["Democracy only brought injustice and ignorance and backwardness and a desire to follow the west. The first people to revolt against these treacherous regimes were of course the mujahideen. But the people did not respond to them at the beginning because of the strength of the police state. The people feared them. At last, however, they started to revolt. They saw that it was either injustice and slavery or freedom. So they revolted. And we support all the revolutions. Sheikh Osama supported it.]
By Ghaith Abdul-Ahad
 |
| Flying the black flag: Jihadi fighters manning a checkpoint at the town of Azzan in south Yemen. The region of newly proclaimed jihadi emirates is run by affiliates of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Photograph: Ghaith Abdul-Ahad/for the Guardian |
Driving east out of Aden, we were just a few hundred
metres past the last army checkpoint when we saw the black al-Qaida flag. It
flew from the top of a concrete building that had been part-demolished by
shelling.
From here into the interior, all signs of control by
the government of Yemen disappeared. This is the region of newly proclaimed
jihadi emirates in south Yemen that are run by affiliates of al-Qaida in the
Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the Yemeni franchise of the movement founded by Osama
bin Laden.
AQAP has existed in this ragged, mountainous terrain
for years, but in the last 12 months the jihadis have moved down from the high
ground to take control of cities in the lowlands. They are in the process of
setting up an al-Qaida utopia here, where security is provided by jihadis,
justice follows sharia law and even the administration of electricity and water
supplies is governed by the emir.
Azzan, a market town in Shabwa province a year ago,
is one of the three proclaimed Islamic emirates in south Yemen. When the
Guardian approached it, the town entrance was defended by more than a dozen
fighters equipped with armoured vehicles that had been commandeered from the
government. We were met by three young jihadis and taken to the spot where the
17-year-old son of AQAP's spiritual leader, Anwar al-Awlaki, was killed,
presumably by an American drone. Awlaki himself was killed in a separate strike
last year.
At a small store on the side of the road, young men
sat at computers copying the sermons of Awlaki, the al-Qaida leader Ayman
al-Zawahiri and other household names of the global jihad. A poster on the wall
advertised a film called The Survivors, featuring accounts of leaders who had
survived drone strikes.
The city's old police station has been converted
into a sharia court. Inside, in a room whose walls were hung with the symbols
of the jihadi court – a black flag, a kalashnikov and a long stick used for
delivering corporal punishment – sat the judge. He opened a small notebook as a
demonstration of how the al-Qaida justice system had resolved 42 cases in a fortnight.
"People come to us from parts we don't control
and ask us to solve their problems," he said. "The sharia justice
system is swift and incorruptible. Most of the cases we solve within the
day."
Had they had cut off any hands in dispensing
justice?
"Cutting the hand of the thief is not to punish
the thief, it is to deter the rest of society," he said.
Driving out of Azzan to the west for 100 miles we
came to the centre of another Islamic emirate, at Jaar. Jihadi fighters met us
with their newly commandeered armoured vehicle, freshly painted with their
insignia and furnished with the black flag.
We threaded a way through the crowded market, past
stalls of vegetables and live chickens, as gunmen on motorbikes patrolled the
dusty potholed streets. Many of the town's buildings appeared to have been
reduced to concrete rubble by air strikes.
In this wretched place, AQAP and their affiliates
are attempting to build a new society. Unlike in Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan,
in Yemen they are trying to implement sharia by winning over the hearts and
minds of the people.
In Jaar, the jihadi administration has abolished
taxes, provided free water and electricity and installed sewage pipes. Their
trucks distribute water to villages and Bedouin settlements.
People living in the desert on the outskirts of the
town told us the jihadis had connected their village to the electricity grid
for the first time in their lives. The Islamist administration has even allowed
the people to continue chewing the stimulant qat. The only thing they have
insisted on is moving the market for it to the outskirts of town.
A young, shy jihadi named Fouad took us into an
abandoned building, where a meal was spread out on the floor. "Eat, eat,
these are good times," he said, cheerfully shredding chunks of mutton with
his thick stubby fingers and throwing them over.
"Times have changed, things are much
better," said Fouad. "The days of suffering and hiding in the
mountains have gone."
Another fighter dressed in Afghan style sat with us,
but his big belly and over-stuffed magazine pouches prevented him from kneeling
and scooping the rice, so he picked up a bone and reclined, sucking at it like
a happy child making whistling sounds.
"Thanks be to Allah," said the fighter.
Fouad had once studied English at the college of
literature at Sana'a University, but now he had adopted the dress and outlook
of a jihadi.
His head was covered with a big white headscarf
pulled down on his forehead and throwing dark shadows over his broad bony
features. He spoke softly in classical Arabic, but his message was contemporary
and had little to do with the caves of Afghanistan.
"The media tries to portray the mujahideen as
ignorant people who failed in their lives, rejected by their societies and this
is why they take this path," he said. "The reality is that many of
the mujahideen are educated and have higher degrees, but they left their
studies to care about the nation. They saw their nation insulted and living
under oppression and believe it is their duty to take this path."
Fouad said that "democracy" – a word that
for him covered the autocratic Arab leaders who ran fake elections in their
countries – had been shown not to work.
"Democracy has failed in the Arab world,"
he said. "It failed in Tunis and in Egypt and Libya. It failed in Yemen.
The people agree.
"Democracy only brought injustice and ignorance
and backwardness and a desire to follow the west. The first people to revolt
against these treacherous regimes were of course the mujahideen. But the people
did not respond to them at the beginning because of the strength of the police
state. The people feared them. At last, however, they started to revolt. They
saw that it was either injustice and slavery or freedom. So they revolted. And
we support all the revolutions. Sheikh Osama supported it.
"We also benefited from these revolutions. They
gave us freedom. We were able to come out."
The revolutions had weakened the police states,
Fouad said, and the jihadis had been able to exploit that. "We were able
to control towns and areas. We were able to tell people about our mission. All
of this was during the last revolution.
"We were aiming for this control from the
start. Control under sharia is our basic goal. Nothing else. We just want to
serve the people, give them what they have been missing for a long time."
The jihadis had tried to take Jaar many times
before, sometimes holding the town for a few weeks before being driven out. But
last year, the revolution that toppled the Yemeni president, Ali Abdullah
Saleh, split the army and turned units against each other, weakening security
forces. The jihadis took advantage, and this time they appear to have
succeeded.
A muezzin called for prayer and the whole town began
to converge on the mosque.
Fouad walked us through the market, pointing out the
perfection and piety of a town where merchants leave their shops unattended
while they go to pray.
"Look, the merchandise is left alone and no one
steals," he said.
What if someone doesn't want to pray?
"We just take them aside and advise them on the
importance of prayer," he said.
And if they still don't want to pray?
"Then we will lock them somewhere quiet and
give them reading material until they realise how wrong they were."
Fouad asked with meek and apologetic smile if he
could have our phones. We were then blindfolded and driven in a car to meet the
prisoners.
When Fouad removed the white piece of cloth, we were
outside a small compound surrounded by heavily armed men, some in local
sarongs, others in shalwar kameez. A couple of them had their faces wrapped in
checkered scarves.
They stood guard outside padlocked metal doors. We
were led into the first room, where a dozen captured soldiers sat on the floor,
their bare feet in new, shiny metal chains with a small copper padlock. They
were tired. Some had long beards.
A man stood in the middle of the room to military
attention and talked, his voice monotone: "We are soldiers who fought
defending our country … we fought greatly until we ran out of ammunition … we
ask the brother president to look into our situation and agree to the demands
of the brothers in Ansar al-Sharia and exchange us with their prisoners …"
We were taken into another cell, and another soldier
stood and narrated very similar lines while someone filmed him.
In the fourth room, we asked one of the men
squatting on the floor how were they being treated.
"Like a prisoner. Like a prisoner," he
repeated, his eyes staring at me wide open.
After we had been shown the prisoners, a heavily
armed squat man said: "They are poor soldiers, they give each soldier one
magazine, that's what, 30 bullets? We each carry 10 magazines how many bullets
is that? You calculate and we have more supplies in the middle of the battle,
we use Google maps and send scouts days before the attack. They are poor."
In the car on the way back a man – identifiable from
his voice as the commander – said: "We ask the government to respond to
us, and exchange those men."
And what if they don't?
"Sharia gives us three ways to deal with them,
either we release them, which we won't, or exchange them or kill them," he
said.
Later we walked around Jaar unaccompanied. A farmer
with a thin fuzz of white stubble on his face was making his way back from the
fields on the outskirts of town. What did he make of jihadi rule?
"They got three men from three different areas
and they cut their hands," he said. Had they stolen? "Yes, but what?
An air conditioner, a few items … but now no one dares to raise his voice in
Jaar, let alone steal. This town has gone quiet. Even in the market, no one
shouts. Al-Qaida have imposed security, but if they suspect that someone is spy
he will disappear."
The fertile land around Jaar appeared deserted. The
irrigation canals, neglected for almost a year, had dried up and the yellow
earth was cracked and powdery. Where mangos and papayas had once grown were
withered trees and swirling clouds of dust.
Many of the people have left, fleeing the shelling
by the government and aerial attacks. Tens of thousands of refugees are packed
in schools in Aden, where they live among uncollected garbage, raw sewage and
poverty.
"The people have left, each family leaving one
son in the house and the rest fled to Aden," said the old farmer.
One of those who has fled is Faisal. He woke up one
morning last year and saw that the jihadis had taken control of the town.
"Not one bullet was fired," he said.
The people tried to march in the streets of Jaar in
protest against the town's takeover, Faisal said, but they were shot at and the
crowd dispersed. So he joined a caravan of refugees streaming towards Aden,
where he now lives in a camp.
A few months after taking Jaar, the jihadis pushed
into the nearby town of Zinjibar. They surrounded the police and security
services. The government's feared central security units abandoned their camp
and the next day the army did the same. The jihadis took over the banks and
raided the heavy weapons stores and ammunition dumps. Heavy shelling and
fighting in Zinjibar in the months that followed sent tens of thousands more
refugees to Aden, which now has the air of a city under siege.
In March, the emboldened jihadis scored another
tactical victory, attacking a military camp on the outskirts of Aden itself.
Instead of attacking the heavily guarded trenches and tank positions, the
jihadis followed a mountain trail and attacked the rear of the army. In a few
hours they had killed 182 soldiers and captured 72. They took the weapons and
left.
Many in Sana'a and Aden couldn't believe that the
Yemeni army could be so easily defeated by a band of tribespeople. Where were
all the American-backed anti-terror units?
In Aden, the Guardian met a young lieutenant, his
hair cropped short and his moustache pencil thin. He was still being paid by
the army, but hadn't worn a uniform in more than a month. He was part of the
reconnaissance unit of the 25th armoured brigade, which had been doing most of
the fighting in Abyan province in the last year.
"There are many conspiracy theories about how
we lost Zinjibar," he said. "Many thought that there was a deal
between Saleh and the jihadis. The truth is much simpler: the army leadership
is rotten and corrupt. Why would a soldier fight if the army is split in
Sana'a?
"Do you know how many of them attacked the
camp? Between 55 and 65."
The lieutenant's assessment of the jihadis' strength
chimed with something Fouad had told us. For two decades, Abyan province and
other parts of south Yemen were closely connected to global jihad. Thousands
went to fight in Afghanistan. Later, new waves of jihadi Yemenis left for
Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia, and Abyan became one of the preferred routes for
Saudi young men to seek training and then travel to Iraq.
"We have military commanders who lead and have
new tactics and new ways to wage war," Fouad said. "The Yemeni army
is much weaker than people think. They don't have a reason to fight. [The army]
fights only for money, which serves a foreign agenda whether they know it or
not. They follow their leaders' orders."
"We have learned," Fouad said.
