistance to the rebels.Ali Abdullah Saleh - Military units loyal to the former president - forced to hand over power in 2011 after mass protests - are fighting alongside the Houthis. Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi - The president fled abroad in March as the rebels advanced on Aden, where he had taken refuge in February. Sunni Muslim tribesmen and Southern separatists have formed militia to fight the rebels.Saudi-led coalition - A US-backed coalition of nine, mostly Sunni Arab states says it is seeking to "defend the legitimate government" of Mr Hadi.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-29319423


Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula - AQAP opposes both the Houthis and President Hadi. A rival affiliate of Islamic State has also recently emerged.

Adapting media Just as al-Qaeda adapts its military tactics to suit different target locations, so its propaganda communications must be diverse enough to suit different cultural and geographical contexts. Al-Qaeda's slickly produced videos, magazines and social media feeds enjoy reach among urban populations. But what about the rural populations of al-Qaeda's heartlands where literacy and internet penetration are low? Here, the genres of poetry and song are deeply entrenched within a highly respected oral tradition dating back to pre-Islamic times. Al-Qaeda is able to stoke passionate emotions and plug into tribal honour codes using the catchy rhymes and rhythms of poetry, which can easily be converted into rousing anthems. And while magazines and internet content disappear, the violent emotions captured in jihadist poetry live on in oral memory. Many prominent jihadists have composed poetry, including both Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda's current global leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri.A fifth of the pages of al-Qaeda's Arabic magazine, Sada al-Malahim (Echoes of Battles), contain poetry. This is not just for pleasure. Poetry wins hearts, and hearts win minds. Documenting the unseen While analysts might skip over this material in search of hard facts, locals don't.A comprehensive survey I conducted among Yemen's eastern tribes revealed that 74% of more than 2,000 locals still consider poetry an important part of daily life. Jihadist poems appeal to new volunteers by telescoping a complex political and religious landscape into a simple battle of good versus evil in which recent "martyrs" are lionised alongside the companions of the Prophet Muhammad himself. Poetry also documents vividly the unseen elements of suicide operations - the power rush, the martyrs' joy, the sweet waters of paradise and welcoming virgins. With few prospects in this world, why not rush in heroic glory to paradise, sexual gratification and reunion with your brothers?'Hitchhiking with guns and bombs' Poetry, videos and photos circulate stories, often involving slain children in Gaza, Iraq, Syria and increasingly Yemen itself, designed to provoke outrage, shame and ultimately revenge. Al-Qaeda's cultural production can also exploit existing feelings of community violation, caused for example by US drone strikes which have inflicted heavy civilian casualties without apparent concern.As one anonymous US counter-terrorism official said, "Innocent neighbours don't hitchhike rides in the back of trucks headed for the border with guns and bombs." The trouble is, in Yemen they do. On the surface, the strategy of drone strikes appears attractive. Such strikes have successfully killed dozens of al-Qaeda militants while keeping US troops out of harm's way. On the ground, the story is different. For example, in 2009, the first drone strike in Yemen carried out under President Obama killed its target but also took out an estimated 35 village women and children. Images of dead children lying among US-made missile parts circulated among furious tribesmen.Long-term, drone strikes are unlikely to succeed. The collateral damage caused, to infrastructure as well as kinsfolk, activates the tribal obligation to seek revenge, even where it does not directly breed sympathy for al-Qaeda. The longer it takes to find a negotiated peace deal in Yemen, the more al-Qaeda will be able to expand its influence. And if the next government does not address chronic underdevelopment in Yemen's marginalised regions in an equitable and sustainable way, al-Qaeda will continue to profit from filling the vacuum.Meanwhile, the continuing destruction of Yemen's military infrastructure in Saudi-led air strikes will make countering al-Qaeda once the war is over even more difficult.Elisabeth Kendall is a senior research fellow in Arabic and Islamic Studies at Pembroke College, University of Oxford and has worked extensively in Yemen.


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html?_r=0


May 20, Fighters from the Houthi Ansarullah movement have managed to expel al-Qaeda-affiliated militants from the al-Houta district in Yemen’s southwestern governorate of Lahij.

A number of militants were killed during fierce clashes on Wednesday as Ansarullah fighters and Yemen’s army forces successfully drove militants out the key city. According to reports, Houta is currently under the full control of the Ansraullah, which also controls the capital Sana’a and other major provinces. The revolutionary fighters, known as Houthis, are pressing ahead with their operations against terrorists despite an ongoing military campaign by Saudi Arabia targeting their positions.

This is the second time the al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) is suffering a defeat in Houta, a provincial capital with a population of tens of thousands. Terrorists captured the town in late March, but it fell under the control of Yemen’s army in a matter of hours. Houta is about 30 kilometers (20 miles) from the southern port city of Aden, where clashes are ongoing between Ansarullah fighters and militants. AQAP militants and other terrorist groups enjoy the support of Saudi Arabia as numerous reports show Saudi warplanes have airdropped arms and ammunition to the areas under the terrorists' control.

Sun May 03, 2015 Dr. Saeb Shaath: Saudis Are Fighting in Yemen Alongside Al-Qaeda against the Revolution

TEHRAN (FNA)- The Saudi war on Yemen, which has so far left over 3,100 civilians dead, seems to have no clear ending, and even the Israeli paper Yediot Ahronot has called it “[a] war for the survival of the Saudi monarchy.” The Al Saud monarchy decided to launch aerial attacks on Yemen on March 19 in response to the rise of the Houthi revolutionaries in the crisis-hit country, fearing that a new popular government at the doorstep of Arabian Peninsula would further undermine its plans for cementing its regional hegemony. However, the attacks have yielded no significant result, simply causing death and destruction in a country already grappling with poverty, corruption and foreign meddling.The United Nations has confirmed that as of April 26, 693 civilians have lost their lives in the war, to which four members of the Persian Gulf Cooperation Council (PGCC), Sudan, Morocco and Egypt have contributed troops. The United States and Israel also backing Saudi Arabia militarily and financially. A former Palestinian diplomat and political analyst believes that the Saudi war of aggression against Yemen is a war for dominance and hegemony. He says the Saudis are resorting to the tactics that the Israeli army has used in its frequent incursions into the besieged Gaza Strip.“The Saudi air force resorted to intensify its attacks and targeting of civilian infrastructure, hospitals, schools, residential areas, etc. to cause and inflect pain, hardship and suffering on Yemeni people,” said Dr. Saeb Shaath in an interview with Fars News Agency. “The Saudis turned to using the Israelis’ military tactics of collectively punishing the civilian population, hoping to steer their anger against the revolutionaries and accuse them as the instigators of their suffering, as they did in the last war of aggression on Gaza.”Saeb Shaath is a former diplomat and Palestinian representative in Ireland. He is a renowned Middle East political expert and author. Dr. Shaath shared his viewpoints about the ongoing war on Yemen, its background and global repercussions in an in-depth interview with FNA. The following is the text of the interview.Q: Why do you think the United States is supporting the invasion of Yemen by Saudi Arabia and its crackdown on the Houthis in the south? The war has claimed thousands of innocent lives and is contributing to further instability and chaos in the Middle East. What’s your take?



A: The revolutionary wave in Yemen, in which the Houthi movement Ansarullah is playing a leading role, came about to achieve and fulfill the Yemeni revolution’s strategic goals, such as equal citizenship, social justice, reclaim the country’s sovereignty and put an end to foreign intervention in Yemen, mainly by the USA and Saudi Arabia.Saudi Arabia all along considered Yemen as its own backyard that falls within its sphere of influence. The revolutionaries ousted President Hadi, precisely because he took his decisions according to instructions and directions from the Saudi and US embassies in Sana’a.President Hadi backtracked on the power-sharing agreements he had agreed upon with all political parties and movements in Yemen. The power-sharing agreements represented the will of the Yemeni people. It took the political parties several months of negations to reach that accommodating formula. [But] Hadi backtracked and took back Yemen to authoritarianism and corruption according to Saudi and US directions.When the revolutionaries did march on Sana’a in September 2014 and captured the presidential palace, they were more interested in combating the government corruption and protecting the Yemeni revolution from the counter-revolutionary forces who were sponsored by the USA and Saudi regime.It became evident, to the people of Yemen, that Hadi’s government turned to be an integral part of that counter-revolution. As an immediate result of the government corruption and the foreign meddling in the Yemeni affairs, the daily lives of the ordinary people became a lot harder, prices rocketed, fuel and goods subsidies were removed in accordance with the neo-liberal policies that the US promoted in Yemen. Then the second phase of the revolution was triggered and the people marched on Sana’a to protect the country and their revolution.Q: Can we interpret Saudi’s unprompted military intervention in Yemen as part of the new king’s plans for extending the umbrella of Saudi dominance in the Middle East, predicated on a rigid opposition to any kind of self-determination and independence for the Shiites in the region? Isn’t Saudi Arabia fanning the flames of sectarian and inter-religious conflict through its military expedition in Yemen?A: In September 2014, the United States and its puppets in the region, mainly Saudi Arabia, became immensely edgy, when they witnessed the revolutionaries led by the Ansarullah movement imposing their control over Yemen’s capital, Sana’a.The USA has been meddling in Yemen’s affairs under the cover of its War on Terror i.e. fighting al-Qaeda in Yemen. The irony today is that since the advancement of the revolutionary forces in Sana’a, the USA and its puppets are fighting alongside al-Qaeda in Yemen against the revolutionaries. That led us to one conclusion, that they were from the beginning furthering and championing the same goals, which are to keep Yemen dominated by USA and it Saudi agent, and to prevent the Yemeni revolution from succeeding or achieving its national goals of reclaiming Yemen’s sovereignty, eradicating poverty, eliminating USA and Saudi’s dominance over Yemen, and creating a fair republic for the people, governed by the people.The revolutionaries’ fast advancements all over the country and their gaining control over Sanaa, the capital, shocked the USA and its puppets in the Arabian Peninsula. USA invested heavily in keeping such puppets in the Arabian Peninsula; that kind of investment in imposing tyrannical regimes who enforce their absolutists’ ruthless tribal rule over the people of Arabia. The system of Arabia’s tyrannical tribal regimes were designed by the inelegance officers of the British Empire to facilitate the British dominance and control of Arabia, as well as to use Arabia’s tribal regimes in the process of creating and securing the Zionist entity ‘Israel’.Q: It seems like Yemen is appealing to the United States as a strategic asset that needs to be preserved at any cost. Why is Washington investing so heavily in the war against



Yemen and supporting the Saudi invasion of the Arab country already ruined with poverty, corruption and drone attacks?A: From the American empire prospective, this system became a very necessary tool, used well in dominating and subjecting Arabia and facilitating the looting of its strategic resources, oil and gas. The consumption of the wealth of this system of tribal regimes proved effective in destabilizing the region as whole, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Bahrain and Yemen.The ruling tribal families of Arabia used their unchallenged control over the oil and gas resources to destabilize and stagnate the Russian and Iranian economies, through the mechanism of dumping oil and gas on the international market to reduce its prices globally, while there are millions of deprived and underprivileged Arab people in need of that wealth which al-Saud is wasting on harming other nations in service to the enemies of the Arab people.I was not surprised at the recent Russian’s position on the UN Security Council regarding Yemen. The Russians as well as the Chinese did miscalculate and gambled with their own national security, by not vetoing the resolution on Yemen. It became paramount to the western imperialist-Zionist actors to see the Yemeni revolutionary movement led by the Houthis defeated, or at least contained, so that the people of Arabia, specifically of the eastern provinces of Arabia, who sympathize with Yeminis and those who have their own similar revolutionary movement smashed by the Saudi regime, are not going to adopt the Yamani’s model in fighting for social justice, political rights and becoming sovereign over their country and its wealth.The success of the Yemini revolution shall influence the geopolitical dynamics not just for Arabia and its neighboring countries, but more importantly, it shall have a global geopolitical influence.Q: Some analysts believe Saudi Arabia is fanning the flames of sectarian conflict in the region through its unanticipated military assault on Yemen. Do you agree with this standpoint?A: Yes, indeed Saudi Arabia is fanning the flames of sectarian and inter-religious conflict through its military gamble in Yemen as it did in other countries. That’s precisely to halt the speedy advancement of the revolutionary forces in Yemen and undermine them through waging a war that kills the opportunity of establishing a fair and just political system in Yemen.The conflict the Saudis created in Yemen was never about religion; it was all about dominance and control, while religion, money and other means are used to achieve such goals. For example, the former President Ali Abdullah Saleh is a Zaydi, like the Houthis, but he fought the Houthis before and allied with them today. Before his removal from power, he was in alliance with the Saudi regime; so religion is used in this war of aggression to assist and serve the Saudi and American agenda in the region. Both actors are experts in deploying religion as a tool to instigate a sectarian and inter-religious conflict.So Yemenis have to suffer the fate of Iraqis, Syrians and Libyans, to stay engaged into perpetual wars imposed on them and sectarian wars designed for plunging them in their mayhem, to keep the status quo, to stop any revolutionary change that might disturb the existing balance of power, whether it’s regional or global.Q: How do you see Turkey’s role in the Saudi invasion of Yemen, given the fact that they have shrugged off joining the Saudi-led coalition forces against Yemen?A: Arabs viewed Turkey as the NATO’s military base guarding Europe’s southern borders and assuring Europe of Israel’s existence within historical Palestine. It was Ahmet Davutoglu himself, who introduced the Turkish “zero problems with the neighbors” policy, but since then the region witnessed totally the opposite, and Turkey played a major role in creating the



problems for the neighboring countries. That was in part, to achieve what Davutoglu called Turkey’s ‘historical legacy’, i.e. the ideological driving force behind Turkey’s AKP leadership to establish a major regional power. Within that political vision, the Arab world falls under Turkey’s ‘sphere of influence’.The Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan pursuance of a greater regional and global influence and his desires to re-establish the ‘Ottoman empire’ is behind a large part of the turmoil that wrecked havoc in many Arabic countries. Erdogan and his party AKP considered the Arabs as part of the Turkish ‘historical legacy’ or the ‘Ottoman empire’, using false anti-Israeli sentiments to gain popularity among Arabs searching for a leader. He believed such false sentiments would position him as the leading and the only popular figure, and that alone would justify the Turkish policies that are actively seeking to fill the political and power vacuum, which was created in the Arab world, since the American invasion of Iraq. From this prospective, Turkey is conducting pragmatic and opportunistic policies in supporting Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen. On the other hand, Turkey cannot gamble with the huge benefits it gets from trading with Iran – nearly 30 billion a year, which shall be doubled after the lifting of the western sanctions imposed on Iran. Turkey, as a NATO member and an ally of the US and Israel, is of course supporting the Saudis war of aggression on Yemen, and of course it does not want to see the revolutionaries succeed in Yemen, but for sure it will not gamble the commercial ties with Iran and will try to help in the political resolution of the crisis to find a face-saving formula for the Saudi regime.Q: So, why Egypt has supported the invasion and bombardment of Yemen by Saudi Arabia? Does Egypt, under President El-Sisi, have any interests in fighting Yemen, at least politically?A: Regarding Egypt’s position, Egypt voiced it support to this war. I think part of this support is due to the financial support that Saudi Arabia is providing Egypt with, as well as the financing of Egypt’s military contracts with Russia that might be one of the pressuring points used by the Saudis to convince the Russians, whose economy needs the cash, not to veto the UN Security Council resolution on Yemen.Egypt’s army has its own bad experience with interfering in Yemen in 1962 and fighting against the Saudis and the northern Yemeni tribes, who were against establishing the revolutionary Republic of Yemen and supporting the monarchists.Egypt has its own problems, in Sinai and on its western borders with Libya. Egypt’s support for the Arab task-force which Saudi wages its war on Yemen under its banner, originated in Egypt’s plans to use the same banner to attack ISIL and Takfiri groups in Libya, and to get financial and political support in fighting them in Egypt.Meanwhile, Egypt found itself in the same strange alliance, with its own archenemies, Turkey, Qatar and al-Qaeda, who are in a way or another fighting the revolutionaries in Yemen, adding to that a considerable and growing Egyptian public opinion which is against the war waged on Yemen. Protesters against the war took to the streets of Cairo, since Egypt’s contributions to the war on Yemen consists of only issuing political statement of support and displaying navy muscles at the Red Sea, to demonstrate its will to protect the route to the Suez Canal.Q: Have the Saudis achieved their goals in invading Yemen? It sounds like their military assault on Yemen had no clear strategy at the outset, and was a hasty reaction to the rise of Ansarullah (the political party of the Houthi revolutionaries) in the southern areas of the country. Now, they find the region in chaos, and have no plan for ending the conflict. Why is it so?A: I believe the Saudi war of aggression on Yemen has failed in its major goal to stop the advancement of the revolutionaries led by Ansaruallah movement. It failed in halting them from bringing in large territories of Yemen under their control.



Since the refusal of the Pakistani and Egyptian armies to send in troops to form the bulk of the forces that will invade Yemen, Saudi Arabia’s military planners panicked. They know that they do not have the manpower or the military capabilities to send in troops who are capable of launching and conducting a ground invasion into Yemen.The Saudi forces do not have the expertise of conducting military operations in urban areas, or to face guerrilla fighters in asymmetric warfare settings.The Saudi air force resorted to intensify its attacks and targeting of civilian infrastructure, hospitals, schools, residential areas, etc. to cause and inflect pain, hardship and suffering on Yemeni people. The Saudis turned to using the Israelis’ military tactics of collectively punishing the civilian population, hoping to steer their anger against the revolutionaries and accuse them as the instigators of their suffering, as they did in the last war of aggression on Gaza.The ‘Israelis’ military tactics of collectively punishing the civilian population in Gaza failed in driving a wedge between the Palestinian people and their resistance, but it succeeded in destroying cities, towns, villages and killing thousands of civilian and vanishing entire families. That is exactly what the Saudi war of aggression on Yemen is doing today to Yemenis, manufacturing a catastrophic humanitarian crisis, as the only way to mount enormous pressure on the revolutionaries and inflict defeat upon them.Indeed, the Saudi airstrikes, have aided the Yemen-based “Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula” by limiting Houthi attacks on their terrorists and enabling AQAP to overrun prisons and free scores of its militants, as well as rearming and resupplying them by airdrops made by the Saudi Air Force over areas controlled by AQAP. So more supplies and support is arriving into the AQAP, meanwhile they have seized new territories in recent weeks, after the defeats inflicted on them by the revolutionaries. Interview by Kourosh Ziabari

Regards Cees

“They are like ghosts,” he says of the jihadi group.

AQAP’s claim of responsibility for the recent attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris, which left 10 civilians and two police officers dead, has forced the world to grapple again with al Qaeda’s presence in Yemen. Despite more than a decade of U.S. counterterrorism efforts targeting AQAP and its predecessors, which have cost hundreds of millions of dollars, the group remains both a local and transnational threat. Even if its claim to have planned and funded the Paris attack is proven false, AQAP appears to have maintained an ability to motivate and inspire extremists abroad.

In recent years, U.S. officials have said they are focused on killing or capturing a small cadre of AQAP fighters in the hope of “mitigating” the threat of an attack on the United States or its allies while steering clear of Yemen’s messy internal wars. This has fostered a perception that AQAP is strictly hierarchical — made up of “a couple of dozen” key figures, in then-counterterrorism director John Brennan’s 2011 description — and can be contained with periodic drone strikes. In September 2014, President Barack Obama declared the country a counterterrorism success story and a model for other conflicts. But recent events and Yemenis themselves tell a different story — one in which consecutive U.S. administrations have failed to properly understand this al Qaeda affiliate, and as a consequence have been unsuccessful at containing the deadly threat it poses.An unreliable ally

The first challenge the United States has faced is its reliance on the Yemeni government, which has not always been as committed to fighting AQAP as its public statements suggest. In November, the United Nations Security Council committee tasked with



overseeing sanctions in Yemen imposed an asset freeze and travel ban on former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, alleging that he had been trying to undermine the country’s post-Arab Spring transition. The committee said that its panel of experts had received allegations that Saleh himself had been using AQAP “to conduct assassinations and attacks against military installations in order to weaken President [Abed Rabbo Mansour] Hadi and create discontent within the army and broader Yemeni population.” Two weeks later, the committee deleted the reference to AQAP, saying simply that Saleh “supports violent actions of some Yemenis by providing them funds and political support” — language more closely in line with wording used by the U.S. Treasury Department to describe its sanctions on Saleh, which were also announced in November.

Still, it was a damning accusation against the man whose government had received a massive influx of U.S. money and training after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to help him defeat al Qaeda, turning his country’s ungoverned hinterland into a front line in the war on terror. Since 2006, when the Defense Department created a specific account to fund foreign militaries’ counterterrorism efforts, Yemen has been the largest beneficiary of Washington’s largess. The government in Sanaa has taken in roughly $401 million from the fund, in addition to the nearly $164 million the country has received since 2001 from the State Department’s Foreign Military Financing budget.

The United States trained Yemeni counterterrorism forces, led by a nephew of Saleh’s, and provided military hardware including helicopters, armored vehicles, surveillance equipment, and night-vision goggles. The United States has also conducted dozens of drone strikes on suspected targets — a program that became one of President Barack Obama’s most vexing national security controversies after he made the politically contentious decision to target and kill an American citizen, alleged AQAP planner Anwar al-Awlaki. All these efforts were in the service of defeating the same group that may have been Saleh’s pawns in a political power game.All these efforts were in the service of defeating the same group that may have been Saleh’s pawns in a political power game. U.S. officials say they long understood that Saleh was a fickle partner against AQAP, and that he and his loyalists in the security services had at times kept former jihadi fighters on their payroll and misused U.S. counterterrorism aid to fight their own domestic enemies. They also maintain that, when it mattered, he sincerely fought against AQAP members who threatened the United States. But there is scant evidence that Hadi, who took office in February 2012, is playing a similar double game.

Today, parts of Yemen are torn apart by battles between AQAP and the Houthis, a Shiite political movement whose militia recently took control of the capital, Sanaa. The Houthis have fought sporadic but fierce battles with Yemen’s military and seem keen on forcing a new government and constitution. On Tuesday, Jan. 20, Houthi rebels seized the presidential palace in Yemen, a move that the government called a coup. Their rise has fueled AQAP and provoked destabilizing sectarianism in the countryside. The turmoil has left average Yemenis with a broken economy and a barely functional government. Yemen’s dismal condition — and the threat still posed by AQAP — suggests that in a fight dubbed a success by the Obama administration, the United States looked the other way in a flawed chase for national security.

The frenemy of our enemyThe alliance between some of Yemen’s most powerful officials and the jihadis the United States paid them to defeat began in the early 1990s, when Yemenis who had gone abroad to fight Soviet forces in Afghanistan began to return, deeply affected by their experience with jihad and seasoned by battlefield combat. Saleh sought to make use of these self-described mujahideen, or holy warriors, in his own civil war. The Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan shortly before the 1990 unification of Marxist South Yemen and the northern Yemen Arab



Republic, where Saleh had been president since 1978. In an effort to weaken the communists who threatened his power, Saleh encouraged the mujahideen to settle in the south and set up Salafi learning institutions with support from Saudi Arabia, which also had an interest in stamping out Arab communists. Al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden announced his support for the plan, writes Yemen scholar Gregory Johnsen in his book The Last Refuge: Yemen, al-Qaeda, and America’s War in Arabia.

Inside a run-down Aden apartment in 2011, one of these returned fighters, a man named Faris, described how the government and former mujahideen cooperated.“The government wanted to assure its [Western] allies,” Faris said, by way of explaining why Saleh used his connections to reach out to former mujahideen and other extremists. “The government would call [the former fighters] and say, ‘What do you want? A job?’” he said.In 1993, Saleh’s government imprisoned Faris — along with at least two Afghan war veterans — for participating in the bombing of two hotels in Aden the previous year. FBI investigators said that the other men, Tariq al-Fadhli and Jamal al-Nahdi, had played key roles in the attacks, which targeted U.S. Marines but killed at least one Austrian tourist and a hotel employee. The State Department believed that bin Laden had sent money to some of the perpetrators, according to the 9/11 Commission report. Many researchers consider it al Qaeda’s first attack on Western interests. But in 1994, the authorities released Fadhli, Faris, and Nahdi from jail to fight alongside Saleh’s forces in the civil war that broke out that year between north and south Yemen. Fadhli would later be appointed to the largely symbolic upper house of parliament, while Nahdi would later join the permanent committee of Saleh’s ruling party.The official often in charge of overseeing the ex-mujahideen was Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, Faris said, a relative of Saleh’s from the president’s home village who was at the time a powerful army general. New York Times reporter John Burns wrote in 2000 that Yemeni officials and Western intelligence reports claimed Ahmar handled a $20 million grant from bin Laden to resettle the Afghan war veterans in Yemen. Such links between members of Saleh’s government and the former mujahideen lingered, said former U.S. Ambassador to Yemen Edmund Hull. “The FBI and the CIA were always very suspicious of these ties and were also concerned about officials within the Yemeni government who would have sympathy or obligations or personal relationships [with al Qaeda],” he said in a recent phone interview. Faris said little about his personal ideology, but he wore his beard in a Salafi style and never looked directly at a female reporter during an interview in his austere living room. He described how he had worked as a personal bodyguard for Abdul Majeed al-Zindani, a deeply conservative sheikh who in 1993 had founded Iman University, a religious school in the capital with a reputation for jihadi indoctrination. Awlaki took classes and lectured at the university, and John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban volunteer captured in 2001, studied there as well. In 2004, the U.S. Treasury Department labeled Zindani a “specially designated global terrorist,” accusing him of being a spiritual leader to bin Laden and helping to buy arms for al Qaeda.Zindani was also a close acquaintance of Saleh, said Abdul-Ghani al-Iryani, a political analyst and opposition activist, and Yemen’s government allowed him to run the university until the Houthis ransacked it in late September when they stormed into the capital.

Payment plansIn the late 1990s, Faris said, he traveled twice to Sanaa, where the director of Yemen’s Political Security Organization (PSO), Ghalib al-Qamish, gave him around $2,300 to abstain from attacks against Western interests. One such meeting occurred at the headquarters of the PSO, then Yemen’s top domestic intelligence organization, and the other at Qamish’s private residence. “They used to send wire transfers to lower-level guys,” Faris said of the hundreds


http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report.pdf

http://www.amazon.com/The-Last-Refuge-al-Qaeda-Americas/dp/0393082423


of other suspected extremists he claimed the government started paying after an attack against foreigners in Aden in 1998. The PSO provided them with fake positions at unimportant ministries and paid them once a month using Al Kuraimi, a local money transfer company.

“The members of al Qaeda who refused to be paid, they are the people who Saleh told America to kill,” Faris said.

“The members of al Qaeda who refused to be paid, they are the people who Saleh told America to kill,” Faris said.Though Faris’s claims at the time could not be independently verified, when questioned on the specific details of his journeys to Sanaa to be paid by the PSO, he answered without hesitation, and Qamish’s close ties with fundamentalists were no secret in Yemen’s capital. Senior U.S. officials also voiced concerns to Foreign Policy about jihadi sympathizers within the PSO. Faris went on to allege that Saleh not only paid potential militants to abstain from violence, he tried to harness them for his own purposes. When a new southern separatist movement began in earnest in 2007, Faris said, the president called upon roughly 100 of these bankrolled mujahideen, among others, and brought them to Sanaa to prepare them to fight. Everyone who showed up at the meeting received $500. He added that Saleh knew some of the men were affiliated with al Qaeda.

A Yemeni official who also worked in Saleh’s administration said in January that the recruitment of ex-mujahideen and other fundamentalists was an intelligence-gathering tactic. “Any Yemeni official can confirm to you that there were lots of former mujahideen on the payroll of the PSO as informants,” he said. Though Saleh succeeded in co-opting men like Faris, other Afghan war veterans kept radical Islamist ideology alive in southern Yemen, tying their parochial demands — including Saleh’s removal and better provision of basic services — to jihadi ambitions to expel Westerners from Yemen. In 1998, an al Qaeda operative who was also a veteran of the Afghan jihad sought and received funding from bin Laden to strike U.S. forces directly. The resulting attack on the USS Cole while it was refueling in the port of Aden in 2000 killed 17 U.S. sailors.

In response, Saleh established a dialogue program with suspected extremists that allowed them to walk free if they graduated — a process that required them to swear allegiance to the Yemeni government. Within a decade, all the defendants convicted of participating in the attack would either escape from jail or be released by the government — including the alleged mastermind, Jamal al-Badawi, whose 2006 escape alongside 22 others from the PSO’s main prison in Sanaa led U.S. officials to suspect Qamish himself, Newsweek reported.Barbara Bodine, who served as U.S. ambassador to Yemen from late 1997 until two weeks before the 9/11 attacks, said that Saleh’s government had at times held uncomfortable relations with extremists, but she doubted that the former president had ever embraced AQAP.“Ali Abdullah and AQAP were always a bit of a murky question,” she said. “I do think there were people in the security services who were former mujahideen, who absolutely supported mujahideen going to Afghanistan and fighting. Did they work with people who were a little further along than we may have been comfortable with? Probably. But people who were full-blown [AQAP] militants? No.”In private, U.S. diplomats have been far more blunt. “Saleh is known for negotiating with his domestic opponents, including al-Qaeda,” a WikiLeaks cable from January 2010 stated. “For years, he has negotiated with, exploited, bribed and cajoled Islamic extremists in Yemen for his own political gain.”Strategy or not, the government’s accommodation allowed fundamentalists to function with relative freedom. By 2011, Faris was lamenting what al Qaeda in Yemen had become, suggesting that the new generation might be harder to control then their forebears.


https://cablegatesearch.wikileaks.org/cable.php?id=10SANAA45


“During my time [the 1980s and 1990s], no one would go blow himself up without thinking. These guys don’t care about killing Muslims. It’s even their policy,” he complained. “[They] just do whatever they want.”

The Ides of SpringThe Arab Spring and subsequent breakdown of Saleh’s government in 2011 provided a ripe opportunity for this new generation to try their hand at governing, revealing a movement both more diffuse than the Beltway stereotype of hard-core reclusive extremists and more appealing among some Yemenis than U.S. policymakers might expect. In the spring of 2011, as the army and police either defected following deadly government-sponsored attacks on protesters or limited their efforts to defending Sanaa from pro-protester militias, fighters under the aegis of AQAP swept across several towns in southern Yemen. They seized the main population centers in the governorate of Abyan, including Jaar, a town of more than 30,000 people, and Zinjibar, the provincial capital, roughly an hour’s drive east of Aden. The time it took for the government to respond would leave many in the capital — Yemenis and foreign officials alike — skeptical about Saleh’s resolve to defeat AQAP.“It was believed that Saleh was not doing all he could to go after AQAP, seeing them as a useful incentive to attract more Western security support for his regime,” a senior Western diplomat who served in Sanaa in 2011 said recently. That skepticism predated the Arab Spring. A January 2010 Senate Foreign Relations Committee report stated bluntly that the United States and Saleh had “different priorities”: While Washington wanted Saleh to fight AQAP, Saleh’s top concern was the ongoing Houthi insurgency.

While Washington wanted Saleh to fight AQAP, Saleh’s top concern was the ongoing Houthi insurgency. Born in the 1990s as a Zaidi Shiite revival movement called the “Believing Youth,” partly aimed at countering the growth of strict, Saudi Arabia-influenced Wahhabi Sunnism, the Houthis took up arms in the northern Saada governorate after a government crackdown in 2004. Half a dozen rounds of conflict persisted until the 2011 uprising, and the movement is today stronger than ever before.The Senate Foreign Relations Committee report expressed concern that Yemeni forces had used U.S.-supplied night-vision goggles, meant for the fight against AQAP, in raids against the Houthis the previous year, and it stated that the U.S. Embassy had put a hold on the supply of “propellant activated devices” — rockets — to the Yemeni Air Force out of concern that they were using them against the Houthis as well.

“The U.S. knew that [Saleh] was lying to them, but they couldn’t do anything about it, so therefore they kept going pretending [that Saleh was fighting al Qaeda],” said Iryani, the analyst and opposition activist. “So I would say that Saleh took them for a ride.”In 2011, the government’s slow response to AQAP’s advance in the south would allow Jaar to become one of the jihadis’ few experiments in government — revealing in the process a movement more diverse and adaptable than the stereotypes about the group would suggest.The fighters — including foreigners from Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, residents of Jaar recalled — occupied the town’s main courthouse, police station, mosque, and hospital, and moved into the community with their families.

Opportunistic local recruits filled out the ranks. Some of the young men who joined were already religiously observant and open to the message brought by AQAP’s proselytizers; others simply had no jobs and few other options.In an acknowledgment of the toxicity of al Qaeda’s brand among many in the Middle East, AQAP began referring to this broader and oftentimes more popular, service-providing movement as Ansar al-Sharia (“Partisans of Islamic Law”). The fighters calling themselves Ansar al-Sharia, the Yemeni government official said, were more like “roving bandits” — a younger generation that only occasionally took orders from the more “well-structured” AQAP.


http://www.foreign.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/54245.pdf


AQAP provided money to the new Ansar al-Sharia volunteers, who in turn provided water, electricity, and food to areas abandoned by the government during the revolutionary upheaval. At the same time, they governed the town with a fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic law, raised their version of the al Qaeda standard — a black flag bearing the Muslim testament of faith — and painted buildings with their new name for the area: the Islamic Emirate of Waqar. They killed alleged spies in public executions.

Meanwhile in the capital, the government was paralyzed by the upheaval of the Arab Spring. Saleh swore to the international community and the Yemeni public that he would sign away his powers as president according to an internationally brokered transition agreement, only to backpedal at the last minute. Amid this negotiating process, ministries hardly functioned and public services ceased to exist. In November 2011, after relentless international pressure, Saleh finally signed the agreement, and his deputy Hadi was ushered into power the following February.

The rise of the popular committeesIt was only months later, in 2012, that a U.S.-backed campaign by Yemeni armed forces pushed out the jihadis. The offensive left behind the de facto rule of “popular committees,” an ad hoc movement of tribes and hangers-on who had been the first to take up arms against the AQAP-inspired militants. Alliances in this struggle were often blurred and ephemeral: Many members of the popular committees, which still hold power in much of Abyan, had joined up with AQAP’s side first before defecting. Nasser, an unemployed 25-year-old from Bateis, a village north of Jaar, joined other members of his tribe to fight the jihadis. His group chose its own leader and planned its own strategy, but often took orders — or “requests,” he said — from Abyan’s governor. Sometimes, Nasser and his comrades found themselves fighting men just like them.

“Most of them are members of tribes who joined al Qaeda,” he said.“They join because they’re poor or hungry, or al Qaeda brainwashes them and they

join. Some of them believe that this is a true jihad. But it’s not a true jihad.”“They join because they’re poor or hungry, or al Qaeda brainwashes them and they

join. Some of them believe that this is a true jihad. But it’s not a true jihad.”Since many of the newly anointed jihadis were local men from well-known tribes, they were also at pains to preserve their reputations, and they closely adhered to local norms.Mohamed, a 39-year-old farmer from a village near Jaar, recalled how jihadis captured him and others at a checkpoint outside the governorate capital of Zinjibar in March 2012. The fighters blindfolded them, took them to Jaar, held them inside a school for two weeks, and beat some of them. They interrogated Mohamed and asked him why he was working as an informant for “Jews and Americans.” While he was held, his brothers and other relatives approached Jelal bil Eid, a senior AQAP figure in southern Yemen who now helps lead some of AQAP’s most lethal operations in the south, including the August 2014 killings of 15 off-duty soldiers captured from a civilian bus. Mohamed is a member of a large tribe whose name is known throughout Yemen, and bil Eid belonged to the related Marqeishi tribe. His family members met with bil Eid to negotiate, going through a tribal process to win Mohamed’s freedom. Soon, his captors released him and returned his belongings, eventually doing the same for other prisoners, he said. Some of the captives even joined the jihadis.What little has been written about bil Eid suggests a banal path to jihad that seems typical of many Yemenis who joined up with AQAP. According to some press accounts, he is the son of a former military officer and the youngest of seven well-educated brothers who, as a young man, had an unremarkable stint as a goalkeeper for a local soccer club in Abyan. “He was sitting around unemployed before al Qaeda,” Mohamed said.


http://www.yemensaeed.com/news17633.html


Ahmed, a 52-year-old government employee, said AQAP paid large compensations when they killed civilians. In early 2011, Ahmed and five other men were riding in the back of a pickup truck traveling from Jaar to Zinjibar, having just collected Jaar residents’ electricity payments, when two men on motorcycles overtook the truck and opened fire with AK-47s. They killed four of the passengers, including a guard who tried to return fire, and tried to steal the money, though they failed to find it, Ahmed recalled. Ahmed was shot in both legs, but he and another man managed to survive. Later, AQAP published an announcement in a Jaar newspaper claiming responsibility and promising to pay compensation for all who died, even the security guard who fired back. They distributed checks to the families of the four dead men. Each was made out for 12 million rials, or $56,000, and could be cashed at a bank in Aden, Ahmed said. Paying out compensation dovetailed with the group’s effort — both through word of mouth and its media arm, “The Echo of Battles” — to portray its members as “pillars of selflessness and piety” and “indistinguishable from millions of ordinary Yemenis unhappy with Sanaa and hostile toward the West,” as one 2011 West Point study put it.“In seeking to preserve its legitimacy, [AQAP] has positioned itself not as an organization distinct from, but rather a reflection of the local population and the global community of subjugated Muslims,” wrote author Gabriel Koehler-Derrick.

The drifters and directorsIn 2012, after Saleh relinquished the presidency and the military campaign drove most of the jihadis out of Abyan, most of the young men who had joined up with AQAP the previous year drifted away. Several Jaar residents recalled how the same people who had once identified themselves as AQAP members began show up on the popular committees.Jaber, an unemployed 24-year-old who had been shot in the crossfire during a gunfight between jihadis and a group of men who had fallen out with them, said that was common. “Some al Qaeda people were imprisoned and released and came back to the straight line,” he said. “People without blood on their hands will be allowed to come back.”One of those allowed back was Jamal al-Nahdi, one of the three Afghan war veterans implicated in the 1992 Aden bombings, according to Hamza al-Khibr, a human rights lawyer in southern Yemen who has represented alleged jihadis for a decade. Nahdi is now a colonel in the security services, Khibr said. In May 2014, Nahdi told BuzzFeed that he had been appointed the assistant to the director of security in the southern coastal city of Mukalla the previous summer.

While the Yemeni government uses carrots to win some jihadis’ allegiance, it is also not averse to using sticks. The government has frequently used extralegal measures to deal with those accused of membership in AQAP, Khibr said, and there are thousands of such suspects currently being held without charge. The authorities often arrest them without warrants, torture them, and hold them in military camps and at other bases for months without trial, he said. For some, this is part of their path toward being brought into the government’s fold. “There is no detailed information on the recruitment of accused terrorists, but they are used as informants and not always in the interest of the government or the political system, but sometimes for the interest of [political] leaders,” Khibr said. Like Salem, the Aden security official whose son died in the October bombing, many Yemenis accept the authorities’ double-dealing and self-interest as commonplace. “Politicians use [AQAP] as a weapon to finish agendas,” Salem said.Such collusion makes him pessimistic that justice will ever be done for the killing of his son. He doubts that the killers would be convicted even if they were arrested. “If I knew any of their identities, and they killed my son, I would follow up,” he said.Select interviews in this article are excerpted from Don’t Be Afraid of the Bullets: An Accidental War Correspondent in Yemen, by Laura Kasinof.


http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Afraid-Bullets-Accidental-Correspondent/dp/1628724455

http://www.buzzfeed.com/shuaibalmosawa/resurrecting-the-jihad-in-yemen

https://www.ctc.usma.edu/posts/a-false-foundation-aqap-tribes-and-ungoverned-spaces-in-yemen

al-qaida chief ayman al-zawahiri the coordinator 2015 part 4-1-aqap-21

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