Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

52. “The US Sees al Qaeda as Terrorism, and We Consider the Drones Terrorism”

YEMEN, LATE 2011—While the Obama administration was basking in the success of the bin Laden killing and JSOC and the CIA were closing in on Anwar Awlaki, the Arab uprisings were spreading. Three weeks after the raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s government in Yemen was on the brink of collapse. The protests were growing and President Saleh had played almost every card he had to keep the Americans on his side. He had given the US counterterrorism machine a virtual free hand to bomb Yemen and opened the doors wide for the evolution of a not-so-covert war. But as his grip on power weakened, AQAP saw opportunity in the chaos. By the summer of 2011, the elite US-backed counterterrorism units were pulled away from the fight against AQAP to defend the regime from its own people. In southern Yemen, where AQAP had its strongest presence, the mujahedeen sought to take advantage of an imploding state whose leaders had earned a reputation for corruption as they failed to provide basic goods and services.

On May 27, 2011, several hundred militants laid siege to Zinjibar, thirty miles northeast of the strategically important southern city of Aden, killing several soldiers, driving out local officials and taking control of the city within two days. Who exactly these militants were was a matter of some dispute. According to the Yemeni government, they were AQAP operatives. But the militants who took the city did not claim to be from AQAP. Instead, they announced themselves as a new group, Ansar al Sharia, or Supporters of Sharia. Senior Yemeni officials told me that Ansar al Sharia was simply a front for al Qaeda. They pointed out that the first known public reference to the group was made a month before the attack on Zinjibar by AQAP’s top cleric, Adil al Abab. “The name Ansar al Sharia is what we use to introduce ourselves in areas where we work to tell people about our work and goals, and that we are on the path of Allah,” he said, adding that the new name was intended to put the focus on the message of the group so as to avoid the associations of the al Qaeda brand. Whether Ansar al Sharia had more independent origins or was merely a product of AQAP’s crude rebranding campaign, as Abab claimed, the group’s significance would soon extend well beyond al Qaeda’s historically limited spheres of influence in Yemen, while simultaneously popularizing some of AQAP’s core tenets.

Months after Zinjibar was taken, I traveled to Aden, Yemen, where I met the Yemeni general whose job it was to retake the areas seized by Ansar al Sharia. General Mohammed al Sumali sat in the passenger seat of his armored Toyota Land Cruiser as it whizzed down the deserted highway connecting Aden to Abyan Province, where the Islamist militants had overrun Zinjibar. Sumali, a heavyset man with glasses and a mustache, was the commander of the 25th Mechanized Brigade of the Yemeni armed forces and the man charged with cleansing Zinjibar of the militants. Sumali’s task carried international significance: retaking Zinjibar was seen by many as a final test of the flailing Saleh regime. The only real traffic on the road consisted of refugees fleeing the fighting and heading toward Aden, and military reinforcements moving toward Zinjibar. Sumali did not want to drive out to the front lines on the day I met him. “You know there could be mortars fired at you,” he told me. Twice, the militants in Zinjibar had tried to assassinate the general in that very vehicle. There was a bullet hole in the front windshield, just above his head, and another in his side window, the spider-web cracks from the bullets’ impact clearly visible. When I agreed not to hold him or his men responsible for what might happen, he relented, and we piled in and took off.

As we rode along the coast of the Arabian Sea, past stacks of abandoned mortar tubes, Russian T-72 tanks dug into sand berms and the occasional wandering camel, General Sumali gave me his account of what had happened on May 27, 2011, when Ansar al Sharia took the town. Sumali attributed the takeover to an “intelligence breakdown,” explaining, “We were surprised in late May with the flow of a large number of terrorist militants into Zinjibar.” He added that the militants “raided and attacked some security sites. They were able to seize these institutions. We were surprised when the governor, his deputies and other local officials fled to Aden.” As the Yemeni military began fighting the militants, General Sumali told me, troops from Yemen’s Central Security Forces fled, abandoning heavy weaponry as they retreated. The CSF, whose counterterrorism unit was armed, trained and funded by the United States, was commanded by President Saleh’s nephew Yahya. A media outlet associated with the militants reported that Ansar’s forces seized “heavy artillery pieces, modern antiaircraft weapons, a number of tanks and armoured transports in addition to large quantities of different kinds of ammunition.”

Sumali said that as his forces attempted to repel the attack on Zinjibar a week later, they were attacked by the militants using the artillery seized from the CSF units. “Many of my men were killed,” he told me. The Islamist fighters also conducted a series of bold raids on the base of the 25th Mechanized on the southern outskirts of Zinjibar. In all, more than 230 Yemeni soldiers died in battles with the militants in under a year. “These guys are incredibly brave,” the general conceded, speaking of the militants. “If I had an army full of men with that bravery, I could conquer the world.”

Sumali said Zinjibar fell because of bad intelligence, but critics of the crumbling Saleh regime told me a different story. They alleged that President Saleh’s forces allowed the city to fall. The fighting there began as Saleh faced mounting calls both inside and outside Yemen for his resignation. Several of his key allies had defected to the growing opposition movement. After thirty-three years of outwitting his opponents, they said, Saleh saw that the end was near. “Saleh himself actually handed over Zinjibar to these militants,” charged Abdul Ghani al Iryani, a well-connected political analyst. “He ordered his police force to evacuate the city and turn it over to the militants because he wanted to send a signal to the world that, without me, Yemen will fall into the hands of the terrorists.” That theory, while unproven, was not baseless. Ever since the mujahedeen war against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s and continuing after 9/11, Saleh has famously milked the threat of al Qaeda and other militants to leverage counterterrorism funding and weapons from the United States and Saudi Arabia to bolster his power within the country and neutralize opponents. A Yemeni government official, who asked to remain anonymous because he was not authorized to speak publicly about military issues, admitted that troops from the US-trained and -supported Republican Guard did not respond when the militants entered the town. Those forces were commanded by Saleh’s son Ahmed Ali Saleh. Neither did those forces loyal to one of the most powerful military figures in the country, General Ali Mohsen, commander of the 1st Armored Division, move in. Two months before Zinjibar was seized, Mohsen had defected from the Saleh regime and was publicly supporting his overthrow.

General Sumali told me he could not “confirm or deny” that Ansar al Sharia was actually AQAP. “What is important for me, as a soldier, is that they have taken up arms against us. Anyone who is attacking our institutions and military camps and killing our soldiers, we will fight them regardless of if they are al Qaeda affiliates or Ansar al Sharia,” he told me. “We don’t care what they call themselves. And I can’t confirm whether Ansar al Sharia is affiliated with al Qaeda or if they are an independent group.”

Rather than fighting AQAP, the elite US-backed Yemeni units—created and funded with the explicit intent to be used only for counterterrorism operations—redeployed to Sana’a to protect the collapsing regime from its own people. The US-supported units existed “mostly for the defense of the regime,” said Iryani. “In the fighting in Abyan, the counterterrorism forces have not been deployed in any effective way. They are still here in the palace [in Sana’a], protecting the palace. That’s how it is.” At the time, John Brennan acknowledged that the “political tumult” had caused the US-trained units “to be focused on their positioning for internal political purposes as opposed to doing all they can against AQAP.” So it was left to General Sumali and his conventional forces to fight the Islamists who had taken over Zinjibar.

As we passed the first front line on the outskirts of Zinjibar, “Tiger 1,” and drove a half mile to “Tiger 2,” Sumali agreed to let me get out of the vehicle. “We will only stay for two minutes,” he told me. “It’s dangerous here.” The general was soon besieged by his men. They looked thin and haggard, many with long beards and tattered uniforms or no uniforms at all. Some of them pleaded with Sumali to write them notes authorizing additional combat pay. One of the soldiers told him, “I was with you when you were ambushed. I helped fight off the attack.” Sumali scribbled on a piece of paper and handed it to the soldier. The scene continued until Sumali got back into the Toyota. As we drove away, he spoke from his armored vehicle through a loudspeaker at his men. “Keep fighting. Do not give up!”

Whether it was a crass ploy on the part of a failing regime to allow the militants to overrun Zinjibar or an opportunistic power grab by AQAP, the taking of several towns across southern Yemen by Islamist forces was significant. Unlike the militant movement al Shabab in Somalia, AQAP had never taken control of significant swaths of territory in Yemen. But Ansar al Sharia was determined to do just that, declaring an Islamic emirate in Abyan. Once Ansar al Sharia and its allies solidified their grip on Zinjibar, they implemented an agenda aimed at winning popular support. “Ansar al Sharia has been much more proactive in attempting to provide services in areas in Yemen where the government has virtually disappeared,” Johnsen, the Yemen scholar at Princeton University, told me at the time. “It has claimed that it is following the Taliban model in attempting to provide services and Islamic government where the central government in Yemen has left a vacuum.”

Ansar al Sharia repaired roads, restored electricity, distributed food and began security patrols inside the city and its surroundings. It also established Sharia courts where disputes could be resolved. “Al Qaeda and Ansar al Sharia brought security to the people in areas that were famous for insecurity, famous for thefts, for roadblocks,” said Abdul Rezzaq al Jamal, the independent Yemeni journalist who regularly interviewed al Qaeda leaders and had spent extensive time in Zinjibar. “The people I met in Zinjibar were grateful to al Qaeda and Ansar al Sharia for maintaining security.” Although the militants in Abyan brought law and order, the policies were, at times, enforced with brutal tactics such as limb amputations against accused thieves and public floggings of suspected drug users. In one incident in the Ansar al Sharia–held town of Jaar, residents said they were summoned to a gruesome event at which militants used a sword to chop off the hands of two young men accused of stealing electrical cables. The amputated hands were then paraded around the town as a warning to would-be thieves. One of the young men, a fifteen-year-old, reportedly died soon after from blood loss. In another incident, Ansar al Sharia in Jaar publicly beheaded two men it alleged had provided information to the United States to conduct drone strikes. A third man was executed in Shabwah.

AQAP took advantage of the Yemeni government’s unpopularity, shrewdly recognizing that its message of a Sharia-based system of law and order would be welcomed by many in Abyan who viewed the Saleh regime as a US puppet. The US missile strikes, the civilian casualties, an almost total lack of government services and a deepening poverty all helped create the opportunity AQAP seized. “As these groups of militants took over the city, then AQAP came in and also tribes from areas that have been attacked in the past by the Yemeni government and by the US government,” Iryani, the Yemeni political analyst, told me. “They came because they have a feud against the regime and against the US. There is a nucleus of AQAP, but the vast majority are people who are aggrieved by attacks on their homes that forced them to go out and fight.”

As Ansar al Sharia took control of towns in the south, Washington debated how to respond. Some within the Obama administration agitated for the United States to jump into the fight. General James Mattis, who took over from Petraeus as CENTCOM commander, proposed that the president sign off on a massive air assault on the “Unity” Soccer Stadium on the outskirts of Zinjibar, where Ansar al Sharia fighters had created a makeshift base from which to attack the Yemeni military. President Obama shot down the proposal. “We’re not in Yemen to get involved with some domestic conflict,” the president said. “We’re going to continue to stay focused on threats to the homeland—that’s where the real priority is.”

Instead, the United States would fly supply runs into southern Yemen via helicopter to back up General Sumali’s conventional forces. The Americans also provided real-time intelligence, obtained by drones, to Yemeni forces in Abyan. “It has been an active partnership. The Americans help primarily with logistics and intelligence,” Sumali told me. “Then we pound the positions with artillery or air strikes.” On a few occasions, Sumali told me, the United States conducted unilateral strikes around Zinjibar that “targeted al Qaeda leaders who are on the US terrorist black list,” though he added, “I did not coordinate directly in these attacks.” As cities throughout southern Yemen began to fall to Ansar al Sharia and the Saleh regime crumbled, in late 2011, the Obama administration decided to pull out most of the US military personnel in Yemen, including those training Yemen’s counterterrorism forces. “They have left because of the security situation,” Abu Bakr al Qirbi, Yemen’s foreign minister, told me at the time. “Certainly, I think if they do not return and the counterterrorism units are not provided with the necessary ammunition and equipment, it will have an impact” on counterterrorism operations.

The United States was shifting tactics. With the Saleh regime severely weakened, the Obama administration calculated that it had little to gain from that alliance at this stage. The United States would double down on its use of air power and drones, striking in Yemen at will to carry on its campaign against AQAP. The Obama administration began quick construction of a secret air base in Saudi Arabia, closer than its base in Djibouti, that could serve as a launching pad for expanded drone strikes in Yemen. Target number one remained the same: Anwar Awlaki.

THE KEY TO ACCOMPLISHING ANYTHING in Yemen is navigating its labyrinthine tribal system. For years, a tribal patronage network helped bolster Saleh’s regime. Many tribes had a neutral view of AQAP or saw it as a minor nuisance; some fought against al Qaeda forces, though others gave them safe haven or shelter. The stance of many tribes toward al Qaeda depended on how they believed AQAP could forward or hurt their agendas.

But the Obama administration’s Yemen policy had enraged many tribal leaders who could potentially keep AQAP in check and, over the course of three years of regular bombings, had taken away the motivation for many leaders to do so. Several southern leaders angrily told me stories of US and Yemeni attacks in their areas that killed civilians and livestock and destroyed or damaged scores of homes. If anything, the US air strikes and support for Saleh-family-run counterterrorism units had increased tribal sympathy for al Qaeda. “Why should we fight them? Why?” asked Ali Abdullah Abdulsalam, a southern tribal sheikh from Shabwah who adopted the nom de guerre Mullah Zabara, out of admiration, he told me, for Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. “If my government built schools, hospitals and roads and met basic needs, I would be loyal to my government and protect it. So far, we don’t have basic services such as electricity, water pumps. Why should we fight al Qaeda?” He told me that AQAP controlled large swaths of Shabwah, conceding that the group did “provide security and prevent looting. If your car is stolen, they will get it back for you.” In areas “controlled by the government, there is looting and robbery. You can see the difference.” Zabara added, “If we don’t pay more attention, al Qaeda could seize and control more areas.”

Zabara was quick to clarify that he believed AQAP was a terrorist group bent on attacking the United States, but that was hardly his central concern. “The US sees al Qaeda as terrorism, and we consider the drones terrorism,” he said. “The drones are flying day and night, frightening women and children, disturbing sleeping people. This is terrorism.” Zabara told me that several US strikes in his region had killed scores of civilians and that his community was littered with unexploded cluster bombs, which at times detonated, killing children. He and other tribal leaders asked the Yemeni and US governments for assistance in removing them, he said. “We did not get any response, so we use our guns to explode them.” He also said the US government should pay money to the families of civilians killed in the missile strikes of the past three years. “We demand compensation from the US for killing Yemeni citizens, just like the Lockerbie case,” he declared. “The world is one village. The US received compensation from Libya for the Lockerbie bombing, but the Yemenis have not.”

I met Mullah Zabara and his men at the airport in Aden, along the coast where the USS Cole was bombed in October 2000, killing seventeen US sailors. Zabara was dressed in black tribal clothes, complete with a jambiya, the traditional dagger, at his stomach. He was also packing a Beretta on his hip. Zabara was a striking figure, with leathery skin and a large scar that formed a crescent moon along his right eye. “I don’t know this American,” he said to my Yemeni colleague. “So if anything happens to me as a result of this meeting—if I get kidnapped—we’ll just kill you later.” Everyone laughed nervously. We chatted for a while on a corniche, a cliff-side road along the coast, before he drove us around the city for a tour. About twenty minutes into the tour, he pulled over on the side of the road and bought a six-pack of Heineken from a shanty store, tossing one to me before cracking open a can for himself. It was 11:00 a.m.

“Once I got stopped by AQAP guys at one of their checkpoints, and they saw I had a bottle of Johnnie Walker,” he recalled as he guzzled his second Heineken in ten minutes and lit a cigarette. “They asked me, ‘Why do you have that?’ I told them, ‘To drink it.’” He laughed heartily. “I told them to bother another guy and drove off.” The message of the story was clear: the al Qaeda guys don’t want trouble with tribal leaders. “I am not afraid of al Qaeda. I go to their sites and meet them. We are all known tribesmen, and they have to meet us to solve their disputes.” Plus, he added, “I have 30,000 fighters in my own tribe. Al Qaeda can’t attack me.” Zabara served as a mediator with AQAP for the Yemeni government and was instrumental in securing the release of three French aid workers held hostage by the militant group for six months. Zabara was also asked by the Yemeni minister of defense to mediate with the militants in Zinjibar on several occasions, including to retrieve bodies of soldiers killed in areas held by Ansar al Sharia. “I have nothing against al Qaeda or the government,” he told me. “I started the mediation in order to stop bloodshed and to achieve peace.” In Zinjibar, his efforts were unsuccessful. He told me that while mediating, he met AQAP operatives from the United States, France, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

I asked him if he ever met with top AQAP leaders. “Fahd al Quso is from my tribe,” he replied with a smile, referring to one of the most wanted suspects from the Cole bombing. “I saw [Said] al Shihri and [Nasir] al Wuhayshi five days ago in Shabwah,” he casually added, referring to the two senior AQAP leaders, both of them US-designated terrorists. “We were walking, and they said, ‘Peace be upon you.’ I replied, ‘Peace be upon you, too.’ We have nothing against them. In the past, it was unthinkable to run into them. They were hiding in the mountains and caves, but now they are walking in the streets and going to restaurants.” “Why is that?” I asked. “The regime, the ministers and officials are squandering the money allocated to fight al Qaeda, while al Qaeda expands,” he replied. The United States “funds the Political Security and the National Security [Forces], which spend money traveling here and there, in Sana’a or in the US, with their family. All the tribes get is air strikes against us.” He added that counterterrorism “has become like an investment” for the US-backed units. “If they fight seriously, the funds will stop. They prolonged the conflict with al Qaeda to receive more funds” from the United States. In January 2013, Zabara was assassinated in Abyan. It is unknown who killed him. That same month, the Yemeni government announced that Shihri had died “after succumbing to wounds received in a counter terrorism operation.”

THERE IS NO DOUBT that when President Obama took office, al Qaeda had resurrected its shop in Yemen. But how big a threat AQAP actually posed to the United States or Saleh at that historical moment was the subject of much debate. What went almost entirely undiscussed in the US discourse on AQAP and Yemen was whether US actions—the targeted killings, the Tomahawk and drone strikes—might backfire, handing AQAP an opportunity to recruit and provoking the group to escalate its own violence. “We are not generating good will in these operations,” Emile Nakhleh, the former senior CIA officer, told me. “We might target radicals and potential radicals, but unfortunately…other things and other people are being destroyed or killed. So, in the long run, it is not necessarily going to help. These operations will not necessarily help to deradicalize potential recruits. To me the bigger issue is the whole issue of radicalization. How do we pull the rug from under it?” He added: “These operations might be successful in specific cases, but I don’t think they necessarily contribute to a deradicalization of certain segments of those societies.”

Colonel Patrick Lang, who spent his entire career in covert operations leading sensitive missions, including in Yemen, told me that the threat posed by AQAP had been “greatly exaggerated as a threat to the United States. In fact, most Americans think that anything that might kill you personally, in an airplane or walking down Park Avenue or something, is the biggest threat in the world, right? Because they’re not accustomed to dealing with conditions of danger as a standard of life, you know? So to say, ‘Is AQAP a threat to the United States?’ Yeah. They could bring down an airliner, kill a couple hundred people. But are they an existential threat to the United States? Of course not. Of course not. None of these people are an existential threat to the United States. We’ve gone crazy over this. We had this kind of hysterical reaction to danger.”

IN THE SAME WAY that Afghanistan and Iraq provided a laboratory for training and developing a whole new generation of highly skilled, seasoned special operators, Yemen represented a paradigm that is sure to permeate US national security policy for decades to come. It was under the Bush administration that the United States declared the world a battlefield where any country would be fair game for targeted killings, but it was President Obama who put a bipartisan stamp on this worldview that will almost certainly endure well beyond his time in office. “This is going to go on for a long time,” said Lang. “The Global War on Terror has acquired a life of its own. It’s a self-licking ice cream cone. And the fact that this counterterrorism/counterinsurgency industry evolved into this kind of thing, involving all these people, the foundations, and the journalists and the book writers, and the generals, and the guys doing the shooting—all of that together has a great, tremendous amount of inertia that tends to keep it going in the same direction.” Lang added: “It continues to roll. It will take a conscious decision, on the part of civilian policy makers, somebody like the president, for example, to decide that ‘OK, boys, the show’s over.’” But Obama was far from deciding the show was over.