A
merican mercenaries, who claim they were paid by the UAE to carry out extrajudicial killings in Yemen and subsequently trained Yemenis to carry out the killings, have spoken candidly about their “work” to BBC international correspondent Nawal Al-Maghafi.
In a discussion about her documentary American Mercenaries: Killing in Yemen at London’s Frontline Club, Al-Maghafi said: “This has been one of the most rewarding films. I received hundreds of messages from people in southern Yemen saying thank you so much for making this film. My uncle was killed last year. We know who it was but were too afraid to say so. My cousin was killed last year and finally someone is shining a light on this. People in the south are absolutely terrified because they know the UAE has incredible surveillance capabilities – they do not want to talk on the phone, they don’t want to text. A lot of the work behind the scenes on this investigation was done face to face because it is almost impossible to get information online or on text.”
“In this investigation the bits you think are going to be hard were the easiest and the things that I thought would be the easiest were the hardest. I thought it would be so hard to get to the mercenaries. We have such great access in Yemen that part [speaking to Yemenis] would be easy. And it was the exact opposite. The Yemen side was so difficult because of the climate of fear. We did speak lots of people who had had family members assassinated but getting people to go on the record was always impossible. But they really fed into our research.”
Yemen’s nine year-long civil war has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands and created one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. When a coalition formed by the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia invaded Yemen in 2015, its stated aim was to return the elected government ousted by Houthis in the north of the country, to power, and to fight terrorism.
But an investigation by BBC Arabic Investigations found evidence that the UAE has been funding a method of covert warfare in southern Yemen – assassinating those who have spoken out against its operations in the country.
The documentary features an interview with Issac Gilmore, a former Navy Seal who later became second in command of a private U.S. military firm Spear Operations Group. Human rights lawyers are trying to prosecute Spear for war crimes in Yemen. Abraham Golan, the founder of Spear, did not respond to the allegations in the film.
Gilmore told BBC he was paid $1.5m a month for this operation. He spoke of a meeting “with appropriate bodies” in the UAE government at an Emirate army base. “The pitch was to put pressure on ISIS and Al Qaeda in Yemen and make sure it did not become another hub of chaotic terrorist activity,” Gilmore said.
But in an exclusive interview, a Yemeni whistleblower alleged that the mercenaries helped in the continuation of the assassinations program by training UAE officers, who in turn trained Yemenis. He also claimed that far from prosecuting the war on Al Qaeda in Yemen, the UAE instead pardoned Al Qaeda members and recruited them as killers for its program of assassinations.
One of the pardoned former Al Qaeda operatives was allegedly Nasser Al-Shibah, a suspect in the attack on the U.S. navy destroyer Cole during a refuelling stop in Aden which killed 17 American sailors. The BBC had a picture of Al-Shibah with the head of the UAE-backed Southern Transitional Council (STC) Aideroos Al Zubaydi. The STC is a political grouping campaigning for the independence of South Yemen from the north. One of its roles was to run security in the south. Al Zubaydi denied that Al-Shibah had an active role in the STC and was head of one of its units.
“We are fighting terrorism so it is impossible we would be working with them [Al Qaeda],” Zubaydi said.
The BBC gained access to one of the UAE’s 2018 ‘Kill Lists’ and learned that Yemeni politicians, clerics and even human rights lawyers who had spoken out against the UAE’s actions in Yemen, were targets.
The mercenary Gilmore admitted that Ansaf Mayo, an MP and Leader of the Islah Party, who escaped an assassination attempt, was on the kill list. Al Islah, one of the largest political parties in Yemen, is the Yemeni branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is banned in the UAE. Its political activism and support for elections is seen as a threat to the Emirati royal family. Gilmore agreed to a meeting, but Mayo did not show up.
The name of Huda Al-Sarari, a lawyer investigating the UAE’s human rights abuses in Yemen, was also on the list. Her son was killed. “We hoped the UAE would support law and order but what happened is the exact opposite,” Al-Sarari told the BBC.
In a statement to the BBC, the UAE government said the allegations made against it in the film were false. The U.S. State Department and the Department of Defence declined to comment on a list of questions put to them about Spear. A CIA spokesman said: “The idea the CIA signed off on such activity is false.”
At the meeting at the Frontline Club when Al-Maghafi was asked during the question and answer session whether we can now conclude that the south of Yemen is being terrorized by six or seven or eight militias, there is no government, there are no services and all the nice things the Southern Transition Council is saying about inaugurating a House of Commons in is a lot of eyewash, she replied ‘yes’.
American Mercenaries: Killing in Yemen BBC documentary – Director Jess Kelly, Reporter: Nawal Al-Maghafi, Executive Producer: Monica Garnsey
Stay informed by subscribing to
our weekly newsletter.
