Michael Burleigh
QAT, GUNS AND JIHAD
Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes
By Victoria Clark (Yale University Press 336pp £14.99)

Exclusive from the Literary Review print edition. Subscribe now!

Although the Christmas Day underpants bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was radicalised during his mechanical engineering studies at the 'Godless' university in Gower Street, he was despatched on his way to Detroit by 'al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula' (AQAP). This is the flag of convenience for those Saudi jihadists who have merged with their brethren in Yemen after a belated crackdown by Riyadh. The Christmas Day bomb plot meant that Yemen was suddenly discovered by the world's media as a potential failed state to which the core of al-Qaeda might relocate should the heat in Afghanistan, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia prove unendurable.

This is the jihadi equivalent of the slogan 'football's coming home'. The Yemeni Hadhramaut region is the ancestral homeland of Osama bin Laden's family, his father having migrated to Saudi Arabia as a juvenile remittance worker in the 1925 (not as Clark claims "in the 1930s"). In fact, Yemen has been integral to several al-Qaeda plots. It was the chosen transit route for the bombers who struck at two US embassies in east Africa in 1998. Two years later, a group of mainly Yemeni terrorists blew a large hole in the USS Cole, in reprise of an earlier failed attack on the USS The Sullivans. Seventeen US sailors died. In far away Afghanistan, proud chants of 'We, the Yemenis, destroyed the Cole' echoed around training camps where Yemenis were the main instructors. Egyptian 'pharaohs' may have been the strategic brains behind al-Qaeda, but Yemeni 'dervishes' were the fighting core as well as constituting bin Laden's personal bodyguard. According to Victoria Clark, the former Sanaa bank clerk Ramzi bin al-Shibh links the Cole attack to 9/11, in which, moreover, nine of the fifteen 'Saudi' musclemen were from Asir province, an area to all intents and purposes more Yemeni than Saudi. Apart from murdering elderly Spanish or South Korean travellers, AQAP was also responsible for the jihadist who last August, posing as a repentant militant, nearly assassinated Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, the Saudi deputy interior minister, with an underpants bomb cheekily detonated after the assassin handed the prince a mobile phone on which further defectors were allegedly calling. The bomb left the prince unharmed, but the bomber's arm stuck in the concrete ceiling. Yemenis are also prominent among the Jaish al-Islam group in Gaza, who do not regard Hamas as sufficiently radical in its hatred of Israel.

Yemen is an attractive base for al-Qaeda. It combines wildness with a quasi-modern infrastructure, including banks, mobile phones and a bloated service of half a million. It affords jihadists easy passage to Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan, where many Yemenis fought the Soviets. The loyalties of Yemen's security forces is often equivocal, resulting in the escape of the perpetrators of the Cole attack and a lackadaisical attitude to former inmates of Guantanamo Bay - so foolishly liberated through the efforts of Western human rights activists - who have returned to practise terrorism back in Yemen and beyond. Despite Saudi attempts to fence the place off with a concrete-filled pipe and electronic sensors, Yemen's borders are unsecured, while its centrifugal tribal structures and notions of hospitality provide perfect cover for any fleeing terrorists. Earlier, the Saudis also encouraged Wahhabism among northern Yemenis so as to counteract the Marxism propagated in the short-lived southern republic, before the two halves were united in 1990 under arrangements in which the fierce northern tribesmen stripped out anything not screwed down. The country is awash with weapons: according to Clark there are three guns for every one of Yemen's twenty-three million people. The government of President Ali Abdullah Saleh (in office since 1990) is distracted by an armed secessionist movement in the south and the al-Hathi tribal rebellion in the northwest, as well as by the prospect of both the oil and water running out in around seven years. This is troubling in a country with a vastly idle public sector clientage, not to mention fictitious 'ghost soldiers' who serve to swell their commanders' pay. Large quantities of heavily subsidised diesel fuel are smuggled into Somalia. Much of the available cultivable area, instead of producing food, is given over to growing qat, a leafy narcotic that people chew so as to get a similar high to amphetamines. Illiteracy is rampant, including a third of the members of parliament, for, at least in theory, Yemen is a democracy.

Victoria Clark's father was a correspondent in Yemen when Aden was still a British protectorate, a major refuelling depot for ships heading to India. Her book is a familiar combination of travelogue, unstructured interviews and gobbets of history, although she does not seem to have spoken with President Saleh, the man who has danced on the heads of so many snakes for thirty years. Clark shows very well how everyone has drawn a blank in Yemen, starting with the Ottoman pasha who wrote: 'in my opinion ... from the day we conquered it to the time we left it we neither knew Yemen nor did we understand it nor learn [anything] about it, nor were we, for that matter, able to administer it', and moving on through the British, the Egyptians and the Soviets. Sensibly Clark concludes by recommending that the West simply pays the Saudis to deal with it, rather than getting dragged into yet another interminable front in the 'war on terror'. Better yet mourn the passing of the Ottomans

Michael Burleigh's most recent book is 'Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism'. His latest project is a history of US responses to global insurgency from 1948 to 1968.