In the early 1990s, I arrived in what would soon become one of my favorite places in the world — the scorching hot and unbelievably humid port city of Aden, at southernmost tip of the Arabian peninsula. It was almost the only unequivocally positive thing I’d gotten out of three years math-heavy coursework for which I had been woefully unprepared. My background in Arabic, and a creative dissertation proposal got me a Fulbright, one of whose purposes was to draw American academics’ attention to Yemen’s economic challenges.
My discomfort, it seemed, had been a portal to a gift, for Yemen was like no other place I’d experienced in the Middle East: extremely poor, but culturally rich, and home to an endless supply of striking landscapes, from the frosted mud-brick buildings of the high-altitude capital, Sana’a, to the green hills of Ibb, and the fairytale-white Hadhrami city of Mukulla. I was based in Sana’a, but made frequent trips to Aden, where the world’s expert on Red Sea maritime logistics adopted me and taught me something about ports.
Tawahi:
In this summer, the heat and humidity were so high it was almost too hot to move; your shirt would turn damp as soon as you put it on. I spent many days in an conference room in the Port Marketing Office at Tawahi, home to many of the Colonial British landmarks, including the Crescent Hotel, a former watering hole for British servicemen, which appears in many writings from the 1950s and 1960s. The British were forced out of their Crown Colony in 1967 by a Marxist-Leninist insurgency, led by the Front for the Liberation of South Yemen (FLOSY). That would mark the beginning of the end for the British Middle East empire. India’s 1947 independence and partition was already 20 years old.
By four or five o’clock, temperatures would dip down to the mid-90s, just low enough accommodate mile-long walk along a winding, single-lane coastal road to the old Beach Club, now the Gold Mohur, identifiable from a distance by a cluster of dark green parasols, arranged under a limestone formation that vaguely resembled an Elephant’s trunk. The area around it had been named, aptly, Elephant Bay.
My ultimate destination was not the Club, but Sahel al Ishq , or Lovers’ Beach, just beyond; a strip of grey sand at the end of a narrow bay. The strip took its name from couples canoodling in the recessed cubby holes of the breakwater, practically invisible to those swimming in the surf. This scene was one of the cultural and religious violations that managed to slide by in this anomalous part of the otherwise highly conservative Yemen, which for two decades had been part of Communist South Yemen, where Islamic prescriptions were not applied.
(Queen Elizabeth in her younger years, against a map of Greater Aden)
The water at Lovers’ Beach was a light fluorescent green. At high tide, with a wind, the sediment was so riled up, you couldn’t see the bottom. There were sea snakes in this tepid soup, their presence confirmed by the occasional carcass lying on top of a clump of seaweed, its yellow, striated underbelly resembling layers of canned tuna.
In the middle of the beach, half submerged, was the rusted hulk of a personnel carrier left over from an amphibious landing during the 1994 Civil War, which sealed the North’s vice-grip over the South. A few years later the structure would grab a child and pull him under, the first of several accidents that ultimately led the Yemeni coast guard to dismantle the dangerous eyesore.
The waves created a lulling action that belied the presence of a powerful rip-tide, which every year claimed a few more swimmers’ lives. But the combination of the snakes, the murky water, the hulk, and the riptide couldn’t chase away the euphoria that one felt swimming here, inoculated briefly against the heat and humidity.
Bombs Here, Bombs There:
A few minutes’ walk up the hill had been Seera Brewery, named for the speck of an island on which Captain John Haines, agent of the British Raj, landed in 1837 to claim Aden for the Crown. In the 70s, Seera had been known to produce some of the best- quality ale in the Middle East.
Lurking above Gold Mohur and Lovers’ Beach both was the 500-meter high Jebel Shamsan (known locally as Shum-Shum), part of a chain of extinct volcanoes that make up the Aden peninsula, attached to the mainland by a long, single-lane causeway. With its sharp ramp and spectacular vistas, Shum-Shum was a favorite early-morning climbing spot for expats who called Aden home. Occasionally, one could hear muffled booms as de-mining teams cleared the base of unexploded ordnance.
Since unification Aden had been marketed as the economic capital, the 'lungs' of a unified Yemen. As a point of convergence between ultra-large container ships and smaller feeder vessels, the city was poised to take advantage its unique, natural deep-water harbor and proximity to the mainline East-West shipping lane linking Asia to Europe through the Bab El Mandeb straits and the Suez Canal. The veiled hope was that Aden might meet and surpass its former bustle as a British Crown Colony - one of the best equipped ports in the Red Sea, and the main refueling port on the way to the British Raj.
A wonderful 2017 series The Last Post, brought the last days of British Aden alive, following a group of military families as they reeled from attacks by FLOSY, the Front for the Liberation of South Yemen. The attention to detail was so great I couldn’t immediately tell it was filmed at the tip of another downward facing landmass - Cape Town, South Africa.
Many refused to believe the 1990 vision of Aden’s resurrection. They’d seen the much more powerful North lay claim to Aden’s prime real estate and whittled down their influence in a unity government. Many locals took to calling the new Free Zone, or Mintaq al Hurra, as Mintaq al Furra - politely, the place where the sun doesn’t shine. Another anatomical description of Aden to add to the list.
(aerial view of Aden peninsula, with Elephant Bay on the far side)
The Rock:
Perched on top of a limestone cliff, the Rock Hotel had seen better days. The cube-shaped structure had been built in the early 1970s by Lebanese communists as a refuge for a hodgepodge of international misfits and radicals. Carlos The Jackal was said to have hid from the long arm of the law here for a time, alongside members of George Habash’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). When post-Soviet Russia withdrew its subsidies from former Communist allies like the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, the Rock withered as well.
On my way back to Tawahi from the beach, I’d stop to sit on a plastic chair on the Rock’s thin patio, abutting the one-lane coastal road. Eventually, a fat man in a short sleeve button-down shirt too thick for the heat, would bring out a warm lemon Fanta. He spoke with a Palestinian accent. He told me he had been exiled from his family in Ramallah, for more than a decade. Having no way back to his family, he married a Yemeni woman and tried to imagine he had always been here,
I wondered what connection, if any, he had to the hotel’s former revolutionary guests.
On the other side of the structure was a ledge, overlooking the vast expanse of the Indian Ocean. It felt like a perfect place for a flat-earth convention, with limitless sea ahead, and no trace of curvature on the horizon. 20 meters below, waves crashed, ever so slowly pecking away at the limestone cliff. A bit farther out, a couple of modest oil tankers lay at anchor. Their Iraqi crews had been shut out of any other ports of call due to sanctions levied against Iraq after the US pushed Saddam Hussain out of Kuwait.
“Their fate is our fate, as well,” I heard someone say, over my shoulder.
The Castaways:
Aden was one of few regional ports where Baghdad could surreptitiously sell its crude. The two tankers had been anchored here for years, apparently, and their crews were not permitted ashore. The local government provided them food and water, but they had been here now for years. I suddenly appreciated my freedom.
The owners told me about a “mysterious" American” who came to stay every month for three days and trained his night vision binoculars on the decks of the ships below, watching the occasional and lugubrious movements of the crew.
On a per-capita basis Adenis continued to drink a liter or more a day, despite pressure from other Arab states on the South Yemeni government to shut the brewery down for good. The Salafists got to it first. Next to it, a hotel where US sailors occasionally spent the night. It too was bombed one night, leaving a shallow crater where the fermenting vats used to be.
Aden: Shooting Range For Al Qaeda
Post-9/11 US interrogations of jihadist prisoners revealed that the hotel was bombed by Al Qaeda, with the intention to kill billeted American sailors, who had, unbeknownst to the attackers been assigned elsewhere. Those interrogations would provide more information about other attacks and attempted attacks that had taken place in Aden. Had those connections been made earlier, some have speculated, Al Qaeda’s 9/11 plans might have been foiled.
With the rise of jihadist groups later known as Al Shabab (The Youth) in Somalia in the 80s, the US switched its refueling base from Somalia’s neighbor, Djibouti, to Aden, 67 miles as the crow flies. American frigates and destroyers refueled offshore, from ‘lighters’ -- floating docks — about 30 meters out.
In 1998, the formerly Communist newspaper Al Ayyam (The Days) published a prominent editorial warning that American ships bunkering at Tawahi were open to attack. A few months later, In December, U.S. President Bill Clinton bombed targets in Iraq in response to Saddam Hussain’s violation of UN sanctions and interference with inspectors looking for Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).
The Friday sermons (Khutbas) carried forth from megaphones attached to the outside of local mosques to rail against evil American imperialists. A few days later, a surface-to-air-missile just missed clipping the tail of a Royal Jordanian Airbus taking off from the airport in Khormaksar, on its four-hour flight up the Red Sea, to Amman. The same route plied by Nabatean traders, who took frankincense and myrrh on horseback 1000 kilometers North to Egypt, Syria and Mesopotamia. To escape the escalating tension I decamped for three months far down the East African coast, to the island of Mauritius.
The Strike:
October 12, 2000, a dinghy full of explosives detonated next to the American destroyer USS Cole, killing 17 US sailors and the suicide bombers, and wounding 37. A preventable tragedy, that provoked a massive investigation by the FBI, whose agents swarmed Yemen in the following months and shook President Ali Abdullah Saleh for answers. That was the beginning of a revolving door relationship between Saleh and Al Qaeda, as Saleh requested more and more American arms to fight the jihadists — while simultaneously facilitating their escape.
The attack didn’t just destroy the Cole, it knocked Aden out of mega-hub contention, by raising insurance rates to astronomical levels. In 2002, two years after the Cole, and one year after 9/11, Al Qaeda attacked another ship, the French oil tanker Limburg, also using small, explosive-laden skiffs. In some ways the Limburg bombing had more of an economic impact on Aden than the Cole: Western governments took it as a sign that Al Qaeda was aiming to disrupt global energy supply through the Gulf of Aden. This was a precursor to the wave of maritime piracy that dogged traffic through the lower Red Sea and Gulf of Aden during the 2010s.
I am Bubblicious:
Looking back on this period much later, I thought about my solo wanderings within the eye of a gathering storm. I had been a witness to the very beginnings of a war that would become the obsessive focus of American foreign policy for the following two decades, and continues as such. I had been vulnerable, and vigilant, but still completely unaware of the scale and scope -- and global import -- of what was quietly happening around me. I swam from one side of the bay to the other, my biggest worry: bumping into a sea snake.
I haven’t been back to Yemen since 2000. The country has been torn apart by civil war, fanned by outside forces — including the United States, and the U.N.— who have collectively created a humanitarian disaster. Without concerted action by the international community, support and investment the situation will almost certainly get worse for the Yemeni people. And it’s hard to imagine an American graduate student today being able and willing, to reconnoiter the city as I did then.
Recommended Reading on Yemen:
Mackintosh-Smith, Tim: Yemen: the Unknown Arabia (an erudite narrative by one of the world’s experts on Yemen. Mackintosh-Smith has just written a tour de force, The Arabs.
Lackner, Helen: Yemen in Crisis (a more academic treatment of modern Yemen, by another deep expert).
Dresch, Paul, A History of Modern Yemen (The best pre-2000s history of Yemen, sorely needs an update)
Eggers, Dave, The Monk of Mokha (“the true story of a young Yemeni-American man, raised in San Francisco, who dreams of resurrecting the ancient art of Yemeni coffee but finds himself trapped in Sana'a by civil war, and his riveting tale of escape.”)
I am swimming right along with you in Yemen’s waters. You have the gift of carrying a reader on your shoulders, a refreshing relish in the moment that powers above naïveté and seasons the dish at hand with a skillful historian’s objectivity. When I first learned that you had been in Yemen, I knew that one day I would read the story. Worth the wait.
It’s as gripping as a great novel, Ethan! I’m ashamed to say I know next to nothing about Yemen. Now I want to know more. I hope you continue the story.