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Yemen Silent on Disclosure of Shooting by Americans Yemen Shooting Opens Window on U.S. Clandestine Operations
(about 4 hours later)
MUKALLA, Yemen — Officials in Yemen remained silent on Saturday about the revelation the day before that Americans were behind the fatal shootings of two kidnapping suspects in the country’s capital, Sana, late last month, a potentially embarrassing episode for the Yemeni government. SANA, Yemen — The kidnappers pulled up in a pickup truck outside the Taj barbershop in an upscale neighborhood here in the Yemeni capital last month. One held an automatic weapon and the other carried a stun gun. As the men went inside, nearby shopkeepers heard shots.
On Friday, Obama administration officials revealed that on April 24, the two Americans — a Special Operations commando and a Central Intelligence Agency officer — shot two armed Yemeni civilians who were trying to kidnap them in a Sana barbershop. Then a foreigner — tall, with the physique of a body builder, and holding a black gun — was seen standing over one of the mortally wounded attackers in the doorway of the barbershop, witnesses said. The foreigner kicked an automatic weapon out of the man’s hands, looked right and left down the street, jumped into a nearby sport utility vehicle and drove away.
The Americans were allowed to leave the country a few days after the shooting with the blessing of Yemen’s government, a strong ally of the United States, American officials said. Those details emerged on Saturday of a shooting last month in which the Obama administration said two Americans killed two armed Yemeni civilians who were trying to kidnap them.
The revelation that Americans had been behind the shooting — and that Yemeni officials had apparently helped conceal their involvement — could damage the government of President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, which has faced stinging criticism at home for its close antiterrorism cooperation with the United States, in particular its willingness to permit drone strikes on terror targets that in many cases have killed civilians as well as militants. While much about the encounter remains unclear, a Yemeni official said the two civilians were part of a Qaeda-linked cell that had planned and executed several attacks on foreigners in the country. Whether by design or chance, the official said, the Americans had disrupted a kidnapping ring that government officials blame for killing a Frenchman, kidnapping a Dutch couple last year, trying to assassinate a German diplomat last month, and attacking the central prison in Sana in February, freeing 19 inmates.
Yemeni officials are frequently silent on the drone strikes, either refusing to confirm them or asserting that they have been carried out by Yemen’s Air Force. The shooting at the barbershop led Yemeni authorities to the group’s leader, Wael Abdullah al-Waeli, said an Interior Ministry spokesman, Col. Mohamed al-Qaidi. Yemeni officials said last week that they had killed Mr. Waeli during a shootout in the capital.
An Interior Ministry spokesman, Col. Mohamed al-Qaidi, said on Saturday that he had no information on whether the two men targeted for abduction were United States citizens, saying only that they were foreigners. In Washington, spokesmen for the State Department, Pentagon and C.I.A. declined on Saturday to provide any details about the initial shooting. The State Department acknowledged on Friday night only that two United States Embassy officers had shot and killed two assailants who tried to kidnap them, and that the shooting was under investigation. One senior American official identified the Americans as a Special Operations commando and a C.I.A. officer.
Colonel Qaidi said the kidnappers had pretended to be police officers. One carried a gun, and the other a stun gun. The colonel said only one of the foreigners had shot the Yemenis, although the State Department said on Friday that both Americans had fired their weapons. It was not clear why the accounts differed. The shooting, on April 24, has offered a rare glimpse into American clandestine operations in Yemen, a major battleground against what counterterrorism officials say is Al Qaeda’s most dangerous regional affiliate. And it has emerged as a potential source of embarrassment for Yemen’s president, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, whose government helped conceal the American role in the shooting, allowing the two officials to leave Yemen quietly a few days afterward.
The colonel said the attack on the Americans had been carried out by the leader of a Qaeda cell that had planned and executed several attacks on foreigners in Yemen. Yemeni officials said last week that they had killed the suspect, Wael Abdullah al-Waeli, during a shootout in the capital. Yemeni officials have not yet publicly acknowledged that Americans were responsible for killing the attackers, referring only to “foreigners.”
The shootings on April 24 also raised questions about security protocols for United States Embassy personnel in Yemen: The men appeared to be on a busy commercial street in the capital, without a large security detail. On Saturday, witnesses and Yemeni officials gave a slightly different account of the shooting, saying that only one of the foreigners had actually fired his weapon, striking each of the attackers at least twice.
Colonel Qaidi said the kidnappers had pretended to be police officers. The foreigner who fired at them was carrying a licensed weapon, he said, and shot the Yemeni man carrying the automatic weapon before shooting his partner.
But many questions remain unanswered about what exactly the two Americans were doing at a barbershop on a street frequented by Westerners, apparently with no security detail.
“They just went out for a haircut? It seems a little strange to me,” said Gregory D. Johnsen, a Yemen scholar and author of “The Last Refuge: Yemen, Al Qaeda and America’s War in Arabia,” who visited Sana five weeks ago.
A former United States Embassy official said the barbershop had been popular with embassy staff members when many lived outside the embassy compound. “But most folks have gotten their hair cut at the embassy for quite some time now,” the former official said, “as the requirements to move into town are just too onerous to warrant that level of effort to get a haircut.”
Mr. Johnsen said security was so tight in the capital that embassy personnel he had met reported that they had to get permission from Washington to leave the walled compound. But the armed American officers may have been operating under different rules.
In the past two years, since Mr. Hadi’s election, the Pentagon has gradually increased its presence in Yemen, sending roughly 50 Special Operations troops to train Yemeni counterterrorism and security forces, and a similar number of commandos whose job is to identify and target Qaeda suspects for drone strikes.
While airstrikes carried out by C.I.A. drones operating from a secret base in southern Saudi Arabia illustrate the most well-known covert program in Yemen, the C.I.A. also has a significant number of personnel conducting training and counterterrorism missions there.
The C.I.A. has stepped up its operations not only with Yemen’s spy agencies, but also with Saudi intelligence, which has deep contacts in its southern neighbor.
It was Saudi intelligence, for instance, that helped thwart a plot by Al Qaeda’s regional affiliate here, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, in October 2010 to pack explosives in printer cartridges and load them on cargo planes bound for Chicago. And it was a Saudi double agent who infiltrated the Qaeda offshoot to foil a plot in 2012 to blow up a United States-bound airliner.
The Obama administration’s counterterrorism strategy in Yemen aims to help Mr. Hadi overhaul his nation’s military to combat the Qaeda franchise in its strongholds in large swaths of the country’s south. And it calls for the United States and Yemen to work together to kill or capture about two dozen of Al Qaeda’s most dangerous operatives, who are focused on attacking America and its interests.
This approach mirrors the White House’s global counterterrorism strategy in the wake of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: to employ small numbers of Special Operations troops, C.I.A. paramilitary teams and drones against elements of Al Qaeda that are committed to striking the United States, while arming and advising indigenous security forces to tackle costlier long-term counterinsurgency campaigns.
Whether the strategy will work in Yemen is still unclear. “In Yemen, there are a variety of different factions, each with enough weapons and men, but none have enough guns or men to impose their will on everyone else,” Mr. Johnsen said. “So there is lots of maneuvering behind the scenes.”