UAE funded political assassinations in Yemen, BBC unmasks

Posted on January 24, 2024 by uprootedpalestinians

January 23, 2024

Soldiers with a military coalition in Yemen backed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates stand guard in the port city of Hodeida on Jan. 22, 2019. (*AFP*)

The most recent political assassination in Yemen, as reported by Yemeni human rights lawyer Huda al-Sarari, occurred just last month, involving the killing of an imam in Lahj using the same method.

The UAE has reportedly financed politically motivated assassinations in Yemen, as revealed by a recent investigation conducted by the BBC.

The revelations surface amid the heightened global focus on Yemen following recent ship attacks in the Red Sea in support of the Palestinian people in light of the ongoing Israeli genocidal war.

Emirati officers in Yemen have utilized “counter-terrorism training” offered by US mercenaries to instruct locals for covert operations, leading to a significant increase in political assassinations, as per information provided by a whistleblower to BBC Arabic investigations.

The BBC investigation revealed that contrary to the stated objective of US mercenaries to eradicate groups like al-Qaeda and Islamic State (IS) in southern Yemen, the UAE has, in reality, enlisted former al-Qaeda members for a security force formed on the ground in Yemen to combat Ansar Allah movement and other Resistance factions.

The UAE government has refuted the accusations made in the investigation, claiming that the accusations of assassinating individuals without ties to terrorism are “false and without merit.”

The wave of killings in Yemen, comprising over 100 assassinations within a three-year span, is just one facet of a persistent and contentious global war on the country involving various international powers in the Middle East’s most impoverished nation.

“Leaked drone footage of the first assassination mission gave me a starting point from which to investigate these mysterious killings. It was dated December 2015 and was traced to members of a private US security company called Spear Operations Group,” BBC Arabic‘s Nawal al-Maghafi said in a radio documentary.

“I finally met one of the men behind the operation shown in the footage in a restaurant in London in 2020. Isaac Gilmore, a former US Navy Seal who later became chief operating officer of Spear, was one of several Americans who say they were hired to carry out assassinations in Yemen by the UAE”, she added.

In accordance with international law, any killing of civilians without proper legal proceedings would be categorized as extrajudicial.

US mercenaries: Killing in Yemen

Gilmore and another Spear employee, Dale Comstock, informed BBC Arabic‘s Nawal al-Maghafi that the mission they conducted concluded in 2016. However, assassinations in southern Yemen persisted and increased in frequency, according to investigators from the human rights group Reprieve.

Reprieve investigated 160 killings in Yemen from 2015 to 2018, with the majority occurring after 2016. Only 23 of the 160 individuals killed were found to have links to alleged “terrorism”. The killings were executed using the same tactics employed by Spear: initiating an improvised explosive device (IED) as a distraction followed by a targeted shooting.

The most recent political assassination in Yemen, as reported by Yemeni human rights lawyer Huda al-Sarari, occurred just last month, involving the killing of an imam in Lahj using the same method.

According to Gilmore, Comstock, and two other mercenaries from Spear who preferred not to be named, Spear had been engaged in training Emirati officers at the UAE military base in Aden. A journalist, wishing to remain anonymous, mentioned having seen footage of such training.

While the mercenaries did not provide detailed information about the training, a senior Yemeni military officer from Aden, who had direct dealings with the UAE, offered more insights.

Due to the conspicuous profile of the mercenaries in Aden and the risk of exposure, their role was altered to train Emirati officers, who, in turn, instructed local Yemenis in the targeting process, as revealed by the Yemeni military officer.

Throughout the investigation, over a dozen Yemeni sources, including two individuals claiming to have carried out non-terror-related assassinations after being trained by Emirati soldiers, corroborated this account. Additionally, one man mentioned he was offered release from a UAE prison in return for assassinating a senior Yemeni political figure, a mission he reportedly declined. Enlisting Yemenis for the assassinations aimed at making it more challenging to trace the killings back to the UAE.

Human rights lawyer Huda al-Sarari: A tale of UAE’s terror

Human rights lawyer Huda al-Sarari, who has been probing human rights violations committed by UAE-backed forces, faced death threats due to her work. Tragically, her 18-year-old son Mohsen was shot in the chest in March 2019 and succumbed to the injuries a month later.

After returning to work, al-Sarari received threatening messages warning her to stop, questioning if one son’s death was not enough. An investigation revealed Mohsen was killed by a member of the UAE-backed “Counter Terrorism Unit”, but no prosecution followed. Members of the prosecutor’s office admitted being too fearful to pursue justice in cases involving UAE-backed forces. A leaked UAE document obtained by Reprieve indicated that Spear was still receiving payment in 2020, although the capacity is unclear.