II. Mounting Violence before the Friday of Dignity Attack

The Friday of Dignity attack did not take place in a vacuum. Across Yemen in the weeks and days preceding the massacre, security forces and pro-government gangs repeatedly attacked the fledgling protest movement.[19] 

The most violent attacks in Sanaa took place at Change Square, a sprawling tent city that the protesters created in February 2011 outside the gates of Sanaa University, in the west of the capital. Change Square became the center of the movement against President Saleh—a burgeoning city within a city complete with vendors, a stage for speeches and entertainment, a makeshift hospital inside a mosque and volunteer lawyers and security forces.  It rapidly expanded south into a mixed residential and commercial area. The expansion created splits in the neighborhood, with many residents and merchants welcoming the protesters and others describing their neighborhood as under siege.

Some residents, including several government officials and security chiefs, formed armed vigilante groups and commissioned the construction of brick walls to cordon off the protest camp.  The tallest and thickest of these walls became the scene of the Friday of Dignity attack.

Security Forces Assist Pro-Government Gangs

State security forces carried out several attacks on largely peaceful protests and facilitated other attacks by armed gangs believed to be Saleh loyalists or mercenaries, even driving them to Change Square in military trucks or supplying them with rocks and sticks. [20] Saleh supporters also reportedly paid gang members, whom they sheltered in a rival tent city in Sanaa’s Tahrir Square. [21] The security forces most frequently involved in the attacks were the CSF, a paramilitary unit led by Saleh’s nephew, Brig. Gen. Yahya Saleh, and the elite Republican Guard, led by Saleh’s son, Brig. Gen. Ahmed Ali Saleh. (As previously noted, President Hadi removed both Yahya and Ahmad Saleh from their posts in December 2012). [22]

The attacks turned deadly in mid-February, with security forces and unknown assailants killing six protesters in the flashpoint cities of Aden and Taizz between February 11 and February 18. The attackers wounded more than 100 others during that period, many in Sanaa.[23]  Protests in cities across Yemen on February 18, named the Day of Rage, drew an estimated 20,000 people.[24]

In early March in Sanaa, local elders and other residents began meeting to discuss ways to “stop the expansion” of the Change Square protest camp, according to testimony from local university student Nasr al-Bawni:

We decided that each family would guard their section of the neighborhood, especially side streets.  However protesters continued to expand their area. … [On March 11, the Friday before the attack] Central Security Force members created a human wall to stop them, and we created a sign asking them to not expand further. [25]

Musa al-Nimrani, a spokesperson for the National Organization for the Defense of Rights and Freedom (HOOD), an Islah-affiliated human rights group that supported the protests, told Yemeni media that day that balatija—a word meaning thugs that Yemenis use to refer to armed men loyal to Saleh—had been gathering on rooftops at al-Qadisiyah intersection, at what was then the southern edge of the protest camp, to prevent its further expansion.  “They will do everything they can to remove protesters,” al-Nimrani was quoted as telling the news agency NewsYemen.[26]

Al-Nimrani described Col. Ali Ahmad Ali Mohsen al-Ahwal, the director of investigations at the Ministry of Interior’s Criminal Investigation Division (CID) and the son of the governor of Mahweet, a province northwest of Sanaa, as the balatija ringleader.[27] 

During the week before the attack, CSF members openly mingled with balatija in the area where the wall that became the scene of the Friday of Dignity attack was built, reporter Laura Kasinof, who was covering the uprising for The New York Times, told Human Rights Watch.[28]

President Saleh’s vow on March 10 to hold a referendum on early elections and constitutional reforms failed to stem the protests.[29] The following day, tens of thousands of demonstrators held another massive rally they called the “Friday of No Return” and continued to expand the protest camp’s perimeter.[30]

Before dawn on March 12, CSF and the Republican Guard forces surrounded Change Square with armored vehicles and fired live ammunition and teargas to try to stop the camp’s expansion, witnesses told Human Rights Watch.[31] The attack killed four demonstrators including a 15-year-old boy who was shot in the head, according to media reports.[32] The Reuters news agency quoted doctors at the site as saying police blocked medical teams from entering the area.[33]

That night and the following week, the state-run Yemen TV and Saba TV channels broadcast interviews with residents who expressed anger over the expansion of the protest camp. [34]  

By then, Change Square extended about a kilometer south from the Sanaa University’s southern gates along the busy thoroughfare of Ring Road, as well as a few hundred meters down nearby side streets. At least 5,000 protesters were living in tents in the camp and their numbers swelled to tens of thousands during Friday protests. 

On March 13, at least four gunmen fired live ammunition into Change Square from nearby rooftops.[35] Protesters and armed men threw rocks at each other following the shootings, according to Yemeni bloggers and activists.[36]

Government Officials Help Build Wall

On March 14, elders and other residents of the neighborhood again met to discuss the encroachment of Change Square, according to the testimony of local zone leader and GPC member Aqil al-Bawni.[37]The group met at the home of Abdullah Farwan, then-president of the Judicial Inspection Authority, a powerful agency within the Ministry of Justice. Other ranking officials at the gathering included Ahmad Ahmad Nasser, a district director-general of the Political Security Organization, an intelligence agency that reported directly to President Saleh and whose de-facto head at the time was Saleh’s nephew Ammar Saleh; and Col. Abd al-Rahman al-Dili’l of the Yemen Air Force. Local council member Abd al-Rahman al-Kuhlani also participated, Aqil al-Bawni said.[38]

During the meeting, al-Bawni said, the ranking officials ordered the elders to expand the popular committees to ward off the protesters:

To my surprise, they asked us to create popular committees, everyone guarding his own entrance, to face any problems that might arise. And since I am the local chief I was assigned to assemble the youth in the neighborhood and tell them to protect the area.  They asked me to bring the youth to the hall and I did.  I also informed members of the General Security [regular police force] in the area . . . and they all came to the meeting.” [39]

Participants in the meeting decided to build a brick wall to block the protest camp’s further growth, the local chief testified.[40]  Residents had over the previous two weeks built several brick walls across side roads to keep out protesters, but the one built following the March 14 meeting was the sturdiest and stretched across Ring Road.

Farwan, the head of judicial inspection, contributed 300 bricks to build the wall and Ali al-Ahwal, the son of the governor of Mahweet, provided the cement, al-Bawni said.[41]  Ali al-Ahwal later became the leading defendant in the government’s case against the alleged attackers.

Yahya Abdullah al-Amrani, an officer in the CSF, told prosecutors that those who commissioned the wall included the governor of Mahweet, Ahmad Ali al-Ahwal, whose nickname is al-Baidani.[42] In the week before the Friday of Dignity attack on March 18, the witness said, the governor and his guards had “shot in the air” to keep protesters from expanding their camp toward his home. Al-Amrani added: “Al-Baidani swore that the wall will not be destroyed even if it is the end of him.”[43] 

Muhammad al-Sanabani, a private security guard who was later charged with helping set fire to the wall after attackers and local residents lined the south side of the wall with tires and doused them with petrol, also testified that Governor al-Ahwal was  involved in the construction of the wall and the use of live ammunition to fend off the protesters:

Throughout the week, as residents were meeting to discuss the wall that was built in order to prevent protesters from expanding, the governor of Mahweet, Ahmad Ali Mohsen al-Baidani [al-Ahwal] stated that gunshots should be fired in the direction of the wall to prevent protesters from breaking the wall.[44]

Residents testified that local resident Bashir al-Nimri, a defendant listed as a fugitive, collected money for the wall’s construction and also distributed small payments for qat, a leaf widely chewed as a stimulant in Yemen, to encourage men to join the vigilante groups.

“Some people were getting between 500 and 1,000 Yemeni Rials [US$2.33 to US$6.66] for qat, and this was distributed by Bashir al-Nimri,” al-Sanabani testified to prosecutors.[45] 

The wall was about 2.5 meters high. It crossed Ring Road at its intersection with a clinic called the Iranian Medical Center.[46] 

On March 14, the Yemeni authorities expelled four freelance journalists writing for major Western media who had reported on attacks by government forces on demonstrators.[47]Combined with a government freeze on most visas for journalists, and mounting attacks by both government security forces and pro-government gangs on Yemeni and regional media, the expulsions decreased the already small international media corps and further isolated Yemen’s uprising from the rest of the world.[48]

On March 15, Yemeni authorities announced a security shuffle in three provinces that included the appointment of Ghazi Ahmad Ali Mohsen al-Ahwal, another son of the Mahweet governor, as director of security for Aden, the strategic southern port city and the seat of a southern separatist movement.[49]  Ghazi al-Ahwal later became the second leading defendant in the Friday of Dignity attack and, like his brother Ali, was charged with shooting with intent to kill.

Aden had become a flashpoint in the preceding weeks and months, with state security forces using disproportionate, and at times lethal, force against both anti-Saleh protesters and southern separatists who were starting to coalesce.[50] Ghazi al-Ahwal had previously been the director of security in al-Dali, another restive southern province near Aden.

On March 16, government security forces fired live ammunition and teargas at largely peaceful protests in Sanaa as well in the cities of Taizz and Hudaida, reportedly wounding more than 150.[51]

On March 17, three witnesses told Human Rights Watch, balatija walked freely in the area of the new wall in Sanaa. Some were armed with AK-47 military assault rifles, batons and metal rods, according to Khaled Raja, a cameraman with the opposition Suhail TV channel.[52]

That night, witnesses including security officials testified, tensions were high in the neighborhood near the wall. Yet, as detailed below, instead of taking measures to avert further violence, security forces withdrew from the immediate area.