BBC Investigation: UAE Funded Political Assassinations in Yemen

Facts

• A new BBC investigation has found that the United Arab Emirates (UAE) — a key partner of the Western-backed and Saudi-led international coalition against the Iran-aligned Houthi rebels — has funded more than 100 politically-motivated assassinations in Yemen over a three-year period starting in 2015.¹
• This comes as a documentary from BBC Arabic, American Mercenaries: Killing in Yemen, which was set to be aired on BBC 2 on Tuesday night, narrates how the US-based private military Spear Operations Group was hired to carry out targeted killings and train the Emirati-backed Southern Transition Council.²
• Additionally, the report claims that former al-Qaeda members, including a high-ranking official, have allegedly been recruited to work with the Council in southern Yemen in a security capacity, with court documents showing that at least one of them was offered release from prison in exchange for carrying out assassinations.³
• Most of those said to have been killed extrajudicially on Emirati orders were members of Yemen’s branch of the popular international Sunni Islamist movement Muslim Brotherhood, which is banned in several Arab countries — including in the UAE where the royal family sees it as a threat to their rule. Only 23 out of the 160 people killed between 2016 and 2018 reportedly had links to terrorism.¹
• According to apparent lists of assassination targets that BBC obtained, the award-winning lawyer Huda al-Sarari and the politician Ansaf Ali Mayo were among those whose killings had been directed by the UAE. In response to BBC, Emirati officials claimed that all these claims were false.²
• Allegations that the UAE hired American mercenaries to carry out a targeted assassination program against its political enemies in war-torn Yemen first emerged in 2018, with BuzzFeed News detailing a failed operation to kill Mayo based on the accounts of two participants that were corroborated by drone surveillance footage.⁴

Sources: ¹BBC News, ²Reprieve, ³Middle East Eye and ⁴Buzzfeed.

Narratives

• Narrative A, as provided by Barron's. Though this investigation has just been released, its claims are all too similar to others made in the past which have already been proved false and politically motivated. Should any credible allegations of wrongdoing in its counter-terrorism operations ever come to light, the UAE will rigorously investigate them. However, there will be no need given the lack of credibility to these allegations, once again.
• Narrative B, as provided by TRT World. This new BBC documentary confirms what several other investigations have found over the past years — that the UAE has indeed hired mercenaries to carry out high-profile political killings in Yemen and advance its geopolitical ambitions in the Middle East. It’s disturbing that the UAE still denies its actions when all evidence points to the contrary.

Predictions