New Republic: The Story Behind The Siege Of Dammaj

by Theo Padnos

February 1, 2012

The worst moments in the siege of Dammaj came in late November and early December of last year. During those weeks, the villagers in this little-visited, extraordinarily pious settlement in the northwest corner of Yemen had no access to the only hospital in the region, and dwindling supplies of food. Meanwhile, from day to day, snipers in the hills picked off the citizens as they walked to their mosque.

The origins of this conflict lie in the age-old Sunni-Shia split. The attacking army is made up of fighters who adhere to a tradition within Shia Islam known as Zaydism. Most of the 10,000 villagers are students in an academy that considers itself one of the world's foremost centers for the study of Sunni Islam. The students say they have come to this high-altitude valley to live as scholars and to memorize. The Zaydis reply that their "academy" is a conspiracy funded by Saudi-Salafi zealots, and that the zealots have established themselves here in order to advance their dream of converting the globe to their Saudi-funded, Shiism-is-heresy version of Islam. On these points, the Zaydis may well be on to something.

ANYONE WHO has traveled in the region will know that Dammaj is an extraordinary feature in the Yemeni landscape. Most of the settlements on this desiccated, high-altitude plateau are ghost towns. Their young people have moved off to the cities or to nearby Saudi Arabia. With no one around to cultivate the land, the houses are being set upon by the advancing desert. Dammaj, in contrast, is a little jewel of grape vineyards, family garden plots, adobe neighborhoods, and makeshift mosques.

Its boom began in the early 1980s, in response to events that had occurred several hundred miles to the north, in Islam's most sacred city. Most of the conspirators who were involved in the seizure of the Great Mosque in Mecca in 1979 were either killed within the mosque or beheaded soon thereafter, but one figure, a professor who was suspected of acting as a spiritual mentor to the conspirators, was only jailed. When this teacher, Muqbil al Wadi, was released, he returned to his native village, a hamlet of grape growers and tall mud fortresses in Northern Yemen. Soon a new academy, funded by whom exactly no one knew, was flourishing there.

At first, the academy did a quiet business catering to Saudi and Yemeni students, along with a sprinkling of ambitious seekers from North Africa and the Levant. In 2001, however, following Sheikh Muqbil's death, a new sheikh permitted internet cafes to open in the village. He allowed the existing students to bring in wives and daughters.

Then came Sept. 11. Far away, in Europe and America, Muslims began to complain of a climate of hostility, especially on airplanes and in subways. Many Western Muslims felt that their governments were expelling the best imams, and that their mosques had become second homes for agents in the state spy agencies. Meanwhile, rumors circulated in the mosques across the West: In a village in Northern Yemen, Islam was as it had been in the time of the Prophet—pure, uncompromising, and gathering strength.

Not long after Sept. 11, cell phone service arrived in the village of Dammaj. Social networks spread across the internet. The students trickled in. When John Burns of The New York Times wrote about the village in 2000, he spoke of "dozens of Westerners, mostly of Arab descent." Nowadays, the Westerners number in the hundreds—and they are not only of Arab descent but also come from Pakistani, Turkish, Nigerian, and Indonesian families who have been living in the West for generations. It's not easy to put an exact number on the Westerners in Dammaj, even when one is living in the village, because the students' wives and daughters, most of whom are not official students, rarely leave their homes. Not all the men have four wives, as Islam allows, but many of the Westerners have more than one.

During the past several weeks, trucks bearing food and medical supplies have made their way into the village, but the students remain in a precarious position. According to their own tally, some 35 of them, including an American called Abdur Rahman Wheat, have been killed to date. Who will protect the rest? In previous decades, this task has fallen to the Yemeni government, but its armies are now too busy falling apart to look after the academy. At present, the Yemeni Shia control all the supply routes to the village. They have superior numbers and heavier arms. They have not yet wiped Dammaj off the map, but if they feel like it, they probably can.

On YouTube, the students have been posting videos which show how they've accommodated to the new order. To hinder incoming sniper fire, they have bricked up the windows in their mosque and draped plastic tarps over alleyways. They have transformed the village pathways into a system of battle trenches, with parapets made from stacks of sandbags.

Meanwhile, to judge by accounts the students have been posting to the internet, they are winning the war, though oddly enough, they are not really fighting. According to the campus discussion board (at aloloom.net) the young people there have rather been busy with their prayers, classes, and ceremonies. Allah himself is taking care of the battle: "The night is shadowed by the sounds of the sniper," writes Abu Laith al Britani in a dispatch from Dammaj that captures the dreamy quality of many of the students' posts, "and when the morning comes, you can see the wonders of Allah and his supreme ability as the Houthies [Shia fighters loyal to the Houthi clan] lay motionless, destroyed, as Allah has caused many to perish, and the praise belongs to Allah."

On this site, the students are always "the believers" and "the Muslims." As for the Shia fighters, they are "dirty dogs," "hypocrites," "the enemies of Allah," and often "raafidah." This last term, "raafidah," is a slur in Yemen which means "rejecters of Islam." It is everywhere on the student website, for instance as follows: "The raafidhah are a group of cowards they just try to snipe from far distance. SO ASK ALLAH TO DESTROY THE RAAFIDHAH." (Abu Fajr as Somali, Nov. 7.)

IN JAN. 2005, I took a job as a reporter for a local paper in the Yemeni capital, Sana'a. During the year I worked at the newspaper, I often bumped into American Muslims at fast food restaurants and at the public basketball courts in Sana'a. The fact that we were hanging around in the same parks and at the same imitation Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in the same Yemeni city gave us an instant basis for friendship, I felt. They did not agree. Nor did they want to tell me how they were getting on in their studies, what they were learning, or why they had left America. This, I felt, was unfair. A clique of unfriendly basketball players meant to keep me from an education in Islam? How illiberal, I thought. I liked the Koran and was interested in studying it, even though I was not myself Muslim.

So, professing to share their faith, I enrolled in these students' school. Right away, before the first moment of the first class, I found myself distracted by the crowds in my mosque. Not only did American and Yemeni Muslims study here, I discovered, but so did dozens of Belgians, French, Chechens, Bosnians, and Britons. In subsequent days I heard rumors of far more westerners—"thousands" was the operative word—in the mountains along the Saudi border, in a village of students called Dammaj. It took me about a year to learn enough about Islam to be permitted to travel to this village. I arrived in the fall of 2006.

At that time, the Yemeni government, rather than the student body in Dammaj, was battling the Houthi army. For the students, the war was a relatively distant thing—a matter of explosions in the hills and roadblocks on the highways. Nevertheless, whenever the subject of the surrounding villages came up, the students employed the same epithets they employ on their website now: "dirty," "disbelievers," "from the party of Satan"—and, because rumors circulated about their permissive attitude toward alcohol, "drunks."

Though we were not officially at war with the Houthies, we were certainly not at peace. Every now and then, the Zaydi minarets threatened to send missiles onto the roof of our mosque. Every now and then, our sheikh broadcast speeches from his roof, directed to listeners at the Zaydi end of the valley, in which he denounced them as Shia unbelieving enemies of God.

Because Islam obliges believers to defend their homes, and because our village had recently lived through two other Zaydi sieges, all the students owned Kalashnikovs. It was thought possible that the Zaydis could attack during the night. Because of this the students went out on Vietnam-style patrols of the village periphery in the evenings. Whenever they felt the need for additional weaponry, the students asked one of the village arms dealers to bring in more guns. This was as easy for the arms dealers as it was for the students since, as it happened, we lived within a twenty minute drive of one of the Peninsula's largest arms bazaars. Kalashnikovs there cost about $50.

IN THIS sort of academy, Allah is in charge. Anyone doubting its future stability and happiness doubts Allah himself. To doubt Allah is to make oneself into a disbeliever. One wouldn't want to do this in public, but from the beginning, I doubted. I suspected that in addition to imparting Islamic wisdom, the academy's leader, Sheikh Yahya al Hajoree, meant to reduce his students to sheep. I suspected he did this to give himself more power.

I was confident that my fellow students, meanwhile, many of whom were in badly over their heads, were capable of wandering into trouble on their own. In the years since I left Dammaj, at least one of my fellow students did just that. In November 2008, a dorm mate whom we called Abdul Hakim, but later turned out to be named Carlos Bledsoe, was arrested at a highway checkpoint in Yemen for having overstayed his visa. He was held in a Yemeni jail for a little while, then deported. The following spring, he turned up at a mall in Little Rock, Arkansas armed with 562 rounds of ammunition and two high-powered rifles. There, he murdered Private William Andrew Long, and shot but did not kill Private Quinton Ezeagwula, After his arrest, he wrote a note to Kristina Goetz, a reporter at theCommercial Appeal in Memphis, Tennessee, in which he regretted not having received proper military training in Yemen: "Had I got this training my story would have ended a lot differently than it's going to end now. My drive-by would of been a drive-in, with no one escaping the aftermath!!" Later in the note, he expressed confidence in his future: "I knew this would end with the enemies of Allah killing me. But the good thing is—Martyrs don't die!"

At some point during his stay in Yemen, the underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Mutallab, made a video in which, a gun at his side, he said into the camera: "Oh, brothers on the peninsula of the Arabs, you have the right to wage war because your enemies are in your land ... against the Christians and the Jews and their agents because the enemies are in your land."

I don't know if Mutallab studied in Dammaj or not, but the first time I watched this clip, it jolted me back to my former life in the village. The English-accented Arabic, the script the kid wants to memorize but hasn't quite been able to, the conviction in his heart, the uncertainty in his eyes, the nearby gun—in Dammaj one has dozens of friends who live for years in this state of mind. Listening to them at their recitations, I could hear the frustration in their voices. I watched them give up, search the mosque with their eyes, then try again.

Theo Padnos holds a Ph।D. in Comparative Literature and has lived and studied in both Syria and Yemen.

A Shia Militia, a Sunni Madrassa, and the Story Behind a Siege in Yemen