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The Saturday Profile

Ex-Jihadist Defies Yemen’s Leader, and Easy Labels

By ROBERT F. WORTH
Published: February 26, 2010
ADEN, Yemen

IT is not often that you see an old comrade in arms of Osama bin Laden hoisting the American flag outside his home.
Yet there on the videotape was Tareq al-Fadhli, the hero of jihadist campaigns in Afghanistan and South Yemen, raising Old Glory in the courtyard of his house, not far from here, earlier this month. As the tape continues, Mr. Fadhli can be seen standing solemnly at attention, dressed in a khaki shirt and a cloth headdress, as “The Star-Spangled Banner” blasts from a sound system nearby.
The videotape, disseminated on the Internet, has helped to redefine the public persona of a man who, as a onetime Islamist guerrilla, loyalist politician and now would-be American ally in South Yemen, has been at the center of this country’s turbulent recent history. It has also profoundly irritated the Yemeni government, which labels Mr. Fadhli one the country’s most dangerous terrorists.
Reminded of the accusation, Mr. Fadhli chuckled dryly. No one ever accused him of terrorism until last year, he said, when he joined a rising southern Yemen independence movement and became an opponent of the country’s longtime president, Ali Abdullah Saleh.
“I was in the ruling party of this country for 15 years,” he said. “I was in the highest authority — I walked into the Republican Palace without an appointment — and nobody ever accused me of such a thing. But now that I have joined the Southern Movement, they say it. And it is not true.”
The flag-raising episode has illustrated once again the murkiness of terrorist labels in this troubled patch of southern Arabia, where the government has used former jihadists — including Mr. Fadhli — to fight its internal enemies and negotiate with militants. Now that global attention has focused on the Qaeda threat in Yemen, the government is smearing its domestic rivals as Qaeda members, Mr. Fadhli said.
“When I fought with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, there were no bombings of civilians, and I would never have supported them,” he said. “The Americans were our allies back then, and what I am doing now by raising the American flag is a continuation of this old alliance.”
BUT Mr. Fadhli, 42, added that the Yemeni president had enlisted him in a failed effort early last year to negotiate a truce with Qaeda members here. And he made a somewhat brazen offer to put his own jihadist connections in the service of the United States, saying the Yemeni government was too corrupt and compromised to fight Al Qaeda successfully.
“I can be a mediator between America and Al Qaeda,” he said. “We can be allied with the United States against terrorism, and we will achieve the interests of the United States, not those of the regime” in Sana, Yemen’s capital.
Mr. Fadhli’s defection to the southern secessionist movement in April was something of a landmark in Yemeni politics. Few men have publicly challenged Mr. Saleh, who has governed since 1978 and is famous for his ability to disarm or seduce potential enemies.
But Mr. Fadhli is the scion of one of the south’s most prominent families, and he says he could no longer bear the Yemeni government’s unfair treatment of his homeland. He and other Southern Movement leaders accuse the government, based in the north, of systematically discriminating against the south and plundering its oil wealth.
The president is said to be personally furious at his former ally, who now lives in a walled compound surrounded by armed tribesmen in Zinjibar, the capital of his family’s ancestral realm, less than an hour’s drive from here.
Yemeni soldiers laid siege to the compound in July, leaving at least 12 people dead and dozens wounded, according to Mr. Fadhli and other witnesses. He was interviewed for this article by phone because government soldiers at checkpoints on the road from Aden would not allow journalists through.
Mr. Fadhli appears in photographs and videotapes as a lanky, distinguished-looking man with large, mournful eyes; a jutting nose; and a thin beard and mustache. For all his jihadist past, several acquaintances say, he is an easygoing fellow with a taste for Scotch and little sympathy for extremists.
He was born in 1967 to a powerful family that had excellent relations with the British, who ruled southern Yemen from 1839 until 1967, when they withdrew under attack by an armed independence movement.
Soon afterward, a radical Marxist faction took power in South Yemen, which was still independent of the north. The government appropriated the land of the old feudal families, and Mr. Fadhli and his clan escaped to Lebanon and then to Saudi Arabia, where he grew up.
IN 1987, at the age of 19, he left to fight in Afghanistan. Like many Yemenis, his war was less about religion than a desire to punish Communists for the takeover of South Yemen. Over the next three years, he fought, befriended Mr. bin Laden and was wounded at Jalalabad, he said.
In the early 1990s, as the Soviet Union broke apart, North and South Yemen unified, and Mr. Fadhli returned home to begin the long process of recovering his family’s ancestral land holdings in Abyan Province.

Relations between north and south soon soured, and in 1994 a brief civil war broke out. Mr. Fadhli, who had been in prison on suspicion of having tried to kill a Socialist official, was released in the middle of the night on the condition that he gather his old jihadist friends to help fight the southern Socialists.
He did so, and got plenty of help from his old friend Mr. bin Laden, who used his own family’s vast fortune to supply weapons, ammunition and fighters from abroad. (Both Mr. bin Laden and Mr. Fadhli have been suspected of playing roles in a 1992 terrorist attack on two tourist hotels in Aden; Mr. Fadhli said this was not true.)
Mr. Fadhli was well rewarded for his wartime contributions, regaining much of his family’s land and eventually becoming a confidant of the president.
After the northern victory, he flew to Sudan in late 1994 for one last visit with the Qaeda leader.
“I thanked him for his support,” Mr. Fadhli said, and the two men said goodbye.
Although he deplores the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and terrorism in general, Mr. Fadhli retains some affection for his old comrade.
“I personally like this man, this legendary personality, who is facing the world in a universal war even now,” he said.
Mr. Fadhli himself clearly remains something of an insurgent at heart. His defection last spring was a risky move: he and his family — including 16 children and other relatives — cannot leave their compound for fear of being detained or shot, he said.
Yet some in the movement remain suspicious of him, in part because of his long alliance with the president, and the fact that his sister is married to one of the country’s most powerful military leaders up north. In Yemen, it is never too late to make a deal.
Mr. Fadhli waves away all talk of divisions, saying his loyalty to the south is supreme. Of all the roles he has played, that of hereditary sultan seems closest to his heart, and that may be the reason he chose to throw in his lot with the southerners.
“My land is my identity,” he said.


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/27/wo...l?pagewanted=1