UAE denies funding political assassinations in Yemen through US mercenaries

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has funded politically-motivated assassinations in Yemen, according to a BBC report which Emirati authorities have denied.

Citing an anonymous whistleblower and other figures who were involved in the operations, the BBC investigation conducted by journalist Nawal Al-Maghafi reported that American mercenaries – hired by the UAE in 2015 – had trained Emirati military officers and subsequently local Yemenis in tactics to assassinate figures for political reasons, rather than counter-terrorism reasons.

In a three-year period starting from 2015, over 100 assassinations were conducted in Yemen against Yemeni citizens without connections to designated terror groups, with the first taking place in December 2015 against Ansaf Mayo, a Yemeni MP who was the leader of the Islah Party in the southern port city of Aden.

Based on leaked drone footage of that incident, the assassination was traced to members of a private American security firm named Spear Operations Group, members of whom were contacted and interviewed as part of the investigation. Figures from Spear such as Isaac Gilmore, a former US Navy Seal and later chief operating officer of the firm, acknowledged that the UAE had hired them to carry out the assassinations in the war-torn country.

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Once their presence became more noticeable amongst the local populace, the mercenaries reportedly taught the tactics to Emirati officers at the UAE’s military base in Aden. Those officers in turn taught and delegated the tasks to local Yemenis. That was apparently a strategy to make it harder for the assassinations to be traced back to Abu Dhabi.

The operations were reportedly a key factor of the UAE’s charge of security in the south of Yemen, as the Saudi-led Gulf Arab coalition waged war against the Houthis and the US entrusted Abu Dhabi to counter groups such as Al-Qaeda in the country. The result was the establishment of a Southern Transitional Council (STC) and its paramilitary forces by 2017, with the whistleblower saying that the STC’s elite Counter Terrorism Unit was trained to conduct assassinations.

According to investigators from the human rights group Reprieve, out of 160 killings carried out in Yemen between 2015 and 2018, only 23 of those killed had links to terrorism. Despite the UAE being tasked with countering terrorism, it had also reportedly recruited former Al-Qaeda members for that security force, with the whistleblower revealing a document showing 11 names of the group’s former members now working in the STC.

The Emirati government has denied the allegations in the report, calling them “false and without merit”. It also insisted that the “UAE has acted in compliance with applicable international law during these operations.”

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