Yemen, Once a Magnet, Now Expels Terrorists

One bright afternoon a couple of weeks ago, two passenger jets roared away from this desert capital packed with a volatile cargo: ex-guerrilla fighters from Afghanistan.

Many of the so-called Afghan Arabs who settled in Yemen after the war were thought by authorities to be connected to terrorist groups or at least sympathetic to them.

“We kick them out,” said Abdul Hadi H. Hamdani, a top aide to Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh. “These people destroyed our country’s reputation.”

Under U.S. pressure, Yemen has deported hundreds of these fighters since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on America. The jets flew to undisclosed destinations, but officials said Yemen’s goal was to send the guerrillas back to their countries of origin: Algeria, Libya, Syria, Iraq and other Arab nations.

Yemeni authorities, who in the past were known for harboring suspected terrorists, are also tightening borders, sharing intelligence reports and forming the country’s first anti-terrorism squad.

“We need to take advantage of this political will to fight terrorism,” said Edmund J. Hull, the new U.S. ambassador and one of the State Department’s top counter-terrorism experts. “I’ve been trying to reassure people this country is not a target, it’s a partner.”

Yemen once was cozy with Saddam Hussein. It is strategically located along the Saudi Arabian border and at the mouth of the Red Sea. This will become increasingly important if America expands its war against terror to countries such as Iraq or Syria where terrorists are thought to train.

But Yemen remains the wild edge of Arabia, a place where men walk around with curved daggers in their belts and houses are still built from a biblical recipe of dung and straw. Its sprawling arms markets and tribal hinterlands have been ideal hide-outs for dangerous men. Osama bin Laden has mused about seeking sanctuary here, his ancestral home.

A Poor Nation With Little Oil, Lots of Sand

It’s the poorest Arab nation, with little oil and lots of sand. Society is tribally based, and the country is flooded with more than three guns for every one of its 18 million people. The weak central government has been challenged by insurgencies, and shadowy links remain between top officials, warring tribes and pariah states. Yemen was one of the few countries to side with Iraq during the Persian Gulf War.

Several sources said the president’s half brother and the nation’s army commander, Ali Mohsen Ahmar, has used Afghan Arabs in the past as mercenaries and maintains contact with such groups still in Afghanistan.

In the 1980s, the Yemeni government helped recruit young men from all over the Arab world and dispatch them to the Afghan mountains. When invading Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, Yemen welcomed the fighters back, even those who weren’t Yemeni nationals. Many served alongside Bin Laden, who is believed to have provided money to resettle fighters in Yemen.

Tariq Nasr Fadhli, one of Yemen’s most powerful tribal leaders and a presidential council member, has publicly praised Bin Laden, whose father was from a mountain village in eastern Yemen where people still live behind high walls and tend goats and beehives.

“Our government is known to be hiding some pretty bad people,” said a human rights lawyer who spoke anonymously because of safety concerns. “If you’re wanted, you just go to Sana, where there is plenty of protection.”

In Sana, the capital, smoke from burning frankincense curls along medieval alleyways, plied by women wrapped head to toe in beautifully patterned gowns and turbaned men wheeling dates by the cartload. Before a rash of kidnappings killed the tourist trade, Westerners came here by the thousands.

Now hotels are empty, restaurants dark and foreign visitors, wherever they go, must be escorted by police. Aden, the seaside main commercial city a couple of hundred miles away, is hotter, muggier and more relaxed. But terrorism found its way there too.

In 1998, 16 tourists were kidnapped en route to Aden. When Yemeni security forces tried to free them, four were killed.

Abu Hassan, a Yemeni who fought in Afghanistan and was the leader of the Islamic Army of Aden, was tried for murder, found guilty the next year and executed. But not before some testimony leaked out implying that the terrorist had a relationship with Ahmar, the army commander.

The Islamic Army of Aden is one of the 27 groups and individuals identified by President Bush last month as being tied to Bin Laden.

On Oct. 12, 2000, nearly a year to the date after Abu Hassan’s execution, two suicide bombers rammed a skiff packed with explosives into the U.S. destroyer Cole while it was refueling in Aden, killing 17 American sailors.

“That was something of a watershed for Yemen,” said Hull, who started his new post earlier this month after stepping down as the State Department’s coordinator for counter-terrorism. “Before Cole, they didn’t think they had a serious internal terrorism problem.”

Yemeni authorities have arrested nine men suspected of having helped bomb the 505-foot ship. All are Arabs who fought in Afghanistan, and some are thought to be connected to Bin Laden.

Defense lawyer Bader Basunaid, who represents two of the nine suspects, said not everyone who fought in Afghanistan is a terrorist--but that seems to be the government’s position.

“Our country once welcomed these people as heroes,” Basunaid said. “Now they have no rights.”

Several FBI agents remain in Aden on a reinvigorated search for evidence to connect the Cole bombing to Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda organization. The mastermind of the bombing is thought to be a bearded, bespectacled Yemeni known to authorities by one of his many aliases, Al Safani.

Yemeni officials said Al Safani is a Bin Laden associate, and kept an apartment in Nairobi in 1998, the year U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed. Shortly before those attacks, several phone calls were patched through Yemen from Kenya to Afghanistan.

They said Al Safani was also seen on a videotape shot in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, meeting with Khalid Almihdhar, one of the hijackers in the Sept. 11 attacks.

“There’s a number of links between Yemen and Al Qaeda,” said one Western diplomat based in Sana. “But it’s not like it’s cut and dried.”

Bin Laden’s Father Made Billions in Construction

The last piece of the Yemeni puzzle is Hadhramaut, the barren region that Bin Laden’s father, Mohammed, left on a donkey 70 years ago. He founded a construction company in Saudi Arabia and made billions from kingdom-sponsored projects including the minarets and stadium seating at Mecca, the holiest site in Islam.

Hadhramaut is one of the most remote, traditional areas in the Middle East. Women dressed all in black with tall, tubular hats work under a punishing sun to make honey while men swing hoes in rocky fields and children tug camels up and down steep paths.

One of the suspects in the Cole bombing was from Hadhramaut, Yemeni authorities said. And during the 1980s, when the fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan was hot and known as the “second paradise,” just behind heaven, Bin Laden recruited holy warriors from here.

In a 1998 interview with the Arabic newspaper Al Quds, Bin Laden said that if he ever had to leave Afghanistan, he might come to the mountains of Hadhramaut to “breathe the air.”

But there won’t be any welcome mat in Al Rubat, his father’s old village.

The violence attributed to Bin Laden seems especially grotesque to people who are just trying to get by.

“It is wrong to kill a dog or a cat without reason,” said Omar Salim Baishim, one of the village elders. “If Bin Laden ever came here, we’d greet him with the gun.”