Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

41. The Persecution of Abdulelah Haider Shaye

YEMEN, SUMMER 2010—In the months after the al Majalah bombing, the young journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye would not give up on the story. He regularly raised the issue on Al Jazeera and continued to report on other US strikes inside Yemen. He had interviewed Awlaki numerous times and had become famous inside and outside of Yemen as a major critic of the widening covert US war in Yemen. “He was focusing on how Saleh was using the al Qaeda card to gain more money and logistical support from the United States,” recalled cartoonist Kamal Sharaf, Shaye’s closest friend. “Abdulelah was the only person critical and speaking the truth about al Qaeda, so he had significance in the Arab world and in America.” Shaye was working with the Washington Post, ABC News, Al Jazeera and many other major international media outlets, often producing stories that cast US policy in Yemen in a negative light.

In July 2010, seven months after the al Majalah attack, Shaye and Sharaf were out running errands. Sharaf stepped into a supermarket while Shaye waited outside. When Sharaf came out of the store, he told me, “I saw armed men grabbing him and taking him to a car.” The men, it turned out, were Yemeni intelligence agents. They snatched Shaye, hooded him and took him to an undisclosed location. The agents, according to Sharaf, threatened Shaye and warned him against making further statements on TV. Shaye’s reports on the bombing and his criticism of the US and Yemeni governments, Sharaf said, “pushed the regime to kidnap him. One of the interrogators told him, ‘We will destroy your life if you keep on talking.’” Eventually, in the middle of the night, Shaye was dumped back onto a street and released. “Abdulelah was threatened many times over the phone by the Political Security agents and then he was kidnapped for the first time, beaten and investigated over his statements and analysis on the Majalah bombing and the US war against terrorism in Yemen,” Shaye’s Yemeni lawyer, Abdulrahman Barman, told me. “I believe he was arrested upon a request from the US.”

Shaye responded to his abduction by going back on Al Jazeera and describing his own arrest. Mohamed Abdel Dayem, who headed the Committee to Protect Journalists’s Middle East and North Africa program, happened to be in Yemen the night Shaye was arrested. Dayem was in the country to research a special tribunal that had been established by the Yemeni regime to prosecute journalists who were critical of the government. Two days before Shaye was arrested, Dayem had met the Yemeni journalist. “Immediately I could tell this was a very smart journalist and a journalist who really was willing to put a lot on the line to get the tough stories, because everybody can get the easy stories,” he recalled. The night Shaye was arrested, Dayem was in the Sana’a studios of Al Jazeera preparing to do an interview when his phone rang. It was Shaye. “I’m on my way out of prison,” Shaye told him. “I’m going to go home. I’m putting on a different jacket. This one has blood on it. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.” Dayem said that Shaye arrived at the studio and “spilled the beans on the air,” describing his abduction and why he believed he was being targeted.

Around this time, the US government began privately telling major US media outlets that were working with Shaye that they should discontinue their relationships with him. One source inside a prominent US media organization told me that the government had warned the outlet that Shaye was using his paychecks to support al Qaeda. A US intelligence official told another journalist for a prominent US magazine that “classified evidence” indicated that Shaye was “cooperating” with al Qaeda. “I was persuaded that he was an agent,” said the official. Just as it wanted Awlaki silenced, the US government wanted anyone who was putting out Awlaki’s perspective or interviewing leaders of AQAP shut down.

When I met him at a café in Sana’a in 2011, Sharaf shook his head in disbelief at the notion that Shaye was pro–al Qaeda. “Abdulelah continued to report facts, not for the sake of the Americans or al Qaeda, but because he believed that what he was reporting was the truth and that it is a journalist’s role to uncover the truth,” Sharaf told me. “He is a very professional journalist,” he added. “He is rare in the journalistic environment in Yemen where 90 percent of journalists write extempore and lack credibility.” Shaye, he explained, is “very open-minded and rejects extremism. He was against violence and the killing of innocents in the name of Islam. He was also against killing innocent Muslims with the pretext of fighting terrorism. In his opinion, the war on terror should have been fought culturally, not militarily. He believes using violence will create more violence and encourage the spread of more extremist currents in the region.”

In the meantime, Sharaf was encountering his own troubles with the Yemeni regime over his drawings of President Saleh and his criticism of the Yemeni government’s war against the minority Houthi population in the north of Yemen. He had also criticized conservative Salafis. And his close friendship with Shaye put him at risk.

On August 16, 2010, Sharaf and his family had just broken the Ramadan fast when he heard shouting from outside his home: “Come out, the house is surrounded.” Sharaf walked outside. “I saw soldiers I had never seen before. They were tall and heavy—they reminded me of American marines. Then, I knew that they were from the counterterrorism unit. They had modern laser guns. They were wearing American marine–type uniforms,” he told me. They told Sharaf he was coming with them. “What is the accusation?” he asked. “They said, ‘You’ll find out.’”

As Sharaf was being arrested, Yemeni forces had surrounded Shaye’s home as well. “Abdulelah refused to come out, so they raided his house, took him by force, beat him and broke his tooth,” Sharaf said. “We were both taken blindfolded and handcuffed to the national security prison, which is supported by the Americans.” They were separated and thrown in dark, underground cells, said Sharaf. “We were kept for about thirty days during Ramadan in the national security prison where we were continuously interrogated.”

For that first month, Sharaf and Shaye did not see each other. Eventually, they were taken from the national security prison to Yemen’s political security prison, where they were put in a cell together. Sharaf was eventually released, after he pledged to the authorities that he would not draw any more cartoons of President Saleh. Shaye would make no such deal.

Shaye was held in solitary confinement for thirty-four days with no access to a lawyer. His family did not even know where he had been taken or why. Eventually, his lawyers received a tip from a released prisoner that Shaye was in the political security prison, and they were able to see him. “When Abdulelah was arrested, he was put in a narrow dirty and foul-smelling bathroom for five days. I noticed that one of Abdulelah’s teeth was extracted and another one was broken, in addition to the presence of some scars on his chest,” recalled Barman. “There were a lot of scars on his chest. He was psychologically tortured. He had been told that all his friends and family members had left him and that no one had raised his case. He was tortured by false information.”

On September 22, Shaye was eventually hauled into a court. Prosecutors asked for more time to prepare a case against him. A month later, he was locked in a cage in Yemen’s state security court, which was established by presidential decree and had been roundly denounced by human and media rights groups as illegal and unfair. The Yemeni government called it a trial. “Yeah. The trial does not pass the laugh test, at all. And the court does not pass the laugh test,” said Dayem, of the Committee to Protect Journalists. “I could not locate a single case that was tried in this specialized criminal tribunal…that met, even remotely, fair trial standards.”

The judge read out a list of charges against Shaye. He was accused of being the “media man” for al Qaeda, recruiting new operatives for the group and providing al Qaeda with photos of Yemeni bases and foreign embassies for potential targeting. “The government filed many charges against him,” said Barman. “Some of these charges were: joining an armed group aiming to target the stability and security of the country, inciting al Qaeda members to assassinate President Ali Abdullah Saleh and his son, recruiting new al Qaeda members, working as propagandist for al Qaeda and Anwar Awlaki in particular. Most of these charges carry the death sentence under Yemeni law.” As the charges against him were read, according to journalist Iona Craig, a longtime foreign correspondent who reported regularly for the Times of London from Yemen, Shaye “paced slowly around the white cell, smiling and shaking his head in disbelief.”

When the judge finished reading the charges against him, Shaye stood behind the bars of the holding cell and addressed his fellow journalists. “When they hid murderers of children and women in Abyan, when I revealed the locations and camps of nomads and civilians in Abyan, Shabwah and Arhab when they were going to be hit by cruise missiles, it was on that day they decided to arrest me,” he declared. “You notice in the court how they have turned all of my journalistic contributions into accusations. All of my journalistic contributions and quotations to international reporters and news channels have been turned into accusations.” As security guards dragged him away, Shaye yelled, “Yemen, this is a place where, when a young journalist becomes successful, he is viewed with suspicion.”