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NY Review of Books, October 24 2013
Terror: The Hidden Source
by Malise Ruthven

The Thistle and the Drone: How America’s War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam
by Akbar Ahmed
Brookings, 424 pp., $32.95


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Ahmed’s book is a radical analysis based on extensive anthropological detail too complex to be easily summarized. A good example of his approach, however, is his analysis of the background of the September 11 hijackers. It is well known that fifteen of the nineteen terrorists were Saudi nationals. Less well known or indeed understood is their tribal background. The official report of the 9/11 Commission, based on information provided by the Saudi authorities, states that four of the thirteen “muscle hijackers”—the operatives whose job was to storm the cockpits and control the passengers—came from the al-Bahah region, “an isolated and undeveloped area of Saudi Arabia, and shared the same tribal affiliation.” Three of them shared the same al-Ghamdi surname; five others came from Asir Province, described as a poor, “weakly policed area” that borders Yemen, with two of these, Wail and Waleed al-Shehri, actually brothers.

Apart from the brief reference to “tribal affiliation,” the September 11 report skates over the fact that all of these “muscle hijackers” hailed from the contiguous regions of al-Bahah and Asir or from the Wadi Hadhramaut in southern Yemen where Osama bin Laden’s own family came from. Drawing on politically loaded information provided by Saudi intelligence and the waterboarding inflicted on two al-Qaeda operatives, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the would-be hijacker Ramzi Binalshibh, the report focuses mainly on personal contacts, training, and ideological influences. It goes so far as to state that “ethnicity generally was not a factor in the selection of operatives unless it was important for security or operational reasons.”

Ahmed, by contrast, sees ethnicity or tribal identity as the crucial factors in the recruitment of the hijackers. “Bin Laden,” he states, “was joined in his movement primarily by his fellow Yemeni tribesmen,” ten of whom came from the Asir tribes, including Ghamed, Zahran, and Bani Shahr. Indeed the only one of the nineteen hijackers without a tribal pedigree was Mohammed Atta, the Egyptian architect who led the operation and had much to do with its planning.

The Asiri background is highly significant because of the region’s history. For centuries the terrain, which is divided between rugged highlands with peaks rising to nine thousand feet and the coastal plain, or Tihama, was riven by tribal conflicts, as in the Caucasus and Waziristan. Like the Pukhtun clans of Waziristan, the Yemeni tribes of Asir are organized in “segmentary lineages” (i.e., prone to splitting) without formal leaders. The clans tended to quarrel among themselves when not coalescing in the face of outsiders. In 1906 the charismatic scholar-king Sayyed Muhammad al-Idrisi, connected to the Sufi or mystically oriented Sanusiyya order in North Africa, was invited to settle disputes between these warring tribes. His rule was in many ways similar to that of Shamil in the Caucasus, as described by those Russian observers, better informed than Tolstoy, who recognized that his diplomatic skills were as impressive as his military ones.

Al-Idrisi’s domain grew rapidly as tribes, attracted by his reputation for piety and justice, rallied to his cause against the Ottomans. After backing the Allies in World War I, he hoped that the victors would reward him by preserving Asir’s independence. All such hopes were dashed, however, following his death in 1922, when the region came under the sway of the reinvigorated tribal empire created by the emir of Nejd, Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud, founder of modern Saudi Arabia. In his aggressive drive for territorial expansion (which included expelling the Hashemite rulers of Mecca), ibn Saud swallowed up most of the region, leaving the southern part to al-Idrisi’s inveterate enemy, the imam of Yemen. Some 400,000 people are believed to have been killed in the course of this conflict.

The Saudi annexation was followed by an invasion of religious clerics who imposed their narrow Salafist practices on Asiri society. Asiri males were known as the “flower men” from the flowers they wore in their hair (an indication perhaps of their status as cultivators rather than nomads). Even their turbans were adorned with flowers, grasses, and stones. Asiri women were clothed in spectacular explosions of color, their headdresses glittering with coins and jewelry. The Saudi clerics forced young males to remove their “un-Islamic” locks and headgear as well as the traditional daggers that symbolized their masculinity. The women were obliged to adopt the niqab (full facial veil) in place of the traditional headscarf.

In short, says Ahmed, while Western countries were appeasing the Saudis in order to secure their oil supplies, the Saudis were systematically destroying the Yemeni-Asiri culture. During the 1960s this process was exacerbated by the civil war that brought into Yemen 70,000 Egyptian troops who used poison gas alongside conventional weapons. Represented in the West as a Spanish-style conflict between “progressive” republicans backed by Egypt and “reactionary” royalists supported by Saudi Arabia, the war was really a conflict between tribal systems that had been drawn into supporting different sides.

The strategic demands of that war prompted the Saudi ruler, King Faisal (who had led the conquest of Asir on behalf of his father, ibn Saud, in the 1920s), to build the famous Highway 15 linking Mecca with the Hadhramaut valley in southern Yemen. The construction magnate who undertook this formidable feat of engineering was Mohammed bin Laden, father of Osama. Twelve of the September 11 hijackers came from towns that lie along this highway, a key strategic asset in the program of Saudi repression that accompanied the destruction of Asiri culture. Ahmed sees “resentment against the Saudi centers of power” as a “constant undercurrent of Asir society.” It is far from coincidental that a top man on America’s “hit list” in Yemen, Ibrahim al-Asiri, alleged maker of the “underwear bomb” that failed to explode on a flight to Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, comes from the region.
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