In the heights of the "Al-Bayda" mountains (a governorate in Yemen whose capital, the city of Al-Bayda, is 268 km away from the capital, Sana'a), and after valleys stretching comfortably on the winding rug of geography, are the houses of the Al-Dahab family. As for this house perched on the small village of Yakla, it seems that it was built recently and hastily, compared to the house known to them. The village of Yakla is inhabited by a group of farmers and khat sellers, and the area is traditionally famous for the cultivation of khat, the ferocity of its fighters, and the wisely composed folk poetry that often recovers from the self- or social clipping of the texts.
During the past years, Al-Bayda became famous as a target for US drone strikes. In January 2017, it was the site of the famous American landing, whose consequences and consequences were discussed in a recently released documentary. US President Donald Trump signed this reckless landing days after he came to power, which claimed the lives of a number of members of the al-Dahab family, many other civilians, and some fighters.
Before that, Al-Bayda was the scene of a series of bloodiest American drone strikes: what is called "signed strikes". And the signed strikes are a famous American policy that allows the implementation of air strikes in certain places in Yemen (and Afghanistan and Somalia), based on suspicious behavior observed and not on intelligence information. More than once, this "suspicious behavior" coincided with weddings in Al-Bayda, as was the famous incident in December of 2013.
The recklessness and killing of children in Al-Bayda is not limited to the current US president, but rather a policy implemented by former President Obama, who turned Yemen into an experimental laboratory for the performance of drones. Obama's intervention included catastrophic mistakes, followed by Trump's interventions with full-fledged sins.
The Al-Dahab family as an intensification of Yemen's dynamics and its overlaps
One gets a strange feeling while standing in front of this house, whose walls bear traces of the exchange of fire on the night of the landing, between American forces and between its residents and a group of neighbors and tribal guests who were there to solve a case Tribal, and they suddenly found themselves engaged in a battle with American special forces, reinforced by Emirati forces.
The al-Dahab family has been displaced to Yakla since the battles with the Houthis intensified in its original area (Al-Manaseh) near the city of Rada’, the second largest city in the governorate, in 2015. The al-Dahab family is one of three ancient families that took over the leadership of the “Qifah” tribe, by whose name the area is known. The side of the Jaroun family and the tribal family.
The father of gold was one of the most prominent sheikhs of Yemen and the most important tribal poets, and the owner of Majd Dareb in the history of its tribes, and the Al-Bayda tribes in particular, which border 8 other Yemeni governorates, which made them geographically very important militarily and security.
The story of Gold and his brothers is similar to the stories of Indian Bollywood dramas. After the death of his father, a dispute arose between the sons and their uncle, and later between the sons themselves, so one of them (Hizam) killed his other brother (Tariq). Currently, one of their cousins is fighting with the Houthis, which contradicts the position of most of the family against the Houthis, the situation of most of the families and tribes that were fragmented in this war. The drones had previously killed his other brother (Nabil). The al-Dahab family, in particular, fought many different disputes and conflicts between its members, and between them and other people outside the family.
Al-Dahab has 18 male children from different marriages, 14 of whom were killed, whether in tribal feuds, in their inter-conflicts, or in drone strikes. Perhaps the greatest irony is that the Al-Dahab family are not Sunnis, but rather they are in fact "Zayids" (Zaydism is an Islamic sect that is attributed to Zayd bin Ali bin Al-Hussein bin Ali bin Abi Talib, and it is spread especially in northern Yemen - Saada governorate - and its followers make up nearly a third of the population of this country) in contrast to their social milieu. The most surprising thing is that one of Al-Dhahab's sons was a member of the Yemeni Parliament, representing the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party (Iraq branch).
Before Tariq al-Dahab became religious, according to many of his acquaintances and local residents, he was far from being a religious person. But his sudden militancy was hiding other details: the gold family is an ideal family for polarization, whether from the authority or armed groups, as a result of their influence in the region. The Qifah region is ideal for those who want to rebel against authority with minimal risks. Tariq took refuge in the "Al-Qaeda" organization, as is the case with some tribesmen, in a reverse course than usual, as it was the reality / expectation that "Al-Qaeda" would strengthen the tribes, and not the other way around.
The complexities of the Yemeni environment and the lightness of the American administration
Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula found a golden opportunity to try to dive into the rugged and wide areas of Al-Bayda, and hide in its mountains. It also gained a rare understanding of the nature of the region, its people, its customs and traditions. Al-Bayda includes Yemeni tribes with a clear Sunni identity, and it is an area that still retains weapons and tribal solidarity, and is still able to protect its sons against others, even if that requires confronting the authority itself.
In addition, it is one of the poorest regions of Yemen, although it has one of the highest rates of expatriation among the Yemeni governorates, and the highest rates of money transfers from abroad - at least until before this war.
Like many of Yemen's tribal areas, it does not work to use force to force the Qifah to do or not do a certain thing. Therefore, the current anti-terrorism policy, drone attacks, and US special forces will not, in fact, weaken al-Qaeda in al-Bayda, but will strengthen it, especially with the continuation of the bloody civil war in the country, which exacerbates sectarian polarization, and is an ideal environment in which al-Qaeda feeds.
However strange it may seem, the series of research that I have conducted in Al-Bayda, Marib, and various places in Yemen since 2012 regarding the effectiveness and price of counter-terrorism policy makes me believe that the United States should learn from Al-Qaeda in Al-Bayda if it wants to Defeat him! Especially with regard to the realization that the use of force and the killing of civilians will not be in its interest, but rather will turn local public opinion against it, and will recruit more young fighters among its opponents.
The last American landing left a village full of panic-stricken people, especially children and women. More than that, it left endless local indignation, especially with regard to not acknowledging the wrongdoing/crime or even simply apologizing for the killing of civilians who fell in the attacks. People in Qaifah interpreted this behavior as direct support for their opponents of the Houthis, because the operations of the American planes and the recent landing came at the height of their fighting with the Houthis.
Because the few times the US paid compensation to victims was not done within a transparent process - this allowed it to be plundered from its Yemeni partners. The United States of America paid compensation to the victims in Yakla through close associates of Yemeni President Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi, but the victims did not receive any compensation amounts in any way.
On the eve of the American attack, Diwan al-Dahab was full of locals and people from neighboring villages who had nothing to do with al-Qaeda. Members of the Al-Jawf family were meeting in Diwan al-Dahab to solve a local issue, but they fell victim to the attacks without clearly realizing who attacked them or what was going on around them.
As the US and Yemeni governments used to do, before carrying out their attacks, they never declared gold a wanted person so that locals could stay away from it or take responsibility for getting close to it, for example.
In fact, Abd al-Raouf al-Dahab had just returned from Ma'rib governorate with weapons and money to confront the Houthis, which created a general impression that he was not wanted by the security forces.
The Yemeni Minister of Defense told me that the killing of al-Dahab and the American military landing were a mistake with uncalculated consequences, and that he - i.e. al-Dahab - had just come from Marib, where he met the Yemeni government and returned with salaries for fighters against the Houthis.
In terms of security, this incident - in addition to its human cost - marks an important turning point in Washington's security policies, which abandoned its qualitative air superiority in favor of its useless quantitative presence.
In fact, Trump did not embark on his recent adventures in Yemen in order to preserve national security, as "anti-terrorism parties" were required by themselves, regardless of their results, to achieve propaganda goals targeting the American interior. Thus, Trump did not find a better and forgotten arena than Yemen, and an enemy more in crisis than Al-Qaeda, allowing him to flex his political muscles during his first days in the White House. At that time, the man's electoral promises centered on his extraordinary ability to eliminate terrorism in a record time, before he became preoccupied with his economic wars and political scandals, and suddenly decided to withdraw from the Middle East.
These villages, scattered in the countryside of Al-Bayda Governorate, did not know anything from European modernity except Kalashnikov rifles, and they did not know anything from American globalization except drones. Therefore, it was funny that the US President claimed in early 2017 that his forces had obtained a very valuable data bank equivalent to the documents of "Abbottabad" (bin Laden's headquarters), in a village that lacked even asphalt and electricity.
For its part, al-Qaeda used the incident to brag about its downing of an American plane that the Pentagon declared had crashed, and about its killing of a member of the American Special Forces. In the organization's calculations, ostentatiousness gains it far more than it exposes it to losses.
There is no area in Al-Bayda that the long hand of drones has not reached. And you can hardly find a family that is not grieving or has not lost any of its members or acquaintances, whether because of the drones or the internal Yemeni war. All of this is not at all conducive to defeating al Qaeda, especially since many of these victims are civilians.
The struggle of "Al-Qaeda" and the "Islamic State"
On many secondary roads to Qaifah, there are currently some checkpoints of Al-Qaeda, and others of the Islamic State. The two sides have clashed and fought more than once in the past, despite fighting on the same front against the Houthis.
Although al-Qaeda and the Islamic State targeted both the Yemeni army and the Houthis at the same time, they differ about the goal in general. Al-Qaeda, whose elements are mostly made up of the local population, believes that the battle now is essentially with the enemy and not rule by a caliphate whose conditions have not yet been met. On the other hand, the "Islamic State" (ISIS), whose membership consists largely of Arabs and foreigners - which explains its insensitivity to local complexities and difficulties, especially with its excessive use of violence, in contrast to al-Qaeda - considers that the immediate, immediate and broader goal is strict rule implementation of succession.
Despite its clear Sunni (Shafi'i) identity, Al-Bayda is not considered an extremist place when it comes to tribes, but rather a place with its own local and tribal dynamics to a large extent. In the words of one of the local residents in Qifah, “My sect is I pray to my Lord and I fight with my companion.” Because of its deadly actions and planes, the United States did not leave any friend among civilians.
Al-Qaeda, on the other hand, developed a frightening understanding of the region, and dealt with it with a pragmatism that sometimes contradicts even some of its ideas. For example, although al-Qaeda leaders treat the qat plant with a strict taboo, their awareness of the centrality of qat as a trade and custom in Qifah made them tolerate local fighters who chewed it. According to local fighters I interviewed, Ibrahim al-Rubaish issued a fatwa prohibiting khat for himself, but he "does not forbid it for anyone else." This extreme sensitivity and pragmatism towards the local situation is what allowed one of the most dangerous terrorist organizations in the world to flourish in this region.
One cannot forget that "Rada'a", which Al-Qaeda took control of in 2013 and withdrew from it, not by force but after tribal negotiations.
Centuries ago, it was a civilized center, from which one of the oldest migrations to the West began since the beginning of the century. the past in search of renewal and an escape from closure.
Ironically, the historical castle in the heart of the city has been transformed from a unique cultural landmark into a detention center run by the Houthis, with which they threaten their opponents or those suspected of being opponents of the group.
* The article was published in the Lebanese newspaper As-Safir