Is this the fruit of Yemen’s Deals with Jihadists, America wonders: 16 Are Killed in Attack on U.S. Embassy

By ROBERT F. WORTH

Published: September 17, 2008

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Heavily armed militants opened fire on the United States Embassy in Sana, Yemen, on Wednesday and detonated a car bomb at its gates, in an attack that left at least 16 people dead including six of the attackers, Yemeni officials said.

Yemeni soldiers took up positions in front of the U.S. Embassy in Sana on Wednesday.

No Americans were killed or wounded in the blast or when guards began to return fire, said a Yemeni official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter.

Yemeni security officials and witnesses said the death toll was at least 16, including four bystanders, one of them an Indian woman. The other dead were six attackers and six security guards, the Yemeni officials said, speaking in return for anonymity because they were not authorized to brief reporters.

Yemen’s official Saba news agency also reported that 16 people were killed.

Ryan Gliha, an embassy spokesman, said via e-mail that the attack took place at 9:15 a.m. The embassy would remain closed for now, he said, but gave no further details.

It was the deadliest attack in years on an American target in Yemen, a poor south Arabian country of 22 million where militants aligned with Al Qaeda have carried out a number of recent strikes.

The attack began when a car raced up to the heavily fortified embassy compound. Several attackers got out and began firing rocket-propelled grenades and automatic rifles at the guards who returned the fire, the Yemeni official said.

A second car then drove into the compound’s gate and exploded in what appeared to be a suicide bombing, the official said.

The attack was especially shocking to many Yemenis because it came during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

Yemen has long been viewed as a haven for jihadists. It became a special concern for the United States in 2000, after Al Qaeda operatives rammed the destroyer Cole in Aden harbor, on Yemen’s southern coast, killing 17 American sailors.

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Yemen actively pursued a counterterrorism partnership with the United States, and its American-trained forces have had some important successes in fighting militants.

But over the last two years, jihadists claiming allegiance to Al Qaeda appear to have reorganized, releasing more propaganda material on the Internet and carrying out attacks. In July 2007, suicide bombers killed eight Spanish tourists in eastern Yemen, and there were two unsuccessful attacks on oil installations.

Earlier this year there were several attacks on foreign embassies. In March, mortars fired at the United States Embassy compound in Sana struck a nearby school for girls instead, killing a security guard and wounding more than a dozen students.

The American compound has also been the scene of occasional political violence in previous years, including a large demonstration against the American-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, in which two Yemenis were fatally shot and dozens wounded.

Yemen has also faced serious security threats on other fronts, including an intermittent rebellion in the north that has kept the country’s military engaged, and continuing riots and instability in the south.

In Washington, Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said that the attack showed that the United States had to maintain its “aggressive counterterrorism programs aimed at fighting the jihadist threat.”

“Today’s attack in Yemen is a potent reminder that America, and Americans abroad, still remain the top targets for jihadist terrorists,” he said in a statement.

Khaled Hammadi contributed reporting from Sana, Yemen.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/18/world/middleeast/18yemen.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

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Wanted by F.B.I., but Walking Out of a Yemen Hearing

Khaled Abdullah/Reuters

Jaber Elbaneh, a 41-year-old American citizen who escaped from a Yemeni prison two years ago, in a courthouse there last week.

By ROBERT F. WORTH

Published: March 1, 2008

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Jaber Elbaneh has been one of the F.B.I.’s most wanted terrorism suspects ever since he escaped from a high-security prison two years ago in Sana, the capital of Yemen.

So when Mr. Elbaneh, a 41-year-old American citizen, walked freely into a Yemeni courthouse where his conviction in a bombing case was being appealed last Saturday, the judge and the prosecutor were stunned. They asked him to show identification, which he did.

Then the broad-shouldered, bearded convict — who is accused by American prosecutors of providing support to Al Qaeda — surprised them again: he gave a speech.

“I’ve been sentenced to 10 years in this case, and three years in another,” he said, as camera shutters clicked furiously around him. “But it’s wrong; I haven’t committed any crimes in this country or the United States.”

He added that after his prison escape he surrendered directly to Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who absolved him of any more jail time.

With the judge still sitting speechless, Mr. Elbaneh, who once worked in a cheese factory in Lackawanna, N.Y., then walked out of the courthouse. No one tried to stop him.

Mr. Elbaneh’s mysterious act of bravado, which prompted an angry protest from the State Department, cast an unusual light on the distinctive counterterrorism efforts of Yemen, a desperately poor Arab country that has long been viewed as a haven for jihadists. The Yemeni authorities often negotiate arrangements with suspects that are entirely separate from court verdicts.

Mr. Elbaneh, for instance, surrendered to Yemeni authorities last May after 15 months on the run and a lengthy negotiation. The agreement, like many others of its kind, included a pledge by Mr. Elbaneh not to carry out any terrorist acts in Yemen. In exchange, the authorities promised that he would not be sent back to prison, and would not be sent to the United States, which has sought his extradition since 2002.

Six months later, when Mr. Elbaneh and 31 others were sentenced in connection with another crime — two suicide bombings that took place in 2006 — he apparently was allowed to stay home, under loose house arrest. It is not clear whether he will serve any time on that sentence, which is now being appealed.

Yemeni officials say that by showing clemency to figures like Mr. Elbaneh — often including help with money and jobs — they have co-opted many jihadists, who then agree to help track down other fugitives or to become informants. They say their approach is the only practical one in a country where the state is dependent on powerful tribes and conservative clerics.

American officials are skeptical, and often express indignation at the release of men like Mr. Elbaneh and Jamal al-Badawi, who is wanted in the attack on the American destroyer Cole in 2000 in the port of Aden. Mr. Badawi, released in October on lenient terms similar to those offered to Mr. Elbaneh, was quickly put back in prison after the United States government threatened to withdraw aid.

In Yemen, terrorist charges are seen very differently. Many critics say that while the government does often coddle terrorist sympathizers, it also often manipulates or even fabricates terrorist charges as a political tool, whether to intimidate its enemies or to press the United States for more financing to fight terrorism.

“They frighten the U.S.A. with these guys, and they frighten these guys with the U.S.A.,” said Khaled Alansi, a lawyer in Sana who has represented men accused of terrorism. “If you’re a religious man, they will use the terrorist charge against you; they don’t need proof.”

Mr. Elbaneh’s case is unusual, even in Yemen. He is one of a group of Yemeni-American men from Lackawanna who attended a Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan in 2001.

Six others returned to the United States and were later convicted and sentenced on terrorism charges. By that time, Mr. Elbaneh — who spent several years working at the Lackawanna cheese company before his Afghan excursion — was already in Yemen. After American prosecutors indicted him in absentia, the Yemeni authorities arrested him and jailed him.

Two years later, in February 2006, he and 22 other suspected members of Al Qaeda broke out of a high-security prison in the Yemeni capital. Alarmed, the State Department soon offered $5 million for information leading to his arrest. Yemeni officials said the men tunneled their way from the prison to the bathroom of a neighboring mosque, but that account is viewed with great skepticism, both in the United States and in Yemen.

Many in Yemen say the escape could not have taken place without assistance, whether from corrupt guards or through a higher-level plan.

Mr. Alansi, the lawyer, said Mr. Elbaneh’s family in Yemen had contacted him in late 2005 to ask if he would represent Mr. Elbaneh. Then, just before the escape, they called back with a surprise: he did not need a lawyer anymore.

Controversy and accusations of government collusion have also shadowed the September 2006 attacks in which Mr. Elbaneh and 35 others were accused of playing a role. In those two attacks, two sets of suicide bombers detonated their vehicles far from their targets, doing little damage.

The bombings — the first terrorist attacks in Yemen in years — came just days before Yemen’s presidential elections. Mr. Saleh, who has ruled Yemen since 1978, quickly used the attacks to suggest that his opponent — one of whose guards was immediately accused of being involved — was linked to terrorism. The guard was later acquitted.

Perhaps the greatest mystery surrounding Mr. Elbaneh — a name sometimes rendered al-Banna — is his decision to appear in court last Saturday. The Yemeni government has generally instructed the jihadists with whom it arranges amnesty to avoid the news media and keep low profiles. But Mr. Elbaneh deliberately spoke out in a public setting, with journalists present, and named the president in his brief tirade.

“This serves only one purpose: to humiliate the president,” said one Yemeni official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the issue. “It may be that his tribe used this as a way to put pressure on the government.”

Mr. Elbaneh’s tribe is from southern Yemen, which was a separate country until 1990, and where there has been considerable unrest and some antigovernment protests in recent months.

Khaled al-Hammadi contributed reporting from Sana, Yemen.

Source:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/01/world/middleeast/01yemen.html?fta=y

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Yemen’s Deals With Jihadists Unsettle the U.S.

By ROBERT F. WORTH

Published: January 28, 2008

SANA, Yemen — When the Yemeni authorities released a convicted terrorist of Al Qaeda named Jamal al-Badawi from prison last October, American officials were furious. Mr. Badawi helped plan the attack on the American destroyer Cole in 2000, in which 17 American sailors were killed.

Ali Muhammad al-Kurdi, in Sana, Yemen, says that he had trained two Yemenis to fight in Iraq.

But the Yemenis saw things differently. Mr. Badawi had agreed to help track down five other members of Al Qaeda who had escaped from prison, and was more useful to the government on the street than off, said a high-level Yemeni government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Mr. Badawi had also pledged his loyalty to Yemen’s president before being released, the official said.

The dispute over Mr. Badawi — whom the Yemenis quickly returned to prison after being threatened with a loss of aid — underscored a much broader disagreement over how to fight terrorism in Yemen, a particularly valuable recruiting ground and refuge for Islamist militants in the past two decades.

Yemeni officials say they have had considerable success co-opting jihadists like Mr. Badawi, often by releasing them from prison and helping them with money, schooling or jobs. They are required to sign a pledge not to carry out any attacks on Yemeni soil, often backed by guarantees from their tribe or family members. Many have taken part in an Islamic re-education effort led by religious scholars, now being copied on a wider scale in Saudi Arabia.

A number of these former jihadists have become government informants, helping to capture a new generation of younger, more dangerous Qaeda militants — some of them veterans of the war in Iraq — who refuse to recognize the Yemeni government. Others have become mediators, helping persuade escaped prisoners to surrender.

But American counterterrorism officials and even some Yemenis say the Yemeni government, more than others in the region, is in effect striking a deal that helps stop attacks here while leaving jihadists largely free to plan them elsewhere. They also say the Yemeni government caters too much to radical Islamist figures to improve its political standing, nourishing a culture that could ultimately breed more violence.

“Yemen is like a bus station — we stop some terrorists, and we send others on to fight elsewhere,” said Murad Abdul Wahed Zafir, a political analyst at the National Democratic Institute in Sana. “We appease our partners in the West, but we are not really helping.”

Uneasy Alliance With Jihadists

All parties agree that the situation is urgent. With a young, poor, and fast-growing population of 22 million, Yemen is rapidly approaching an economic and political crisis that could result in its becoming a failed state. The government is fighting a persistent insurgency in the north, oil supplies are dwindling, and the water table in the capital is expected (according to a World Bank estimate) to run out in two years. Like Afghanistan, Yemen has a weak government with strong tribes and mountainous terrain, and a vast weapons supply.

The Yemeni government argues that its approach is in keeping with their deeply conservative society, where Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein remain popular figures. Although a new American-trained commando unit has regularly captured and killed terrorists, officials say they must also show restraint with prisoners: taking a harder line or acceding to American demands to extradite people like Mr. Badawi (as the United States has asked) could provoke a violent backlash.

“The strategy is fighting terrorism, but we need space to use our own tactics, and our friends must understand us,” said Rashad Muhammad al-Alimi, Yemen’s interior minister.

Yemen’s uneasy partnership with jihadists dates back to the late 1980s, when it welcomed tens of thousands of returning Arab veterans of the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. While other Arab countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, struggled with the question of how to accommodate those jihadists, Yemen was actively open to sheltering them, said Gregory Johnsen, a security analyst at the terrorism research group Jamestown Foundation. At the time, President Ali Abdullah Saleh saw the returning fighters as a useful military and ideological weapon against the restive socialists of southern Yemen.

When a brief civil war broke out in 1994, President Saleh sent thousands of jihadists into battle against the south. He also forged important ties with Yemeni Islamist clerical and political figures like Sheik Abdul Majid al-Zindani, a former mentor of Mr. bin Laden who has a broad popular following and has since been listed as a “specially designated global terrorist” by the United States and the United Nations.

Those ties persist today, despite American complaints. Some American officials say the influence of Islamists, and entrenched government corruption, may have made possible the spectacular escape of 23 Qaeda figures, including Mr. Badawi, from a well-guarded prison in the capital in February 2006. Yemeni officials blamed poor oversight for the escape, in which the prisoners are said to have tunneled their way to the bathroom of a neighboring mosque.

Finding a Balance After 2001

After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Saleh flew to Washington and pledged full cooperation with American antiterrorism efforts. At home in Yemen, thousands of former “Afghan Arabs” were rounded up and imprisoned.

But Mr. Saleh was still sensitive to Islamic extremists, who remained a crucial domestic constituency. When the Pentagon leaked word of Yemeni collaboration in an American missile strike in 2002 that killed the suspected leader of Al Qaeda in Yemen, Mr. Saleh was furious.

That same year, Mr. Saleh hit on an idea that he hoped would satisfy both his American and Islamist partners: “al hiwar al fikri,” or intellectual dialogue. This was an effort to inculcate the idea that Islam, properly understood, does not condone terrorism. Sessions began with hundreds of former jihadists who remained in prison without charges.

 “It came from the idea that terror depends on ideology, and that thought should be confronted with thought,” said Hamoud al Hetar, the cleric and judge who led the program.

A cleric would sit for several hours with three to seven prisoners, mostly outside the prison, and discuss Islamic law and ethics, Judge Hetar said during an interview at his home in Sana.

At first, the Saudis and others derided the idea as too soft. At the same time, many Yemeni religious scholars refused to participate out of fear that they would be assassinated by militants, Judge Hetar said. Gradually the program gained acceptance, and Saudi Arabia soon adopted its own version, including therapy and a more comprehensive reintegration program.

Some critics have dismissed the dialogue program, which lapsed in 2005 after terror attacks dropped off, as a sham in which inmates feigned conversion to get out of prison. But Nasser al-Bahri, a former driver for Mr. bin Laden who spent four years with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, said it was more like a raw bargain: exempt Yemen from your jihad and you will be left alone.

“It changed their behavior, not their thoughts,” said Mr. Bahri, a cheerful, talkative 33-year-old who once went by the nom de guerre Abu Jandal. “Judge Hetar cannot cancel jihad. It is in the roots of our religion.”

Sitting on the floor of a bare living room in his Sana apartment, Mr. Bahri said the government helped him buy a taxi and pay for business school after his release in 2003. Although he says he still supports Al Qaeda’s global goals, he also urges other Islamists to avoid any violence in Yemen.

Ali Saleh, another former jihadist who went through Judge Hetar’s program while in prison, now serves as a mediator between the government and Islamists. He helped negotiate the surrender of several of the 23 men who escaped from prison in Sana in early 2006. In exchange, the government agreed to make concessions, including releasing the men after their surrender, he said.

“The government understands, in Yemen you must compromise to reach a solution,” Mr. Saleh said. “The Americans would like to put us all in jail. But if you do this, 10 men will become 20, 20 will become 100, and then — we will be an army.”

A More Violent Generation

Some former jihadists also work as informants for the government and have helped foil a number of attacks, Yemeni officials said.

There appears to be a limit, however, to the government’s ability to co-opt Islamists. A new, more violent generation of militants has emerged in Yemen, according to Yemeni officials and older members of the jihadist community.

Some of these younger men have fought in Iraq, and they refuse all dialogue, seeing Yemen’s government as illegitimate. They appear to have been responsible for the suicide bombing in Marib Province last July in which eight Spanish tourists were killed, and two other suicide attacks on oil installations in 2006. Recently, there have been warnings of more attacks in Yemen on Islamist Web sites.

“They opened a door we hoped would be closed forever,” Mr. Bahri said.

The younger men also see older figures like Mr. Bahri, despite his association with Mr. bin Laden, as traitors. Mr. Bahri said Yemeni security men had showed him a “death list” of 30 names written by members of this younger generation, with his name at the top.

Last summer, two Internet statements claiming to be from Al Qaeda in Yemen lamented that “some of the people abandoned their principles and turned to the government.” The statement accurately describes the mediating committee on which Ali Saleh serves, and goes on to say, “Those deserters became the government’s hands; some of them turned into their spies,” according to a translation provided by the SITE Institute.

Mr. Bahri said he has tried to reason with members of the younger generation of militants, but they refuse all dialogue. He and Mr. Saleh, the mediator, now carry a weapon at all times, and fear for their safety, Mr. Bahri said.

In addition to the threat of these younger militants, there is the broader question of whether Mr. Bahri and his friends are involved in terrorism outside of Yemen. Mr. Bahri still supports the goals of Al Qaeda, and he speaks admiringly of Yemenis who fought in Iraq.

Yemeni officials say they have stepped up efforts to prevent Yemeni men from traveling for jihad. But Mr. Bahri says he knows 10 or 15 men who fought in Iraq, including two who went through Judge Hetar’s program.

Asked what he did to advance the cause of Al Qaeda outside of Yemen, Mr. Bahri smiled, and said answering the question could be dangerous — but that not answering it could also expose him to risks, from a different group of people. After a pause, he said he merely prayed for Al Qaeda’s success.

Another veteran of the Afghan jihad, Ali Muhammad al-Kurdi, said in open court during the course of an unrelated terrorism trial in 2005 that he had trained two Yemeni men to fight in Iraq. He was never prosecuted for the claim, because it is not against Yemeni law.

“They went to Iraq and fought, and they were killed there,” said Mr. Kurdi, a soft-spoken 33-year-old, smiling at the thought, as he sat for an interview in a cafe in Old Sana.

Source: New York Times, New York

URL: https://newageislam.com/war-terror/is-this-fruit-yemen’s-deals/d/738