Read Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes for Free Online

of the Israel-Palestine question.
    ‘Do you thnk there’s any chance that he’s hiding in Yemen?’ I asked, and received an answer that confirmed my belief that, if history was anything to go by, Yemeni tribesmen’s overriding interests were money and land, not any ideology about a restored Caliphate.
    ‘No,’ said Ibrahim, ‘with that big a bounty on his head? Someone would definitely betray him! He wouldn’t risk coming here!’
    ‘If bin Laden called for Yemenis to go and fight jihad in Iraq, would you go?’ I asked him.
    ‘If he asked me to go and kill American or Israeli soldiers, of course, I would love to go, but I wouldn’t go and kill civilians.’
    Ibrahim’s lucrative employment with Oxy and the cluster of excited and happy faces that greeted him when we arrived at his home a few minutes later amply accounted for his failure to beat a path to the jihad in Iraq. As head of the family since his father had died, he was clearly the happy object of at least a dozen women’s deep devotion. His mother, his sisters, his teenage nieces who were happily learning to read at the age of fifteen, his startlingly beautiful but illiterate wife and his one-year-old baby daughter all doted on him. Three small nephews copied every gesture he made.
    Early the next morning Walid piloted the Land Cruiser slowly around the low sand dunes on the outskirts of the Ibrahim’s village, allowing us plenty of time for a good look at a school built with foreign aid but standing empty for lack of any teachers, and then at a circle of men in their pale shirts, patterned futas and faded head-cloths sitting cross-legged in a small patch of shade next to a Toyota pick-up. I thought they must be having their breakfast.
    ‘Breakfast? No. They’re men from my Balharith tribe,’ said Ibrahim. ‘They’re holding a strategy meeting. It’s nothing so special, just that one of those guys owns some land on the coast, on the road between Aden and Abyan. He has paperwork proving his ownership and authorisation from the president, but the officials down there have decided to seize it. About a week ago soldiers removed the posts marking the plot and arrested the man he had employed to guard it. So those guys are planning to cut the road near here, to stop the flow of traffic to and from the oil fields.’
    ‘Will it work, do you think?’
    Ibrahim shrugged. ‘Maybe, probably - because the state hates anything to disrupt the oil business. That’s why the tribes around here are powerful. We’ve got some kind of chance of getting justice!’ Proud of his tribe, he was surprised and pleased when I recalled that the suspected leader of al-Qaeda in Yemen in the period immediately before and after 9/11 had been a fellow Balharith, yet another Afghan War veteran named Qaid Sinan al-Harithi.
    In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when, on account of its lawlessness, Yemen was regarded as the likeliest refuge for jihadists fleeing the western onslaught on Afghanistan, President Salih had warded off a rumoured American invasion by speedily deporting whole planeloads of foreign Afghan War veterans. Anxious not to repeat the costly mistake of siding with Saddam Hussein in 1990, he had also hurried off to Washington to reassure President George W Bush that he was on his side in the new global ‘War on Terror’, but Bush had given him to understand that he would have to prove it, that actions would have to speak louder than words. When Salih offered to help lower the international temperature by mediating a reconciliation between Baghdad and Washington, chattily quoting an old Arab proverb to Bush about taking care not to put a cat in a cage because it might turn into a lion, Bush retorted that the Iraqi cat had rabies which could only be cured by cutting off its head. 7 He then upped the pressure by demanding he demonstrate his new commitment to tackling jihadism by arresting a pair of al-Qaeda men suspected of playing leading roles in the attack on