—
Mokhtar went about his work as best he could. Every day he opened the processing mill for his sorters and provided breakfast, and they talked about the previous day’s work and what needed to get done that day. He continued to train them, watching each of them, giving them notes.
After lunch he’d go to Andrew’s mill to chew qat and talk business and politics. They didn’t know if anything happening in Yemen would materially affect the country or their work. It seemed, at first, simply the usual transfers of power between equally incompetent players.
On January 7, two brothers, Chérif and Said Kouachi, entered the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and shot eleven people dead. On their way out, they shot and killed a policeman. A third man, Amedy Coulibaly, shot and killed a policeman in Montrouge, south of Paris, and four at a kosher market. The attacks, precipitated by Charlie Hebdo’s publishing of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, brought forth a global outpouring of support for the magazine and its slain writers, editors and cartoonists. On Sunday, January 11, more than four million people throughout France marched in support of the victims and the right to free expression.
On January 14, the Yemeni branch of al-Qaeda—al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula—claimed responsibility for the attack.
—
On January 18, the Houthis in Yemen rejected a new constitution drawn up by committee across the political spectrum. The next day, they seized the state television station. They took over all the government buildings in Sana’a, and President Hadi resigned in protest. Weeks later he rescinded his resignation, but it didn’t matter. The Houthis had control of the country.
Mokhtar’s family and friends in the United States worried for him, but Mokhtar saw very little change in his daily life. He’d gone to bed one night with Hadi in power, and woke up without a president. And yet the airport was still open and hosted regular commercial flights. The banks functioned as usual. And the grocery stores, the health clubs, the mosques. Taxi drivers drove their taxis. Sana’a was still Sana’a, though it was now run by the Houthis. The lives of everyday working Yemenis continued unchanged. Mokhtar spent afternoons at Andrew’s mill, chewing qat with Ali and together they laughed at the Yemeni Americans who were fleeing the country.
“We have no government now,” Mokhtar said.
“Wait. Yemen had a government?” Andrew asked.
—
On February 10, 2015, the U.S. State Department announced that it was suspending embassy operations. The staff, it said, had been relocated out of Sana’a. The next day the U.S. embassy was closed for good. The British embassy closed, too, and the U.S. and British governments urged their citizens to leave the country immediately. But there were no plans for a U.S. evacuation of American citizens. Commercial flights were still available, the State Department noted, and “U.S. government–facilitated evacuations occur only when no safe commercial alternatives exist.”
The French foreign ministry closed a few days later. “Given the recent political developments, and for security reasons,” their statement read, “the Embassy invites you to temporarily leave Yemen, as soon as possible, via commercial flights at your convenience. The Embassy will temporarily be closed as of Friday, February 13, 2015, until further notice.”
It was not unusual for the Western embassies to close for a day or a week. The U.S embassy had closed in 2001, 2008 and 2009. It was part of the rhythm of life in Yemen, Mokhtar assumed. The heat turned up, the embassies closed, and then, a few weeks later, with things calm again, they would reopen.
—
Andrew was staying, too. They promised to keep each other informed of their plans. Until things became untenable—or, more specifically, until they couldn’t continue their coffee work—they would remain.
A few hours every day, Mokhtar tried to convince his investors to pay for the coffee he’d promised to buy from Hubayshi. It had been two months, and the investors were intractable. And as conditions worsened in Yemen, their hold on their money became ever tighter.
Mokhtar called Ghassan for advice. He called Willem. And Hubayshi called him daily. Where is my money?
By March, most of the Yemeni Americans Mokhtar knew had left. He began to worry for Andrew. Mokhtar was part of a vast tribe and could count on their protection. But Andrew had no such heritage. In this new period, where standards and order were no longer reliable, any foreigner could become a target for kidnapping. Jennifer, Andrew’s wife, would be safe if she stayed inside, but Andrew was known and would be sought out.
On March 20, suicide bombers detonated themselves inside two different mosques in Sana’a. Because it was during Friday prayers, the mosques, used by Houthi Shiites, were full. One hundred and thirty-seven men, women and children were killed, and over three hundred were wounded. This was the worst-ever terrorist attack on Yemeni soil, and was claimed by ISIS.
On March 21, ISIS posted the names and addresses of all one hundred American military personnel in Yemen and encouraged its acolytes to kill them. These last U.S. personnel were evacuated on March 25, and the same day they left al-Anad, just north of Aden, the Houthis quickly seized the strategic military base. The Houthis also took control of the Aden International Airport and Aden’s central bank.
Saudi Arabia, which had clashed with the Houthis in 2009 and 2010, now massed artillery and tanks near the Yemen-Saudi border. By late March, the Houthis controlled nine of the twenty-one provinces of Yemen, including Taiz, the country’s third-largest city.
“It looks bad,” Mokhtar said.
He and Andrew were at the mill, chewing qat in the afternoon.
“It’s Yemen,” Andrew said.
They were not yet committed to leave Yemen for good. But they were planning to leave temporarily to attend the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA) conference in Seattle. Rayyan had rented a booth, and with hundreds of importers and buyers there from around the world, Mokhtar and Andrew considered the conference a crucial step in their work. Mokhtar would share Andrew’s booth and present his Haymah and Udaini coffees. The conference would be his most important event to date, his first real introduction of the progress he’d made with Yemeni varietals.
—
Getting out of Yemen even during peacetime, even for American citizens, had become a fraught proposition. The stories started circulating in 2011. Yemeni Americans would go into the U.S. embassy for some routine request and leave without a passport. There had been bizarre interrogations, accusations of Yemeni Americans changing their names, living in the U.S. under false identities. Mokhtar had heard the stories. They were strange and unreal, none more so than that of Mosed Shaye Omar.
He was an acquaintance of Mokhtar’s from San Francisco. A gentle man of about sixty, he’d lived in the United States for over forty years. In 1978 he’d become a naturalized U.S. citizen. He had a social security number, a California driver’s license, paid his taxes faithfully.
Like thousands of other immigrants, he’d left family members in his country of origin. In his case, one daughter had stayed behind with his own parents in Yemen. When she was twelve, Mosed was ready to bring her to live with him in San Francisco. In 2012 he went back to Yemen to prepare the paperwork to get her a passport. In August of that year, at the U.S. embassy in Sana’a, he submitted his application for a U.S. passport for his daughter.
In December of 2012, he was summoned to the U.S. embassy. They called him on the phone to say they had “good news” about his daughter’s passport application.
On January 23, 2013, he went to the embassy, thinking he’d be picking up his daughter’s passport. When he got there, a consular official asked for his passport. Mosed handed it to the official, who asked him to sit in the waiting room.
About an hour later, Mosed was escorted out of the waiting room. He followed an official through the main building and into an adjoining building. They walked through a number of secure doors, guarded by uniformed U.S. military personnel. Already he
knew that this was likely a departure from anything standard. He knew he was not being led to his daughter’s passport.
He was taken into a small room where there were three men. One was an official with the Diplomatic Security Service, and another man served as an interpreter. The third man seemed to be an American, but he didn’t speak throughout the process, which Mosed came to understand was an interrogation.
Through the interpreter, the man from the Diplomatic Security Service asked Mosed questions about his origins, his family, his name. Mosed told him his name was Mosed Shaye Mosed. It was the name on his passport, after all—a passport granted and renewed by the State Department as recently as 2007.
After an hour, Mosed was escorted out of the interrogation room and back to the waiting room he’d started in. He was told to remain there.
An hour later, he was brought back through the secure doors and hallways, past the armed guards again and back to the interrogation room. The man from the Diplomatic Security Service again asked Mosed about his name. Mosed again insisted his name was Mosed Shaye Omar, the only name he’d ever had. The interpreter seemed frustrated with Mosed and began inserting his own advice into the dialogue. Beyond translating what the Diplomatic Security Service agent said, he began telling Mosed to cooperate, to tell the agent what he wanted to hear.
This second session lasted another hour, at which point Mosed was again brought back to the general waiting room. He was told to wait there. Hours passed. Mosed hadn’t had access to food or water since six-thirty that morning, difficult in normal circumstances but in Mosed’s case especially trying. He suffered from diabetes and high blood pressure, and while waiting, he felt faint, and his vision blurred. He couldn’t call family or friends, given cell phones were not permitted in the building, and the building had no pay phones.
At 4:00 p.m., Mosed was so desperate to be released that he approached a guard and told him that he needed to leave, that he would do anything to be allowed to go home and eat. The guard conveyed this to the embassy officials, and soon a consular official arrived and escorted him back to the interrogation room.
There, he was given a piece of paper to sign. He was not a fluent reader of English, so he couldn’t parse the paper’s meaning. The interpreter was in the room but didn’t offer to translate it. Mosed was told to sign it if he wanted to leave the embassy. He signed the paper with his name, Mosed S. Omar, and the interpreter took his thumbprint.
After he signed the statement, he was taken back to the waiting room and told to wait for the consul, who would return his passport. But his passport was not returned. Mosed was called to the window and told that his passport could not be returned because his name was not Mosed Shaye Omar. At that, the official closed the window, left the room, and Mosed was escorted to the door by an armed guard.
Mosed went home, and because he hadn’t eaten or had water in twelve hours, he experienced a severe diabetic attack, and was rushed to the hospital. As he was being treated, he struggled to understand what had happened at the embassy. He’d been given no explanation of how they’d come to think he was not actually Mosed Shaye Omar. They provided no evidence. They offered no explanation and gave him no opportunity for redress. He wasn’t given a date for a hearing, or any idea of what he was supposed to do without a passport, while most of his family was in the United States, and he had lived there for forty years.
The next day, he began calling the embassy, but the phone was never answered. He learned that e-mail was the embassy’s preferred method of communication, so he began writing e-mails. For the next eleven months, he wrote to the embassy but received no response. Finally, in December of 2013, almost a year after his passport was confiscated on January 23, he received an e-mail telling him to come to the embassy. He did so on December 15, and when he arrived he was given a written notice explaining that his passport had been revoked because “an investigation revealed that you are not Mosed Shaye Omar, born on February 1, 1951. In fact, you are Yasin Mohammed Ali Alghazali, born on February 1, 1951. On January 23, 2013, you signed a sworn statement admitting that your true identity is Yasin Mohammed Ali Alghazali. Because you made a false statement of material fact in your passport application, your passport is revoked pursuant to Section 51.62(a)(2) of Title 22 of the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations.”
—
Mokhtar heard similar stories for years. Going to the U.S. embassy for any kind of help, then, was not an option.
On March 25, just after the final American troops abandoned Yemen, and a day after Houthi forces advanced on Aden and forced President Hadi to flee by sea, Mokhtar directed a taxi to his local Yemeni travel agent, whose office was still open in Sana’a, to buy plane tickets to Seattle, for a coffee conference.
But when the driver got close to the travel office, Mokhtar saw a throng of Houthi mourners. It was the funeral for the victims of the March 20 attack. Soon the crowd had spilled into the street and the taxi was surrounded. Mokhtar knew he shouldn’t be there. The funeral was a target—terrorists had made a habit of bombing funeral gatherings to double their body count. Mokhtar got out of the taxi and pushed his way through the crowds. He’d get his ticket later.
The next day, President Hadi made a direct appeal to Saudi Arabia, asking for its help in turning the tide on the Houthi movement. Citing the Houthis’ ties to Iran, he pleaded for direct Saudi military involvement. Mokhtar heard about Hadi’s appeal but didn’t think much of it. No one did. Mokhtar couldn’t remember if the Saudis even had an army.
CHAPTER XXIX
MOUNTAINS ON FIRE
AT 3:00 A.M. ON March 26, Mokhtar was rattled awake. The building was shaking. He was at the Rayyan mill; he’d been working late and decided to sleep in Andrew’s office. The rattle brought him to the roof, where he saw Raj Attan Mountain on fire. Houthi antiaircraft fire striped the sky. Fires plumed around the city. It was the end of the world.
Mokhtar went online and confirmed it was the Saudis. F-15s were bombing Houthi positions all around Sana’a. Every few minutes there was another strike. The ceiling shook and dust rained down.
Mokhtar called his mother. “I’m okay,” he said. She begged him to leave the capital and go to Ibb, to Hamood’s house. Mokhtar thought it through. Ibb was no doubt safer—the Saudis were unlikely to bomb Ibb. But going anywhere in the middle of a bombing campaign seemed unwise. Mokhtar was in a high-density residential neighborhood of Sana’a, and from all the news he was getting it seemed that the Saudis were after the Houthis’ military positions and munitions dumps only. They wouldn’t bomb a civilian neighborhood.
He told his mother not to worry and hung up. He tried to sleep. He counted the air strikes. Fifty, sixty. He lost track at eighty.
—
At 5:00 a.m., he heard the call to prayer. Then another. Competing calls echoed through the city. He went to the street, determined to wait out the last hour of darkness at the mosque. On his way, between the black silhouettes of the buildings, he saw the bright white stripes of antiaircraft fire.
Inside the mosque, a few dozen men were gathered as the bombing continued. The rug was gray with the ceiling’s plaster. The imam performed a long supplication, and the congregants prayed as if living their last minutes. There couldn’t be so many military targets in Sana’a, Mokhtar thought. They must be hitting civilians and this must really be war. When the imam asked God to forgive the sins of those present, the men around him wept, and Mokhtar knew he might die there, that at any moment a bomb would rip through the roof.
Had it been a good life? Mokhtar thought. He wasn’t sure. It was incomplete. He should have started all this coffee business sooner, he thought. Had he begun a year earlier, he would have at least done something, finished something, before the bombs rained down. Now he would die in a mosque. Maybe his family might find some comfort in that. Another bomb struck, now closer.
The men around him stopped crying. They had submitted to their fate. Mokhtar did, too. Nothing was within his control, so he lost
all fear and worry. He felt a weight leave his shoulders. He would die, he would not die. It had nothing to do with him. He could run from the mosque and die. He could stay in the mosque and die. He could go to Kenza and Mohamed’s home and die among his family. He could go to Rayyan and die with his coffee.
Or maybe he wouldn’t die. He and the congregants stayed an hour, until finally the quiet between bombs spread and became whole. At daybreak it was over. When Mokhtar and the rest of the men left the mosque, the sun had begun to rise and the city was bathed in an eerie pink light, the air bright with dust.
Mokhtar, feeling a new and encompassing peace, walked from the mosque to the mill, sure that nothing would ever frighten him again. It was as if he had died already.
—
Later that morning, he went back to the travel agent. He told her he wanted two tickets out of Sana’a. He and Andrew had to get to the SCAA conference. “What are you talking about?” the travel agent said. “There’s no airport.” The Saudis had destroyed runways and threatened to shoot down any plane leaving Sana’a.
Mokhtar went to the mill. He and Andrew chewed qat. “It was closed during the Arab Spring, too,” Andrew said. “It’ll reopen.”
Mokhtar checked the U.S. State Department website, expecting to find information about an organized evacuation for American citizens. There was nothing of the kind. Every day, the State Department offered vague indications that Yemeni Americans should find passage out of the country by any means available.
There was recent precedent for the U.S. State Department helping its own citizens evacuate from a foreign country at war. In 2006, the Pentagon and State Department helped fifteen thousand Americans leave Lebanon during the war between Israel and Hezbollah.
But this was different. Given the presence of AQAP and ISIS, the U.S. decided it could not risk a large evacuation. They had no embassy or staff on the ground, thus had no effective way of screening all the prospective passengers on a plane or ship. They deemed the prospect of unintentionally bringing a terrorist into the United States too great a risk. They decided to leave American citizens stuck in Yemen to their own devices.