A Struggle for Peace in a Place Where Fighting Never Ends

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A Place Called al-Jawf
U.S. advisers trying to bring democratic reforms to Yemen's tribal areas face tremendous challenges, including poverty, lack of schools, and decades-long tribal conflicts that have claimed thousands of lives.

Because as he drove through a moonscape that truly was in the middle of nothing, a cylindrical shape appeared on the horizon, which turned out to be a lookout tower with bats in the stairwell and five men on top who are there day and night scanning the sky. They were looking for approaching missiles, one man said. Far in the distance, just visible, was another lookout tower, presumably with men on top watching them. "Hamdan," the man said.

Then came a village of a few lonesome houses where a man knelt in his front yard and stripped off his clothing while describing a recent battle in which two people were killed and four were injured, including him. He had a hole in his shoulder and a fresh gash across his back. "Is there a truce?" he asked Rabea.

"Yes," Rabea assured him.

"I don't trust this," the man said. He put on his clothes, buckled a belt that held his dagger, and hung his assault rifle over his shoulder. "We are ready," he declared.

And now came the village closest to the front, Al Hessn, which looked like something from the Middle Ages and felt like something still under attack. The amount of damage was striking: The mosque was crumbling, some houses were wrecked, and many others had been hit by bullets and mortars, including the most prominent building of all, a 350-year-old castle where Rabea lives part of the year with his third wife.

As intimidating as a castle with thick walls and turrets might seem, it was not safe. In fact, nothing is safe when there isn't a truce, Rabea said, not in Al Hessn or anywhere else. You can be killed in the mosque, he said. You can be killed in the market. You can be killed in school. You can be killed as you sleep in your bed. "If you're crazy, they don't kill you," he said. "If you're crazy, you're safe. So the only way out is to become crazy."

And if you're not crazy? You travel everywhere with armed guards, one of whom this day was Rabea's 19-year-old nephew Salih, who said one of the pleasures of life in Al Jawf is to pull the trigger of an assault rifle. He has seen "many" die, he said, the most recent in this very castle a couple of weeks before. It was a shot to the head, he said, and it was probably the worst thing he had seen. "We brought him downstairs and he was talking for about an hour," he said, and whenever shooting would erupt he would shudder and move his hands along the ground "as if searching for his gun."

The gun, of course, was a Kalashnikov. A new one costs about $350. A bullet costs 36 cents. Somehow in this poor place, everyone finds the money for at least one Kalashnikov and multiple clips, the only exception being an elderly man who instead was carrying a menacing-looking Chinese rifle.

The man, Saleh Ali al-Hadj, is a sniper. He said he used to be a farmer, and then the war began, and since then he had watched over Al Hessn from the same spot for "25 years and seven months, minus eight days." To get to the spot, he removed a seven-inch key from his belt, bent down and unlocked a miniature door that seemed straight out of a fairy tale. He crawled through the opening, climbed up a spiraling stairway and emerged on top of the tallest turret in the village.

There, mounted to the floor and covered with canvas, was the only American export ever to reach Al Hessn, a .50-caliber machine gun.

The sniper of Al Hessn explained what he knows about America. Its president is named Bush. It wants to invade Yemen. And it makes a machine gun whose bullets can accurately reach the Hamdan village he was looking at now through binoculars, where a man was climbing onto a tractor and a woman and child were walking hand in hand.

One other thing about the Hamdan village: Rabea's third wife is from there. She is Hamdan. And her father is a sheik who helps direct the Hamdan side of the war.