a shocking new investigation that reveals the United Arab Emirates hired U.S. mercenaries to carry out assassinations of political and clerical leaders in Yemen. The former elite U.S. special operations fighters were paid to take part in missions to kill those deemed to be terrorists by the UAE. The UAE worked with the U.S. company Spear Operations Group, founded by an Israeli-American man named Abraham Golan, who told BuzzFeed, quote, “There was a targeted assassination program in Yemen. I was running it.” The group’s first target in Yemen was a local leader of al-Islah, a political party whose members include Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Tawakkul Karman.
Aram Roston talking:
we found a mercenary operation unlike anything we had ever seen before. U.S. veterans, Special Forces, SEALs, people who had been trained by the U.S. government, were working for the UAE in Yemen to assassinate Yemen politicians that had opposed UAE policies. The politicians that they were working against chiefly were from a group called al-Islah, as you mentioned. Al-Islah is viewed by the UAE as a terrorist group because it’s seen as an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, which the UAE has declared war on, functionally.
And we were surprised to see that this was a group that really functioned not as security contractors, but as mercenaries. Two of the people who participated, who were there, two of the Americans, were reservists, or one was a national guardsman, and the other was in a Navy SEAL reserve unit.
So, we dug into this. We found a videotape. We obtained a videotape that showed one of the operations they had been involved in, which was an attempt to kill the head of the party in Aden, the head of the al-Islah party in Aden. And you can clearly see the vehicle that the mercenaries use to come up near the building. They try to place a bomb there, and you can see it from the drone. We interviewed two of the participants in this program, including the head of it, who told us that there was indeed a targeted assassination program, and another—and a former Navy SEAL who participated in it, as well.
Experts we talked to said it was simply inconceivable that they wouldn’t have known. Remember, the UAE—the military of the UAE was trained by the United States. It’s a close ally of the United States. The United States supports—gives it intelligence. The United States fuels their planes, arms them. And, I mean, they’re viewed, in many ways, as a client state or proxy in many ways. People believe there’s no way that a country like this could have hired an American company, staffed by American former soldiers, incorporated—in a company incorporated in America, without the United States government knowing about it.
it did happen under Obama, yes. The period of time was after the war—I mean, an interesting point was, after the war started in March, the U.S. pulled its forces directly out of Yemen, during the chaos of that war, when the war first started. The UAE, of course, still stayed there. They were the ones on the ground. And the Yemen war is a very complex war. People see that the UAE and the Saudis are in the same coalition, but the UAE and the Saudis have kind of different aims there, or traditionally had different aims there. The Saudis were bombing the Houthis, fighting the Houthis, which they believed are proxies for Iran, and the UAE, most experts will confirm, was really trying to consolidate control over the south. They want the south to separate, to secede. They want control of the ports in the south. And they want to control the political space there, because the UAE and Yemen are very close.
– So they were trying to get the head of the al-Islah party. This is the party of Tawakkul Karman, who was sitting here a few years ago, right at the time the Nobel Peace Prize—the Nobel committee announced she was winning the Nobel Peace Prize. UAE can call them terrorists. UAE can hire a mercenary firm, the State Department would approve, to attack anyone they consider unfriendly to them?
It’s a very complex issue, because I don’t—there’s no evidence the State Department permitted this to happen. We looked at the law. The law about mercenaries is far more complex than most people realize. This isn’t the first time we’ve done a story about sort of mercenaries. I did a story earlier this year about an American colonel, a retired American colonel, who went to the UAE and heads a branch of their military—headed a branch of their military. He was titled commander. He called himself a general. And he simply did this, and there was no repercussions, that we know of, for him.
So, this is different in the sense that these people were what you’d call trigger pullers. They actually had guns in their hands, and they were acting in what they call offensive combat operations, if you want to call assassinations combat. But it’s not as if this hasn’t happened. But it’s not clear that there are actually repercussions against Americans who function as mercenaries, if they become attached to the military of an ally. We’ve seen, you know, Americans frequently will join—will serve in the Israeli Defense Forces. They’ll serve in the French Foreign Legion. And we’ve seen Americans obviously
Abraham Golan’s background is a bit murky. He was born in Hungary, he says, and it appears to be true. He seems to have been educated in France, spent a lot of time in France. He says he was in the French Foreign Legion. He obviously has very good contacts in Israel, says he was—lived in Israel for a while. He seems to have associated at one point with the former head of the Mossad, Danny Yatom. He’s a fascinating character. He clearly, according to the people I spoke to who knew him, former commandos, American commandos—he clearly knows what he’s doing in terms of combat and soldiering. He has military experience. And he’s the one who, with another person, set up this entire operation.
He met—this mercenary scheme was brokered by a man named Mohammed Dahlan, who I’m sure many people are familiar with. He’s a former Palestinian politician who’s exiled now. He was the head of security—he was the head of security first for the—in Gaza for a long time, and in the ’90s he crushed Hamas very forcefully and was accused of human rights violations. In 2007, he was finally exiled. He was finally kicked out of Fatah, and he was kicked out of Palestine. And he settled in the UAE and is an adviser to the crown prince, who’s functionally the ruler of the UAE. He, this Palestinian, Mohammed Dahlan, and Golan, together, as you’ll see in the story, they brokered this agreement.
– Golan, he said, “Maybe I’m a monster. Maybe I should be in jail. Maybe I’m a bad guy. But I’m right.”
He was saying, in part—the reason he was willing to talk to me, in part, is he seems to want the United States to have a targeted assassination program along the lines of the one that Israel not so secretly has. His argument—and, in fact, of course, the U.S. already does have some targeted assassination programs, right? The United States launches drone attacks frequently. And his argument is this is a better method of warfare, that targeted assassinations, if done properly and transparently, are a better—are less indiscriminate, say, than bombing, or are better than, say, you know, these signature strikes that the U.S. launches, where they simply bomb individuals when their conduct seems to the United States intelligence agencies to match that of a terrorist organizer. We’re all familiar with it with the signature strike program. And that’s his argument. I’m not saying whether it’s a credible argument, but it’s what he’s sort of—it’s what he’s sort of pitching. The U.S. has, as we know, toyed with assassination in the past.
Anssaf Ali Mayo was the leader in Aden of al-Islah. He was not a hidden character. He was not viewed by the world as a terrorist. He was quoted in The Washington Post in a story about the effects of U.S. drones. And he objected to U.S. drone attacks in Yemen, saying that they turn the tribes against the United States. He was not—certainly publicly, not supporting al-Qaeda. He was quoted in the Financial Times. He was not a—in other words, he was, in many ways, a public figure. He, according to Mr. Golan, and Mr. Glimore, who I interviewed, as well, a former Navy SEAL, they were handed target cards by the UAE, by an intelligence officer for the UAE, while they were flying to Yemen the first time. And among those target cards, the most important was this man Anssaf Ali Mayo. So, they claim they formed this scheme to kill him.
They said he was in a—they believed he was in his office with a group of what they considered to be, what the UAE considered to be, terrorist targets. And they—as you can see, there’s a drone video we show which explicitly shows what’s happening. The mercenaries—because we have to call them mercenaries, they’re not security contractors—they drive up to the building. In the back is an actual UAE military vehicle. In the front is a UAE military vehicle. But these mercenaries are not in a military vehicle, they’re in a SUV. They drive up. They get out of their car with their guns drawn. One of them carries a bomb. It’s a shaped charge with shrapnel. He’s going to try to fix it to the door. You can see him walk up to the door. And another one opens fire. It’s unclear what he’s opening fire at. He’s shooting down the street, where there are people. They run away. Then the mercenaries start making their exit. They run to the UAE military vehicles to get away. One of the mercenaries has set this charge at the building. They all leave.
And then, suddenly, there’s an explosion as that bomb goes off, the one the military—the one the mercenaries dropped off at the—set at the door of this building. Then, after the mercenaries are gone, the car, the SUV they arrived in, that blows up. And that, we were told, is to sort of create confusion about who targeted al-Islah back in December 2015. It was December 29, 2015. It was supposed to spread confusion. And it did. Until now, nobody realized that it was Americans, American mercenaries, who bombed that building in an assassination attempt.
In the end, Anssaf Ali Mayo was not seen for some time. His social media presence subsided. Golan and Gilmore believed—they thought they had successfully killed him. In fact, he is back. He’s now recently met with the U.N. representative for Yemen. We saw—we showed a picture, that was in the newspaper, of him. He’s alive. What they did do is they did a lot of damage to the front of the building. But according to one person I spoke to who says he was in the building, a member of al-Islah, they didn’t kill people in the building. So it was a failed mission, in essence.
this all happening in the context of the U.S.-backed, Saudi-UAE-led coalition that is bombing Yemen into the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. More than a million people have cholera. The infrastructure of the country has been destroyed. Children are being killed every week. The U.N. is warning this is a complete catastrophe
the U.S.—and we believe, in many ways, the U.S.—U.S. individuals and veterans are far more involved than we knew before.
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Aram Roston
journalist at BuzzFeed News. His latest investigation reveals the UAE hired U.S. mercenaries to carry out assassinations in Yemen.
— source democracynow.org | Oct 17, 2018