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08/23/2010 Blood feuds and hospitality: al-Qaida in Yemen

In the second of his special reports from Yemen, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad finds a population for whom the constant danger of tribal feuds is exacerbated by the presence of al-Qaida

Read Part 1 of a special report

The sky was dark on the road from Aden to Shabwa, even though it was the middle of the day. "There will be rain," said the driver of our dilapidated 1980s Land Cruiser, and soon afterwards heavy drops hammered the car, as water ran down the jagged black mountains, leaving them glittering like marble.

The Yemeni province of Shabwa is host to the most significant al-Qaida presence in the country. As well as jihadi training camps, many of the leaders of this new "franchise" of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) are believed to be based here. Foremost among these men is Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni-American cleric the Obama administration designated in April as a legitimate target for assassination, and who was once described as the US's "terrorist number one".

The Guardian spent a week travelling around this lawless region, talking to tribespeople about the al-Qaida presence and trying to understand why the organisation had become so established here.

Land Cruiser was filled with men, the Bedouin tribe Awalik. Together, we jumped into the potholed mountain roads, which are controlled by various bandits, separatists, jihadis and government security forces. Most of the time he 's gang.

We found our first bandits just across the border into the province, on a bend in the road between two mountains. Seven young men were sitting in the shade of a tree clutching guns, some covering their faces with kufeyas. Less than 50 metres away across a small bridge and under another tree sat a group of soldiers, slouching in the shade.

The bandits and soldiers would not attack each other, said one of my companions in the car. Why? "They and the soldiers are from the same tribe," he said. We met a second group of bandits a few hours later, further along the road. They were more active. It was night by then and they had blocked the road with boulders and rocks. A lone gunmen stood in our path while a dozen men sat to the side. The gunman thrust his head in the car window and looked around: "Anyone of you work for the government?"

We met with mumbled "no", he gave us the drive on our way.

Arriving in the small Bedouin settlement of Hateeb after dark, the men carried their bed mats away from their concrete houses and laid them on the rocks under the sky and chattered for hours before they fell asleep.

The situation between the tribes and the al-Qaeda is tense.

The tribes can't deny them shelter and hospitality: in the Bedouin code of honour there are few crimes graver than insulting or betraying a guest or refusing him hospitality.

At the same time, they have became weary of their presence and the unwanted attention they have brought. Every night I was in Shabwa, drones flew slowly around the skies, keeping watch on the rocky landscape. The pictures sent back must be familiar to other drone-infested war zones.

A few nights later, as I sat chatting with Ali, the young nephew of the tribal sheikh, and other men at night under the gaze of distant drones, we heard the distant sound of a car. A warning bullet rang from a distant scout and all the men picked up their guns.

"Qaida!" came the shouts from one house to the other.

The men ran into the middle of the village, waiting to intercept the jihadis' cars, but just as the headlights came into view someone shouted that the convoy were of tribesmen from the next village taking a relative to hospital.

"Al-Qaida is in that mountain," said Ali, pointing at a distant peak.

At first, he said, they had been much closer to the settlement, but after an airstrike in which five militants were killed, the tribesmen asked them to move away. "We asked them to leave after the bombing."

Tribal feuding

Ferocious blood feuds have been raging for years in Shabwa. Almost every tribesman in the region finds himself entangled in the cycle of revenge.

The barren desert and mountain are divided into patches of small tribal war zones. As we travelled in Shabwa we often had to leave the main track and drive deep into the desert to avoid passing through the land of a tribe with which someone in our car had a blood feud.

"We would like to go to school," says Ibrahim, a hazel-eyed 16-year-old tribesman who was sitting in the back of the car with a wrapped head shawl. "But we had to stop, because someone might track us there and kill us."

I asked him if he had seen much fighting. "Yes," he answered. "Many times."

Tribes exist in persistent poverty in this harsh landscape. When - if - the water goes, he moves quickly down the thin rocky valleys, resulting in the desert as thirsty as before. Except for a few plots of cultivated land, the rest is desert.

Being so poor, the people have little to fight over except their honour.

The only way for an insult to be avenged was by killing the enemy, calling his name so he would turn â€" it's a shame to kill a man in his back â€" and shoot him while looking into his eyes. The culture of hospitality is taken so seriously that one tribal feud that has been going for two years was over a guest who was insulted.

Ali tells how the inter-tribal battles sometimes included heavier armaments. "Last year we besieged a neighbouring tribe. We took anti-aircraft guns and mortars. We shelled them for three days and we besieged them for weeks, until they had nothing to eat but biscuits."

Against this backdrop of armed, perpetually fighting tribes, where it sometimes seems every other man is wanted by the authorities for a murder or two, al-Qaida can easily blend in. Their gunmen are little different from any other gunman wanted by authority and seeking shelter among his tribe.

\\ "There are a few believers [of jihad], who live in the mountains," old man in Hateem said to me: ", but we haven 't see anything wrong here. We do not care' if they t killed anyone in America, and here in Shabwa they haven 'crimes, and they must be respected, just like any other man. "

Wrap enemies

The village of the sultan of the Awalik sits on a hill surrounded by lush green fields and palm groves, in the middle of the hostile desert.

Said is an architectural treasure of high towers and sloping dirt and shaded strip of dirt. Some of the fortified compounds pockmarked with bullets from tribal feuds and many rebellions that raged in the area for decades.

Next to the ruins of one mud castle destroyed by the RAF back in the 1950s is the new concrete and marble compound of the sultans of the Awalik.

Inside the compound I met the sultan, Fareed bin Babaker. He is tall, old and frail, with a hooked nose and a thin white goatee, but carries the weight of tribal authority in his soft yet imposing voice.

His pronouncements are adhered to by almost two million Awalik in southern Yemen. He is a close ally of the government, yet at the same time his tribes are giving shelter to the enemies of the government and the west. The most notorious jihadi he is currently protecting is Anwar al-Awlaki.

Awlaki, a once-obscure 30-something cleric has been linked to Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, in November 2009, and to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian charged with trying to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day. He is now among the US's most-wanted targets.

Sultan Fareed almost an hour after the enlargement of the history of South Yemen, told me that Awlaki lived in the village and that he knew his movements.

"Anwar, and with him four or five people, spend the night in their homes [in the village] and in the morning they do their morning prayers somewhere not far away," said Fareed. "We know about it."

Why, I asked, was such a wanted man allowed to live in the village. He replied that he had committed no crimes in the tribal community, nor had the government asked him to hand Awlaki over.

t kill anyone "al-Qaeda harbor 'here, so we [don' t have to] accept or reject transfer them to the authorities," he said. T Government have not asked us to convey to him, if they are then we will think about it. But no one asked us. "

Connections Awlaki family is just a few meters away from Sheikh 's. I approached him to see if I could get some idea or talk to him, but all the windows and doors were locked.

A boy opened a small window in the upper floors, looked down at me, then disappeared back inside the building and the window was shut.

Casualties

Sometimes, the ever-watchful drones do more than merely observe the people in Shabwa. After leaving the sultan's village we travel to the Majala valley in the Awalik mountains. Here, a series of small graves marked by stones lie by the side of the highway.

An old man sat nearby in his relatives' tent sipping sweet tea. He and his five-year-old daughter were the only survivors of a double missile strike that is said to have killed dozens of people, including his wife and sons, and their wives and his grandchildren.

He was one of Bedouin settlements in the collection of his camels to 17 last year, when he heard a huge explosion. "I though fuel truck exploded, but the mountains around me shook so hard," he said.

It took him a few hours to reach the camp where his relatives had settled. By that time other villagers were already there. Abdul Mutalib, a thin-faced young man who was one of the first to reach the area, said he saw people, cars and animals on fire. "A woman was burning in her tent. I tried to get her out but I couldn't."

We drove to the first bombsite. Shreds of soiled clothes and scraps of yellow plastic buckets used by the Bedouin to collect water or milk dangled from the twisted branches of a dead tree.

Bleached bones of animals were scattered. Twisted metal rocket engine was lying on the edge of the crater 2m.

A few metres away lay the long grey shell of the rocket that had carried the deadly cluster bomb canisters.

According to the villagers, a Yemeni parliamentary report and Amnesty International, a dozen men, women and children of the Haydara family were killed here in one of two Bedouin encampments targeted on 17 December, 2009.

There were more shreds of plastic and few black clothes scattered around two more craters, and then a long trail of animal bones.

We walked for 20 minutes over boulders and thorny shrubs to reach the other campsite that was hit on the same day. Here, the remains of austere Bedouin life dangled from another tree: plastic and bits of clothes, blue tarpaulins that are used to make shelters. Among the wreckage were dozens of melted black plastic shoes of varying sizes, men's, women's and children's.

This is where the Ba Kazim family were killed, the villagers said. According to the Yemeni parliamentary commission, in total 41 civilians were killed in the two strikes, and 14 al-Qaida fighters.

Some among the rubble of destroyed lives of the colorful yellow objects, engineering forms contrasts sharply with the shapes of objects more than rag-tag Bedouin.

They carry the bald stencilled words "BOMB FRAG", "US NAVY" and a serial number. These were cluster bombs, scattered like candy.

I asked one of those who showed me the site, Muqbel al-Kazimi, about reports that al-Qaeda was in the camp.

Muhammad al-Kazimi, who is wanted by the government over al-Qaeda ties, was here a few people, "he said. He is believed to have been killed." There were at least 10 people, and they lived in two tents on the edge of the camp Ba Kazim . "

Why Bedouin shared their camp with al-Qaeda, I asked?

\\ "The fighters said they would dig the Bedouin and to attract water," he said.

In this poor, arid region, that must have seemed like a good price.

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