A Struggle for Peace in a Place Where Fighting Never Ends

"We are talking about violence. We are talking about armed confrontation. We are talking about people who are killed every day," one U.S. Embassy official said, cautioning against such a visit. "They are the border of Saudi Arabia, and that's where al Qaeda is."

"We don't have terror in our area," Rabea said. "What we have are tribal wars, poverty and illiteracy." His only caution about visiting: Not only is he one of the few people from Al Jawf ever to have met an American, he is also one of the few to have positive feelings about a place that most people there hate because of Iraq, Abu Ghraib, the Palestinian issue, a widely believed rumor that the United States wants to invade Yemen, and a recent increase in fuel prices urged on Yemen by the World Bank, which is assumed to be under U.S. control.

"You will need to be tolerant. You will hear nasty things. 'Americans do this. Americans do that,' " he said -- and on Sept. 23, 12 days after the ambush and in the first moments of a trip into a part of Al Jawf that has never seen an American, that's exactly what was taking place.

"I want the hurricane to destroy the U.S.," a man was saying after hearing a report on a battery-powered radio about Hurricane Rita approaching Texas.

"So the U.S. knows that God is bigger," another man said. The two men and a dozen others were sitting on the sand in a very dark desert, finishing a midnight dinner of freshly killed goat after a four-hour drive over rocks and through ravines. It was too dark to see anything other than the silhouettes of the men as they unshouldered their assault rifles and talked about whether "the U.S. will do to Yemen what it did to Iraq," as one of them said.

Off to the side there was an orange glow as a man inhaled a cigarette. This is Rabea. He is 38 years old. He has three wives. He has 11 children. Thirteen days ago, he didn't smoke. Twelve days ago, he began.

What is Al Jawf to the U.S. government? It's a place of concern because of terrorism. What is it to Robin Madrid? It's a place in need of democracy and rescue. What is it to Rabea? That's what he would try to answer over the next three days, beginning the next morning when the sun rose early and hot over a landscape empty and vast.

Just as there are no police here, or courts or government or law, there are also no roads, only smoothed tracks in the dirt and sand, which Rabea and his armed guards drove along until they arrived at a village called Aal Shinnon. It has no electricity, no functioning school, no functioning anything, only an angry man who, when the subject of the United States came up, said, "We're ready for the Americans. If they come, we will kill them."

Next stop: a village called Al Muhtoon, where a man said of the United States, "It's the biggest country in the world, and it doesn't do much good for the world." Why, he asked bitterly, doesn't American money come here? He was standing outside the health clinic, which had bullet holes in the front gate, trash in the courtyard, a padlock on the door and nothing visible inside except a broken scale, a rusted bed frame and a dust-coated sink. A year ago, there was a doctor here, the man said. He stayed for two months, waiting for the government to send equipment and medicine, and when nothing showed up he went away.

And so it went in village after village, until Rabea arrived at his destination for this first day, a dusty town of 5,000 people called Mymerra. This is the village where Rabea was raised, along with 22 brothers and sisters, in a house that has seven photographs on the walls, one of which is of Osama bin Laden. "He is considered a great fighter here," Rabea explained.

There may be no greater compliment in Al Jawf, where tribal wars are so common that over the past 40 years, according to one estimate, 5,730 people have been killed. One of those wars is between Rabea's tribe, called the Shawlan, and a neighboring tribe, called the Hamdan, in which 75 people have been killed over 25 years of intermittent fighting, seven of them in the past several months.

What begins such a war? Someone wants to dig a well, or build a house, or siphon some rainwater runoff, on land that bordering tribes claim as their own. Out come the assault rifles, the grenades, the missile launchers. And soon entire villages are on the move to somewhere momentarily safe, until one more truce can be worked out in a place stitched together not by a shared vision of civilization but by temporary agreements written on flimsy pieces of paper.