Armies of Liberation

It was big news in 2006 when al Wasat published the list of scholarship recipients and they were the sons and daughters of the most powerful people in Yemen. Now its just old news.

Mareb Press: استعرض وزير التعليم العالي والبحث العلمي الدكتور صالح علي باصره اليوم في مدينة مرسيليا الفرنسية التطورات التي شهدها التعليم العالي في اليمن في مختلف المجالات. The Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research Dr. Saleh Ali Bazareth today in the French city of Marseille developments in higher education in Yemen in various fields. (Read on …)

Dammaj??? Why would the Houthis want to hold a rally in Dammaj? A ceremony for the families of the war dead. (I guess Dammaj wasn’t bombed during the war, and the Yemeni and Saudi air forces only made terrible bombing “mistakes” on pro-rebel villages.) The article aptly describes Dammaj as a pro-government stronghold. It also among the main Salafi strongholds in Yemen and includes the world renounced Dammaj Islamic Institute, headquarters of the Dar al Hadieth chain of schools. Dammaj has faced allegations for years of recruiting some or maybe a few of its students for al Qaeda.

Seven were killed in the clash between the rebels and the “pro-government tribal fighters.” Much of Yemen’s pro-government tribal fighters were trained or include known al Qaeda figures. For example, Ammar al Waeli is there now, although the government says he is dead. In the fifth war, 2005, it was Khalid Abdul Nabi who, oddly enough, the government reported as dead in 2004. This is really an odd development.

Update: It was in the context of a week long series of rallies to highlight the thousands of orphans and widows who need support.

WaPo: SANAA (Reuters) – A gunfight between Yemeni Shi’ite rebels and pro-government fighters killed seven people in the deadliest clash since a February truce calmed a northern war, officials said Thursday.

The clash broke out after dozens of armed rebels descended on a village — said to be a pro-government stronghold — for a rally in support of families of rebels killed in the war that raged on and off since 2004, a local official said.

The tribal fighters, who fought alongside the state in the war, tried to stop the rebel rally, and a melee erupted.

“The Houthis wanted to hold a rally in Damaj but the locals prevented them. They engaged in a quarrel, which escalated to an armed clash in which three tribesmen and four Houthis were killed,” a local official said, referring to the rebels by the clan name of their leader, Abdel Malek al-Houthi. A rebel official confirmed a clash had occurred.

ISRIA: Studies affirmed that the main reason of the low education in Yemen is the less qualified teachers. ‘Statistics showed that 43.9% of the high school headmasters have only high school certificates or lower than that. As well as 10045 high schools are managed by non educated headmasters and this means 31.13 %,’ he added.

What is that, about 400K US? And the story is the Health and Education Ministries withdrew the 400K for salaries from a bank in Zanzibar, Abyan and were driving back when they were highjacked and robbed, and no one could call the nearby military camp because the phone lines were cut by the state earlier in the month. There was an earlier bank robbery in Aden.

Yemen Observer Unknown gunmen seized a car carrying the salaries of the Education and Health Ministries in Loder District in Abyan on Wednesday in the biggest armed robbery operation. (Read on …)

could be anything… Later reports say they are French. Random Dhamar factoids:Yahay Al-Amri, the former Governor of Sa’ada, described as a “pro-Salafi active advocate” is Governor of Dhamar (a predominantly Zeidi stronghold and learning center). Complaints have been reported by residents there of forced takeovers of Zeidi Mosques by Salafi preachers (as occurred in Sa’ada). Also the second largest Dar al-Hadith Institute is in Maber, Dhamar headed by Sheik Mohammed al-Imam al-Reimi, a former student of Sheik al-Wadi. Armed guards protect the institute which has a capacity of 1500-2000 students.

26 September Net: Police in Yemen’s central Dhamar province have arrested two Europeans while training in marksmanship. Two rifles were seized with the foreigners who were arrested at Naqil al-Mashana in Jahran district, the Interior Ministry reported on Sunday. They were both 24 years old and one with an Arab name. An investigation is underway. saba

Other reports have Mobley as a low level, if that, terrorist wanna-be who never actually hooked up with AQAP. This is an interesting angle though considering the Nasir al Wahishi, Emir of AQAP, spoke about a nuclear attack on the US in a January 2009 interview. Update: AOL News: He also said Mobley studied at Dar al-Hadith Dammaj institute in Saada, a well-known Salafist school in Yemen’s northern province, which was decried as a “known terrorist training center” during tribunals for Guantanamo Bay detainees. Reports say that between 3,000 and 5,000 foreign students live and study there,” said Abdul-Salam al-Korary, a local journalist who has covered Yemen for several decades. “It is a very radical school.”

AJC: From 2002 to 2008, Mobley worked for several contractors at three nuclear power plants in New Jersey, PSEG Nuclear spokesman Joe Delmar said. Mobley carried supplies and did maintenance work at the plants on Artificial Island in Lower Alloways Creek, and worked at other plants in the region as well.

He satisfied federal background checks as recently as 2008, Delmar said, adding that the plant is cooperating with authorities. Mobley moved to Yemen about two years ago, supposedly to learn Arabic and study Islam, a former neighbor said.

There’s also a number of Somali (as opposed to Somalialand) students in Al Iman University in Sana’a:

Somalialand Press

The total number of Somaliland students currently in Yemen are quite large, and they are spread in the different regions of the country. Although the student’s union registered a total of 200 students, who filled the Unions admission requirements; however there are a large number of them studying in Islamic Institutions such as Ma’bar and Dammaj (centers for Islamic teachings). Many also come from abroad and stay here at least during the summer, while others come from Europe and America who want to further their Islamic teachings from such Islamic institutions.

Not only are they fighting on behalf of the regime against the Houthis but they gained entry through facilitiation by officials. Many are at Dammaj. Apparently this group was in Yemen for some time. Aden Gulf Network

Informed sources revealed that a number of Algerians took part in some battles based on Yemeni territory between the conflicting parties to the conflict there.

أضافت ذات المصادر، أن عددهم يزيد على عشرين عنصرا أغلبهم من ذوي الاتجاه السلفي، تنقلوا إلى اليمن بطرق رسمية عبر المطارات وبجوازات سفر سليمة، منهم من تنقل إلى المملكة العربية السعودية وأقاموا هناك بطريقة غير شرعية أين انقضت الفترة المحددة لتأشيراتهم، وبعدها تحوّلوا إلى الأراضي اليمنية، والبعض الآخر منهم سافر إلى سوريا وليبيا ليتنقلوا بعدها إلى اليمن. Same sources added that they are over twenty components, mainly with the Salafi trend, moved to Yemen through airports and official passports of sound, many of whom moved to Saudi Arabia and settled there illegally Where the specified period has elapsed for their visas, and then turned to the land of Yemen , and some of them traveled to Syria and Libya to move around then to Yemen. (Read on …)

School authorities deny charges of terror training leveled in the German press. Yemen Times

SANA’A, JAN. 20 ­— A Yemeni Salafi sheikh has refuted allegations made by the German press that the Dar Al-Hadeeth Center for Islamic Studies in Sa’ada is encouraging terrorism. (Read on …)

WASHINGTON: Twenty other young Muslim radicals have been trained to blow up planes by al-Qaida in Yemen, a young Nigerian charged with trying to blow up a US airliner has told FBI.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, has told FBI that close to 20 other young Muslim men were being prepared in Yemen to use the same technique to blow up airliners, CBS said in an exclusive investigative report.

US surprised by AQAP’s links to Pakistan? Say it aint so…

Newsweek: U.S. officials have been surprised by what they’ve discovered about the resurgence of Al Qaeda in Yemen in the aftermath of the Christmas Day bombing attempt by a Nigerian student who says he was trained and equipped there. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), as this offshoot is called, is linked directly to the “core” group in Pakistan and it is now “one of the most lethal” affiliates, White House counterterrorism coordinator John Brennan said at a news conference.

Times Online:

Yemeni security sources believe that of the 15-20 Britons recently recruited by Al-Qaeda, most have undergone training in camps in Rafad, a mountainous region in the southeast. It lies in the province where Abdulmutallab is thought to have met Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical cleric who is viewed as a big influence in luring foreign recruits to Al-Qaeda.

One institution popular with British Muslims is Dar alHadith in Dammaj, northern Yemen. US defence officials have described the institute as a “known terrorist training centre”. This has always been denied by the institute.

Students can access weapons there, and teachings have traditionally been anti-western. Students are told that democracy is an enemy of Islam and locals are reported to refer to America as “the great Satan”.

Abu Muaz, head of the Salafi Youth Movement in the UK, said about 50 Britons had gone to study at Dar al-Hadith. “Most want to learn about Islam, but there are some jihadi supporters who decide to take up arms,” he said.

This is it in a nut shell, a snapshot of the entrenched difficulties of building a better dictatorship in Yemen, which seems to be the plan.

Yemen Times This protest came after the administration of Sana’a University suspended a group of professors after they formed an organization called “Academics Against Corruption”.
This organization was intended to reveal financial and administrative corruption at the university caused by the rectorship of the university.
The violations against professors by the rectorship included suspension from teaching, elimination, threatening, and interrogation by the university.
Protestors from teachers’ syndicate, doctors’ syndicate, members of the parliament, human rights activists, and college students raised billboards that said, “Stop violations against professors”.
“ The academics now have joined us in the freedom square against corruption and injustice,” said Sultan Al-Atwani, a member of the parliament.“ The government had considered the academics as supporters of its mistreatment, but the professors have proved this to be an incorrect assumption,” he added. (Read on …)

From what I can gather, there’s armed combat between Dammaj students and the Houthi rebels. There’s a great influx of students to Dammaj. Some Saudi scholars traveled to the southern border and are “educating” the soldiers, which could mean a number of things.

It became 1431 on December 18. “Raafidah” is an objectionable term that I can reproducing here only to keep the text original, since I’m not hotlinking it.

Timeline of Events in Dammaaj

The following is a brief summary of recent events that have taken place in Dammaaj, one of the few strongholds of the Sunnah and its people. It is taken from a post on sahab mostly by Abu ‘Abdullaah Husayn al Kahlanee. (Read on …)

In a joint statement today “The Educators syndicate” and “The Education Profession syndicate” in the governorate of Taiz condemned the illegal deductions the government imposed on their salaries, which was deducted to the benefit of fake syndicate called ” The education & discipline profession syndicate”. (Read on …)

On the average half of kids even have access to a school in walking distance, and for girls that access is even more limited by the shortage of female teachers. (Related issues include corruption in schools, the withholding of teachers pay, punative teacher transfers, and the failure to fully implement the 2005 Wages Strategy, all of which will become more severe as the oil money runs out.) The original press release and contact info from Seyaj is below the fold and I’ll add the raw data:

HODEIDAH, 19 November 2009 (IRIN) – Nearly half of children in rural areas of the western Yemeni governorate of Hodeidah, have no access to basic education, according to a new report by the Seyaj Organization for Childhood Protection (SOCP) and the Yemen News Agency.

A survey was conducted on a random sample of 3,249 boys and girls from 1,542 families in the districts of Lihyah, Zahrah and Beit al-Faqih, said Fahd al-Sabri, lead author of the report.

The survey results, announced on 18 November, indicate that 45 percent of boys and 52 percent of girls in the 6-15 age group have no access to basic education – for several reasons, including vulnerability of their families, lack of schools and teachers, or schools being far away from their homes, al-Sabri told IRIN. (Read on …)

The term “Raafidah” means a rejectionist of the true Islam and is quite derogatory. The head of Dammaj while endorsing the government’s war efforts seems to be saying that they won’t fight the Houthis unless attacked, despite efforts to pit the two groups against each other. Via Madeenah

An Naasih al Ameen, Shaykh Yahyaa al Hajooree, may Allaah preserve him and the centre in Damaaj speaks about the events in Dammaaj and the Raafidah – 29th of Ramadaan 1430. (Read on …)

Another story thats nearly beyond belief. After most of the other public corporations were “privatized”, the Aden refinery remains an attractive target. Yemen Post:

The Aden Refinery is facing another challenge as economists warn about the bids to privatize it, after the refinery, one of Yemen’s most crucial economic facilities, survived a sale bid that came within a drive targeting most institutions in the south.

Under the resisted privatization attempts backed by influential figures, the refinery would have been handed over to the National Petroleum and Gas Company. (Read on …)

The Yemen Post among other media reports that the Houthi rebels are fighting Salafi groups in Dammaj, headquarters of the Dar al Hadeith network of schools, the Ivy League of hardcore Salafi institutes. The YP reports 16 dead.

In late April 2007, a firefight occured between rebels and the students of the Dammaj school which left one French student dead. The school at that time insisted that they were well protected by the government and not fighting the rebels.

Remarking on the current incident, Abdelmalik al Houthi insists the reporting is untrue propaganda intended to stoke sectarian tensions and frame the war in religious terms, which apparently as he sees it, it is not.

Yemen, Sa’da, 26/8/2009

There is no truth of what has appeared in some media reports of clashes in Sa’ada city between us and Salafis, and this is not true, but is an attempt which are in the attempts from some quarters to make it as a doctrinal conflict.

Press Office of Al-Sayed. / Abdul-Malik Badr al-Din

The Yemeni government insists that the goal of the rebels is to re-institute the Imamate, but the rebels’ terms of cease-fire are centered on military disengagement, some political empowerment within the central government, areas of autonomy and religious freedom.

Also included is the never ending refrain for prisoner releases- which the government promised in every mediated agreement since 2005. The families of the Sa’ada detainees have been sitting-in for about a year now, and I have a copy of Saleh’s directive ordering their release. Maybe the hundreds of prisoners died in jail and no one has the courage to admit it. Maybe they were tortured and their release would provoke an uproar. Maybe Saleh doesn’t have the authority to effect their release. But the continuity of this issue for years points to a greater disfunction or at least the failure to negotiate in good faith.

As we know the government appointed fact-finding committee found that the government failed to implement its part of the 2006 bargain, leading to the resumption of hostilities in 2007. And the committee members were promptly jailed.

A large part of the residual nature of the conflict harkens back to the Yemeni military’s lack of qualified and unified command and control, not just the soldiers harrassing the women in the markets, but also the inclusion of tribal militias. The Yemeni military/security is a series of conflicting fiefdoms which accounts in part for the failure at border control and in combating smuggling, for the shooting of the southern protesters and the deals with al Qaeda.

Marib Press also reported on the fighting: (Read on …)

Yemen’s judiciary is a tool of political vengence.

This is the same brutal dictatorship that is now promising to solve all problems by empowering the GPC dominated local councils, but has not yet changed the electoral laws as promised in 2006.

Sahwa Net – The Supreme Council of the Joint Meeting Parties has called human rights and freedom organizations to stand against an unfair sentence of death against three of Islah’s representatives in poll centers during the presidential and local council elections held in 2006.

Khalid Nahshal, Mabkhoot Nahshal and Abdu Nahshal were sentenced to death last week on charges of killing an officer and a soldier in crossfire during the presidential and local council elections led held in 2006.

In a statement, JMP said that the sentence was a settlement of political accounts and political pressures were practiced on justice and there were several violations to judiciary.

“The sentence was issued inside the jail, not in a court and that apparent evidence of legal violations” said the statement.

The murderer was bullied by FBI while in Yemeni jail so he became a fanatic? Oh come on… The first story of being radicalized in Yemeni prison was more believable. ( Update at NPR, a little more realistic. )

Fox: “He said my concern was the FBI agent coming in over there (Yemen) and I thought would be there to help me,” Hensley says. “He was there to torment me a little bit more, to explain that I was in trouble, I was going to be looked after, that I was going to be watched over. And if I ever got out of here I’d have to be concerned with him. That’s what he said.”

That same Ohio mosque. There’s a good blog devoted to jihaddism in Ohio, I’ll try to find it again. ABC

Nuradin Abdi was convicted in 2007 of planning to blow up an Ohio shopping mall. Iyman Faris was convicted in 2003 of planning to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge. Christopher Paul was convicted in 2008 of conspiring to use explosives against targets in the U.S. and Europe.

The mosque, according to well informed sources, is a small house of worship that has regularly been frequented by foreigners with radical sympathies who, after their stops in Ohio, continued onward. The Imam of the mosque was not immediately available for comment. (Read on …)

Yemen Post: Two Yemeni pilots died when a training airplane crashed in northwestern of the Sudanese city of Bur Sudan, Sudan’s Civil Aviation Authority reported. (Read on …)