The Secret
Behind the Yemen War
A recent PBS report about the war in Yemen exposed
the secret connection between the U.S.-Saudi
alliance and Al Qaeda, a reality that also
underscores the jihadist violence in Syria, writes
Daniel Lazare.
By Daniel Lazare
May 08, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Consortium
News"
-
PBS
Frontline’s “Yemen
Under Siege,” which aired on May 3, makes for
powerful viewing. A first-hand look at the
devastation that the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and other
powers have visited on one of the poorest countries
in the Middle East, the 35-minute documentary shows
families struggling amid the rubble, children dying
from mortar attacks, surgeons operating without
anesthesia, and other such horrors.
But the
most important revelation comes almost as an
aside. Interviewing pro-Saudi fighters near the
central Yemeni city of Taiz, journalist Safa Al
Ahmad suddenly hears shouting. “What’s wrong?” she
asks. “Who are they? They don’t want me to be here?”
A soldier
explains that the people making a ruckus are Ansar
al Sharia, i.e. fighters for shari‘a. “And he just
says quite casually, these are Al Qaeda in the
Arabian Peninsula,” Al Ahmad says later of the local
Al Qaeda affiliate often referred to as AQAP. “And
he referred to them by their local name, which is
Ansar al Sharia. He revealed what is considered an
open secret in the front lines, that they [AQAP] had
been fighting with all the different factions, the
[pro-Saudi] Yemeni factions and the [U.S.-Saudi]
coalition against the Houthis.”
“We don’t
accept you,” the Al Qaeda members cry out. “On
religious grounds, we do not accept you.” A non-Al
Qaeda fighter says dismissively, “They are
ISIS.” But a second corrects him: “No, they’re not.
They’re worse than ISIS. We can’t coexist with
them.”
But coexist
they do, as the film makes clear. Yet another non-Al
Qaeda fighter explains: “Islam does not allow for
people to be overly strict. We must be moderate. But
we have a group here who are strict.”
“But you
fight together at the front line?” Al Ahmad asks.
“For sure.
At the front, we are together.”
With that,
the documentary lifts the lid on perhaps the single
most incoherent aspect of U.S. policy in the Middle
East. On one hand, the United States claims to be
fighting Al Qaeda, and indeed AQAP,
regarded as one of Al Qaeda’s most aggressive
franchises, has been a prime target of U.S.
drone strikes ever since the war on terror began.
At the same
time, though, the U.S. provides military backing for
forces led by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab
Emirates, and other Persian Gulf petro-states that
welcome AQAP fighters into their ranks as full and
active participants in the anti-Houthi crusade.
The U.S.
opposes Al Qaeda, on one hand, but supports elements
that ally with it, on the other.
Explaining the War in Yemen
As Al Ahmad
– a heroic Saudi dissident who has been
effectively banished from her homeland for
reporting on the plight of the kingdom’s Shi‘ite
minority – puts it:
“This is
why it’s so difficult to explain the war on Yemen,
because there are so many enemies that find
themselves on the same front lines fighting the
other enemy. A lot of people who wanted to fight the
Houthis, that didn’t necessarily agree with Al
Qaeda, did join them because that was a ready front
for them to go out and fight. And that grew with the
ranks of Al Qaeda. And so the situation only got
worse from 2012 until now.”
Where
formerly Al Qaeda “controlled huge parts of South
Yemen,” she adds, the group’s reach over the last
four years has grown to the point where it now
constitutes a veritable
state within a state.
All of
which runs directly counter to the official line in
Washington, which holds that if AQAP has expanded,
it is only because it has taken advantage of the
disorderly conditions that the Houthi uprising has
imposed. As a U.S. counterterrorism official
told The Daily Beast last summer:
“It is now
clear that AQAP has been a significant beneficiary
of the chaos unleashed by the Houthi takeover. While
the Saudi-led coalition has started to push back the
Houthis, they are not able to simultaneously fight
AQAP. The net result is that AQAP continues to make
inroads and exploit the situation.”
This vision
holds that the Houthis are the prime cause of Al
Qaeda’s expansion, they created the conditions that
have allowed it to expand, and poor Saudi Arabia is
now struggling valiantly to set things right. It’s
all quite heartwarming except that “Yemen Under
Siege” shows that the opposite is really the case.
Rather than
rolling Al Qaeda back, it makes clear that, whatever
their misgivings, pro-Saudi forces have come to rely
on it as a useful asset in the anti-Houthi struggle
and that, consequently, they have encouraged its
growth. Since the Saudis are backing the anti-Houthi
forces, this makes them complicit in AQAP’s
expansion. And since the U.S. is backing the Saudis,
this makes America complicit, too.
Indeed,
America’s role is even worse. By subjecting AQAP to
periodic drone strikes, it not only winds up killing
civilians – such as the 14 members of a wedding
party that the U.S.
mistakenly targeted in December 2013 – but
fairly encourages AQAP members to intermingle with
other anti-Houthi forces by making it clear that is
the one place it will not bomb.
The result,
in effect, is a highly effective machine for fueling
apocalyptic fervor, spreading Islamic militancy, and
encouraging AQAP to extend its tentacles throughout
the broader anti-Houthi movement. The only ones who
are in the dark as to why AQAP can prosper under
such conditions are the foreign-policy experts back
in Washington.
A
Broader Pattern
None of
this is unique to Yemen, meanwhile. To the contrary,
it takes place wherever the U.S. pretends to combat
Al Qaeda while in fact doing the opposite. The
original model was Afghanistan where Pakistani
journalist Ahmed Rashid
estimates that the CIA, the Saudis and others
poured a total of $10 billion into the anti-Soviet
jihad over a ten-year period beginning in mid-1979.
Since
Islamic militants generally proved to be the most
dedicated fighters, the money flowed to extremists
such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a notorious fanatic who
got his start in the 1970s throwing
acid in the faces of unveiled women at Kabul
University.
His reign
as prime minister in 1993-94 and again briefly in
1996 was so brutal and destructive that the Taliban
were hailed as liberators when they finally took
over and sent Hekmatyar fleeing to Pakistan.
The same
happened in Libya when the Arab Spring touched down
in early 2011 and the White House urged Hamad bin
Khalifa al-Thani, emir of Qatar, to contribute to a
growing swarm of anti-Gaddafi rebels. Obama
described Al-Thani at a Democratic fundraiser as “a
big booster, big promoter of democracy all
throughout the Middle East,” but then
confessed: “Now, he himself is not reforming
significantly. There’s no big move towards democracy
in Qatar. But you know part of the reason is that
the per capita income of Qatar is $145,000 a
year. That will dampen a lot of conflict.”
In
fact, it did the opposite. Happy to oblige, Al-Thani,
a major supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood,
funneled $400
million in the form of
machine guns, automatic rifles, and ammunition
to Salafist rebels who proceeded to do to Libya what
an earlier generation of U.S.-backed jihadis had
done to Afghanistan, i.e. reduce it to chaos. [See
Consortiumnews.com’s “Obama’s
Risky ‘Mission Creep’ in Syria.”]
Once again,
Washington’s clueless foreign-policy establishment
was left scratching its head as to how it had
all gone so wrong.
Finally,
there is Syria, where such perverse policies have
generated a tidal wave of violence resulting
in millions of refugees and as
many as 470,000 deaths. The Bush administration
began making threatening noises toward Damascus
weeks after invading Iraq in March 2003, although it
quickly pulled back once events in its new
protectorate began spinning out of control.
But three
years later, then-U.S. Ambassador to Syria William
V. Roebuck suggested that fostering religious
conflict might be an easier way to bring down the
Assad government. Even though Sunni fears of Shi‘ite
proselytizing are “often exaggerated,” he
advised in a diplomatic cable made public by
Wikileaks, “[b]oth the local Egyptian and Saudi
missions here (as well as prominent Syrian Sunni
religious leaders) are giving increasing attention
to the matter and we should coordinate more closely
with their governments on ways to better publicize
and focus regional attention on the issue.” [See
Consortiumnews.com’s “Obama
Tolerates the Warmongers.”]
Exploiting Religious War
Religious
war was too good an opportunity to pass up. In June
2012, The New York Times
revealed that the CIA was relying on the
arch-Sunni Muslim Brotherhood to help channel arms
to rebel forces that had already taken the
field against Assad.
In August,
the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency
reported that Al Qaeda, the Salafists, and
Muslim Brotherhood were “the major forces driving
the insurgency,” that the likely outcome was the
establishment of a “Salafist principality in eastern
Syria,” and that “this is exactly what the
supporting powers to the opposition” – i.e. the
U.S., Turkey, and Arab gulf states – “want in order
to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered
the strategic depth of the Shia expansion….”
In August
2014, Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes
assured Americans that ISIS posed no danger
since its “primary focus is consolidating territory
in the Middle East region to establish their own
Islamic State” rather than striking out at Western
targets abroad.
Hence,
Americans could count on the violence remaining
safely self-contained as Islamic State made life
miserable for the Damascus government – an
assessment, needless to say, that proved woefully
incorrect when ISIS hitmen shot up the Bataclan
theater and other Paris targets last November,
killing 130 people in all.
Thereafter,
U.S. policy wobbled ever more unsteadily. Washington
still tilted toward Islamic State when it came to
combatting Syrian government forces, which is why it
refrained from bombing ISIS fighters as they
converged on Palmyra in May 2015 even though they
would have been perfect targets as they traversed
miles of open desert.
But it
otherwise tilted toward Al Nusra Front, as Al Qaeda
is locally known, which it now regarded as
less dangerous, or toward groups with which Al Nusra
is closely aligned.
“Moderate
these days is increasingly becoming anyone who’s not
affiliated with ISIL,” Director of National
Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr.
explained in March 2015 – and indeed the White
House made no objection a month later when so-called
moderates joined with Al Nusra to launch a major
offensive in Syria’s northern Idlib province. [See
Consortiumnews.com’s “Climbing
into Bed with Al-Qaeda.”]
Covering for Salafists
Similarly,
the U.S. resisted classifying a Salafist army known
as Ahrar al-Sham as terrorist even though it
collaborates closely with Al Nusra and its ideology
is virtually identical, as Stephen Gowans recently
noted at the Global Research website.
The same
goes for a Free Syrian Army unit known as the 13th
Division, which the US has long backed even though
it maintains “a tacit collaboration with Nusra”
according to The Wall Street Journal
“and even shared with the group some of its
ammunition supplies.”
Mohammad
Alloush, who enjoys strong US backing as the chief
rebel negotiator at the Geneva peace talks, is a
leader of yet another Salafist group called Jaysh
al-Islam, which issued
a blood-curdling call to exterminate Syria’s
Alawite community in July 2013. Jaysh al-Islam, it
informed the Alawites, “will make you taste the
worst torture in life before Allah makes you taste
the worst torture on judgment day.” But while one
might think this would place Jaysh al-Islam beyond
the pale, former Ambassador to Syria Robert S. Ford
praised it a year later as one of the “moderate”
rebel forces that were making life “particularly
painful” for the Damascus government.
Genocide is
permissible, apparently, as long as it’s not too
extreme. More recently, Secretary of State John
Kerry assailed Assad for bombing rebel positions in
Aleppo even though it is clear that so-called
“moderates” have intermingled with Al Nusra fighters
to the degree that it is impossible to attack one
without affecting the other. After Colonel Steve
Warren, spokesman for US military forces in Iraq,
conceded in a press briefing that “it’s
primarily al-Nusra who holds Aleppo,” Kerry
reportedly pushed to include it among the
non-terrorist groups exempt from Syrian government
attack under the terms of an Aleppo ceasefire
agreement that went into effect on May 5.
“This was
absolutely unacceptable,” Russian Foreign Minister
Sergey V. Lavrov
said, “and at the end we managed to strike it
down.”
While the
U.S. was happy to see ISIS attack Syrian government
forces in Palmyra, it was none too pleased to see
Syrian forces attack Al Qaeda in Aleppo, which
pretty much tells us where its sympathies lie.
If ISIS, Al
Nusra, and Al Qaeda-clones like Ahrar al-Sham and
Jaysh al-Islam continue to grow, it is not hard to
figure out why. The more the Sunni political
spectrum shifts in a Salafist direction as sectarian
warfare deepens and spreads, the more the advantage
goes to a hard core composed of ISIS and Al Qaeda.
They are
the best fighters, the most dedicated, the best
financed thanks to years of support by wealthy gulf
contributors, and the best armed thanks to weapons
that other groups have relinquished voluntarily or
not. Despite friction, the Saudis and Qataris cannot
say no to such forces because they see them as
increasingly important in a fight against a “Shi‘ite
crescent” stretching from the Houthis in Yemen to
the Alawites in Syria.
They are
allies whose help they cannot afford to forego,
which is why the various Sunni forces are coming
together at this point rather than pulling
apart. Hence the intermingling of “moderates” and Al
Qaeda that we see from Taiz to Aleppo.
As for the
U.S., it is locked in a dysfunctional marriage with
the Saudis from which it is unable to escape. As
a result, it winds up in bed with the same forces as
well. Like a character in a Somerset Maugham novel,
it finds itself returning again and again to the
same sordid love affair no matter how hard it tries
to resist.
Daniel Lazare is the author of several books
including The Frozen
Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing
Democracy (Harcourt
Brace). |