The almost two-year-old merger of Saudi and Yemeni jihadists into a Yemen-based al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) seems to have been a success. Certainly, that is what the suspect packages, including mobile phone technology, on board two cargo planes, suggests. The Saudis have brought funds, the Yemenis manpower. AQAP was described on Thursday by the chief of Britain’s Foreign Intelligence Service, John Sawers, as posing a threat comparable to that emanating from Pakistan or Afghanistan.
It’s impossible to say whether it was a Saudi or a Yemeni national, or perhaps a Saudi from the disadvantaged southern border region of the country that once belonged to Yemen, who provided the technical know-how, but it is not the first time AQAP has employed mobile phone technology. Barely reported in the West, AQAP road-tested a first mobile phone-enabled bomb in August last year at an elegant Ramadan party in Jeddah hosted by Saudi Arabia’s chief of counter-terrorism, Prince Mohammad bin Nayef.
The prince had been energetically employing a startling mix of inducements (cars, apartments, jobs, wives) and threats to rid Saudi Arabia of an al-Qaeda problem made embarrassingly manifest when many of the Sept. 11 bombers were found to hold the kingdom’s passports. One of the “carrots” was inviting a young Saudi member of AQAP who was hiding out in Yemen, but claimed to have seen the error of his un-Koranic ways, to attend his private Ramadan soiree. He further honored the young jihadist by transporting him there aboard his private jet.
Illustration: Mountain People
On arriving at the palace, 23-year-old Abdullah Hassan al-Asiri — his name indicates that he came from a formerly Yemeni province — was duly welcomed by the prince in person. Al-Asiri told him that several other jihadists were keen to follow his lead and throw themselves on his benevolent mercy. However, could the prince reassure them all by speaking to one of them in person, then and there, on al-Asiri’s mobile phone? Yes, the gracious prince replied, why not?
That call was the agreed signal for the detonation of a bomb al-Asiri had secreted about his person, probably in his underpants, like the Nigerian but Yemen-trained “underwear bomber” Umar Farook Abdulmutallab, who almost exploded an airplane over Chicago last December. The blast blew al-Asiri to smithereens, while fortunately failing to seriously injure the prince. However, it was by far the nearest al-Qaeda had ever come to assassinating a member of the kingdom’s ruling family.
Given the fright of this incident, it is hardly surprising that the Saudis’ intelligence effort in Yemen is now fine-tuned and energetic enough to pick up rumors of the threat uncovered on Friday. That success can be construed as a welcome sign to the kingdom’s Western allies that, opaque and unresponsive as it tends to be, it is taking a useful interest in neighboring Yemen, rather than limiting itself to buying influence among the country’s top tribal sheikhs.
It took last December’s failed plane bombing to concentrate Western minds on Yemen. The poorest country in the Middle East, a terrifyingly dysfunctional state stranded among some of the richest states in the world, including Saudi Arabia, looked ideally suited to providing the world’s Islamic jihadists with as welcoming and safe a haven as Pakistan’s tribal areas. In January, then-British prime minister Gordon Brown hurriedly added a forum to discuss Yemen to the end of a London meeting about Afghanistan. However, what, precisely, could be done?
Yemen is home to a whole series of linked crises. The trickle of oil which accounts for 90 percent of its exports and three-quarters of its revenues will have run out by 2017, as will the water supply to its capital city, Sana’a. Its 23 million-strong population, two-thirds of whom are under the age of 24, is set to double by 2035. Unemployment is around the 35 percent mark. At the time of the meeting, the country was also suffering two separatist insurgencies: One in the north near the Saudi border had created a vast refugee problem, and one in the south around Aden, which looked capable of splitting the country in half again after only two decades of unity.
Yemeni President Abdullah Salih, at the helm for more than 30 years, thanks to a little oil wealth and a talent for co-opting, flattering, reconciling — a style of rule he describes as “dancing on the heads of the snakes” — presides over what academic Robert Burrowes has dubbed a “kleptocracy, a government of, by and for the thieves.”
All this is appalling for the vast majority of Yemenis. AQAP, rather than being supported, has ruined tourism in their beautiful country and scuppered all chance of Western investment. Southern Yemenis feel warmly toward the West and are unlikely to furnish AQAP with any abiding safe haven in the country. In the past six years of visiting the country regularly, I have learned that Yemenis care much more for land and money than they do for religion or ideology. While a few may be drawn to jihadism, for most the danger lies in numbing themselves by chewing the leaves of the mildly hallucinogenic qat shrub, a pastime which consumes over a third of the country’s agricultural land and a ruinous quantity of water.
AQAP’s ability to infiltrate is aided, however, by Yemeni culture. Much of Yemen is run by tribesmen whose sense of self-worth revolves around honoring guests without questions, owning weapons and resisting centralized authority if its dictates impinge on traditionally tribal prerogatives. Small wonder that the influence of the US-educated and English-speaking, Internet-savvy Yemeni tribesman and cleric Anwar al-Awlaqi, the man whose teachings may have inspired the bombers, is proving impossible to eliminate, for example. Whatever the pro- or anti-al-Qaeda politics of members of the Awlaqi tribe, a large and powerful grouping whose lands are situated east of Aden in the south of the country, they would be dishonoring themselves and their tribe if they handed him over.
Quite correctly, there seems no chance of Western armies trying to enforce change on Yemen in the manner they have set out to do in Iraq and Afghanistan. And, in truth, Yemen deserves more pity than bombs. The US has increased its aid to Yemen — half developmental, half military — to approximately US$300 million.
We would be well advised to leave the job of arresting Yemen’s descent to Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf counties that make up the Middle East’s equivalent to the EU, the Gulf Cooperation Council. All have substantial Yemeni diaspora and a much better understanding of how the country’s internal and tribal affairs work. They also have the funds and, as the attack on bin Nayef shows, the immediate and pressing motivation.
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