Life on a UN Blacklist
Caitlin L. Chandler on how one man’s world unraveled after he found himself on the UN’s al-Qaeda sanctions list
Life on the List
Caitlin L. Chandler
Late one night in May 2016, Naif al-Qaysi was riding shotgun in an old Landcruiser as it barreled down an empty highway through the desert connecting Saudi Arabia and Yemen. For the past six months Naif, then thirty-three, had been the governor of Al-Bayda, a large mountainous region in central Yemen, which he was trying to keep from falling under the control of the Houthis’ armed insurgency in the early years of the country’s brutal civil war. Now he was heading home from business in Riyadh. Naif’s colleague and cousin were chatting in the backseat when his phone buzzed with the name of an old friend. “Have you seen the news?” the friend asked. “No man I’m in the desert,” Naif replied. “The US has declared you a terrorist,” the friend told him. “You’re on the list.”
Naif instructed the driver to pull over to the side of the road, where the men pitched camp against a dune and brewed tea. Quickly they learned that the US Treasury, under President Barack Obama, had declared Naif a financier and senior official of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). He was now, in the eyes of the US government, a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist,” subject to a US asset freeze and travel ban.
The charge was so outlandish that it almost reassured them: clearly the Americans had made a mistake. Naif was a prominent politician who condemned violent extremism, a prodemocracy reformer who had grown-up in Al-Bayda. A few months earlier, AQAP had tried to assassinate him, peppering a car that they thought contained him with bullets. “When I spill your blood I will be justified in front of God,” one of their operatives texted him. “You discourage the youth from jihad.” Now, concluding that the whole thing was a mix-up, the men sang some poetry: “You piece of news! Oh you struck my heart—a lightning strike.” Then they drove home.
The next morning, from his house in Marib, Naif dialed the then president of Yemen, Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, offering to resign if the listing, however unfounded, caused too many problems. Hadi expressed his irritation at the US, who, despite a decade of counterterrorism operations in Yemen, had not consulted him. “Forget about this for now,” Hadi said, assuring Naif that he had his full support. Hadi had bigger problems to deal with: a year and a half earlier the Houthis had captured Sanaa, the country’s capital. Hadi was running what remained of the government from Saudi Arabia, as the conflict reverberated across the Gulf.
Naif returned to mobilizing Al-Bayda against the Houthi advance—the militia controlled some 30 percent of the province, and battles occurred weekly. Shortly after the Treasury announcement community leaders from Al-Bayda, Marib, and Al-Jawf provinces held a press conference rejecting the accusations against Naif and calling on the US to “stand by freedom, democracy, and the values of justice and progress.” Naif was blocked from receiving funds from a regional and national bank, but another Yemeni bank continued to process his salary.
At first not much about his daily life changed, though his stomach dropped whenever he heard the low hum of a plane. For the past seven years the Obama administration had been bombing Yemen, claiming to target al-Qaeda members, although some of those killed turned out to be civilians, even children. That year American drone strikes in the country killed some 123 people. Did the US target men they labeled “global terrorists”? No one knew how the list worked.
Then, in February 2017, the United Nations Security Council placed Naif’s name on the Al-Qaeda and Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Da’esh) Sanctions List, established by Resolution 1267 (colloquially known as the 1267 List). Naif, they declared, was a leader of AQAP, facilitating the group’s expansion in Al-Bayda. The UN posted his passport number and other identifying information online: he was now on a global no-fly list and all his bank accounts were frozen. No one from the organization had contacted Naif to ask for an interview, assess his political leanings, or inform him he was under an international investigation. This list applies in all of the UN’s 193 member countries.
President Hadi ordered the Ministry of Interior to investigate. Ahmed bin Ahmed al-Maisari, who then led the ministry, had suffered his own losses from al-Qaeda: a suicide bomber killed his father, and his brother died in an ambush. Al-Maisari told me they found no evidence to support the allegations against Naif. “It’s impossible that this guy is a terrorist,” he said matter-of-factly when we met in 2022 at a Tim Horton’s in a mall in Muscat, the capital of Oman. The Yemeni National Committee for Investigation of Alleged Human Rights Violations, led by the prominent women’s advocate Ishraq Fadhel al-Maqtari, conducted a separate review, which also cleared Naif.
None of those findings seemed to matter. Naif was named a terrorist by the European Union, Japan, Israel, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the United Kingdom, Qatar, and the Terrorist Financing Center in Saudi Arabia, among others. Neighbors began avoiding him and his children faced taunts at school. He could no longer receive his Yemeni salary. When we talked in October 2022, in his living room in Salalah, Oman—where he now resides in exile—Naif said that the long-term implications took some time to dawn on him: “I didn’t know how much this would affect my life.”
Read the full article on the Review’s website here.
Homer vs. Hollywood:
A Live Q&A on Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” with Daniel Mendelsohn
You’ve seen the movie, you’ve read the fiery tweets and Instagram posts—now, you can discuss Christopher Nolan’s controversial blockbuster adaptation of the Odyssey with our expert Daniel Mendelsohn, Editor-at-Large of The New York Review and the most recent translator of Homer’s epic. In this special hour-long edition of NYRSeminars, Mr. Mendelsohn will briefly outline his own take on the film, which he reviewed at length for the Review, and then open the floor to questions from and discussion with audience members. Among the topics to be addressed are the debate over the film’s sets, ships, and costumes; the film’s handling of its female characters; and the question of whether the director’s vision of Odysseus represents a betrayal of the epic’s values.
