Armies of Liberation

from GULF STATES NEWSLETTER • VOL 29 • NO 771 • 9 DECEMBER 2005
(page 8 )

As Ali Abdullah Saleh faces security threats from Salafyist
Sunnis, the Zaydi rebellion and a range of criminalised
sub-state factions, the apparently outgoing president has
begun the slow-process of reorganising Yemen’s main internal
security organisations (GSN 770/8).

There have been years of criticism and whispers about the
security establishment’s lack of financial probity, but this is not
the cause of security sector reform: the reorganisation is
primarily driven by a recognition that many elements of the
system are seeded with militant Salafyist or Baathist elements,
and they are now working against the security policy of
Yemen and its major ally, the United States.

Considering Yemen’s recent history, the presence of
embedded Baathists and Salafyists should not come as a
surprise. Yemen remained a strong backer of Saddam Hussein
– a personal mentor to Saleh – throughout the 1990-91 Gulf
crisis and for some time thereafter. Senior Saddam-era Iraqi
advisors are seeded throughout the military. Advisors to a
number of Yemeni army battalion and company commanders
previously served in the Iraqi army; indeed have seen heavy
service since the beginning of the twin Al-Houthi rebellions
in 2004-05 (GSN 760/7, 741/6). Their presence was shown
when three Iraqi personnel were injured in a Zaydi grenade
attack against the Yemeni Air Force’s Air Defence Academy in
Sanaa on 7 May.

Within the Yemeni military, sympathy for the insurgency in
Iraq is high. The country has also been fertile ground for the
Wahhabi indoctrination that flowed in during the anti-Soviet
jihad in Afghanistan and during the early1990s, when figures
such as Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri invested
resources and time to embed militant Salafyist thinking
throughout Yemen. Saleh actively welcomed returning Afghan
Arabs and used them as a paramilitary militia at the violent
edge of politics during the unification period (1990-94) and
subsequently as military forces in the 1994 civil war.

There are indications that some irregular units of former
jihadists have been used against Zaydi militants in the Sadah
area, indicating a return to Yemen’s predilection for the use of
Salafyist proxies. Salafyist tribesmen appear to be being used
against the Zaydi by North West Region commander and
presidential half-brother Ali Mohsin Al-Ahmar – a powerful
figure, married into an influential southern family, who is seen
by some Yemenis as a potential future president.

This would not go down well in Washington, where
unconfirmed rumours abound that Al-Ahmar worked with
Saudi Salafyists, including Bin Laden, in the effort to recruit
Yemenis to fight in Afghanistan. After his May 2005 defection
to the United Kingdom, former Yemeni ambassador to Syria
Ahmed Abdullah Al-Hasani alleged that Al-Ahmar was
complicit in the December 1998 kidnapping of 16 Western
tourists; two days before the botched rescue resulted in the
deaths of four tourists, Al-Hasani alleged that members of the
terrorist group were in Al-Ahmar’s house in Sanaa.
Such allegations cannot be verified – and might simply
reflect the tangled web of tribal contacts that any Yemeni
securocrat needs to maintain – but with the USA looking hard
at the government’s connections to terrorism, controversial
figures like Al-Ahmar are increasingly finding that mud sticks
in Washington.

PSO’s ambiguous role

Perhaps most significantly, considerable elements of Yemen’s
oldest internal security arm, the Political Security Organisation,
are seeded with Salafyists, recruited when Saleh was using
them as deniable political paramilitaries in the early 1990s.
Headed by General Ghaleb Al-Qimch, the PSO is
independent of the Ministry of Interior and its leaders are all
military officers. The PSO is theoretically an intelligence-gathering
arm reporting directly to the president, but, it has
long carried out direct actions, including the harassment of
journalists and political opponents.

The rumour mill continued to turn with lively conjecture
about an alleged PSO role in the December 2002 assassination
of Yemeni Socialist Party assistant general secretary Jarallah
Omar. Defence lawyers for alleged assassin Ali Al-Saawani
have suggested that a state ‘organisation’ manipulated Al-Saawani
into killing Omar, the architect of the Islah/YSP
alliance that now looks so threatening to the Saleh’s ruling
General People’s Congress faction (GSN 769/4).
With Washington breathing down Saleh’s neck about
political reform, such activities are no longer a mainstay of
government practice, but critics say the PSO is slow to change
its violent ways and has increasingly become a liability to the
president. These critics say the PSO is responsible for much of
the “revolving door” strategy that has seen militants escape or
be released to engage in recidivist militancy.

Should Saleh really shuffle off the political stage in 2006 as he
has threatened, the PSO would constitute a power base within
the GPC that could threaten the accession of a designated Saleh
ally – such as presidential son Ahmed Ali Saleh – as surely as
Syria’s old guard have weakened President Bashar Al-Assad’s
rule.