This is a browser translation of a link about Yemen. There are numerous images at the link that I have not transcribed. Even after having followed events in Yemen for several years, I remain more ignorant than informed about how all the moving parts intersect. For me this link is but another part of a complicated puzzle.
Electronic espionage, an "unknown soldier", turns the balance in Sanaa
"The Independent Arabia" investigates how "Ansar Allah" transformed communications into "polytheism" to hunt opponents and recruit neutrals?
Hisham Al-Shubaily is a Yemeni journalist and photographer
Thursday 26 November 2020 18:18
If the Houthi militia, themselves, were to one day place a symbol of the "unknown soldier" in their control of power in Sanaa, then that soldier would most likely be the "mobile chips", which played a very influential role in the brutal war between them and the recognized legitimate government Internationally, by describing mobile phones, the most lethal means in most of the military group's arsenal, to entrap opponents and recruit neutral Yemeni citizens, divided voluntarily or involuntarily between the two parties to the conflict, in the land of Yemen, whose title was "Al-Saeed".Although Yemeni parties are accustomed to exchanging accusations, in which one party without the other monopolizes state institutions, which are usually based in the capitals, the Yemeni telecommunications file has remained and remains the most thorny file, and one of the tools that provide the militias financially, intelligence and media and work to keep them together. What is the story? That was the mission of "The Independent Arabia", which investigated the case through its various corridors, between the testimonies of the victims, the documents of the parties from the men of the Yemeni President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi, and the recruiting of the militia leader, Abd al-Malik al-Houthi.
Ground of control
Once the committee was formed, it set up units of experts who were trained in Iran, Iraq and Lebanon, and their tasks were distributed to all telecommunications sectors. After that, the main committee worked according to two security sources who spoke to The Independent Arabia, in the context of a "joint operations room between the Ministry of Defense and the Interior in Sana'a, whose mission is to search and investigate all leaders and officers of the (legitimate) Hadi government, and find out their numbers that were not registered with their names, as well as Monitoring the numbers of people opposed to the group, including dignitaries, educators, tribal sheikhs, and influential people, using the secret telecommunications company records of Yemeni companies, such as "Yemen Mobile", "Spafone" and "MTN", and starting to monitor the activities of those targeted. "
One of the teams that emerged from the espionage committee took over the task of hacking accounts on social media platforms, most notably Facebook, WhatsApp and Telegram, some of which are active through the officers and leaders of the Yemeni republican regime who were with the legitimate government or who adhered to neutrality in their homes. .
The testimonies of the two security sources, whose names are kept by The Independent Arabia, confirmed that the group’s affiliated elements did what they could to control accounts and spy on mobile SIM cards as much as possible, and developed a technology thanks to which they were able to monitor all the movements of those required to be monitored by tracking the “chip” without stopping what remained. Connected to the battery.
According to the information we got from the two security sources, the year 2018 witnessed a remarkable development when the elements that were trained in Iran, Lebanon and Iraq began to link the devices in their possession with more advanced modern listening devices directly related to the war operations room, missiles and drones in order to target the leadership The army and the legitimate resistance elements through it.
They explained that among the new devices that have been linked to the communications and the military operations room, devices that monitor the movement of coalition aircraft, these devices have their own radars, which have been distributed in the various areas under the group’s control, and this - according to the two sources - may be one of the reasons why some air strikes were not hit. The Arab Coalition Forces have their targets. Reports of the attack are received by the Houthis about ten minutes before the targeting operations.
The Constitution of the Republic of Yemen criminalizes all forms of espionage and eavesdropping, as Article 53 of the Yemeni law states that “the freedom and confidentiality of postal and telephone correspondence and all means of communication are guaranteed and it is not permissible to monitor, search, divulge their secrecy or delay them.” Articles (16, 14, and 12) thereof, and the infringement of this right is considered a criminal offense that does not lapse by prescription.
The nerve of the battle
In his speech, Al-Thabti pointed out that the tracking process is carried out in several ways, sometimes by traditional means, "by tracking the number through the database of subscribers, and there is a database of equipment belonging to this company numbered by the so-called automated coding process."
The advanced aspect of the tracking or eavesdropping process, according to the constant, is with key words such as "a weapon or mine, and sometimes it is the fingerprint of the detected voice. Once it is heard, the interested person intercepts it, according to a technique called biometric" biological data ", by which intelligence services can track opponents through Algorithms and technology, usually owned by tracking and tracing companies. "
This is how the secrets began to unfold
In its statement, the company said that it had "launched secure mobile communications services in the liberated areas through a communications network independent of the control and control of Ansar Allah group in Sana'a."
Its spokesman, Abdullah Al-Awadi, told "The Independent Arabia", that the reports of the Houthis spying on Yemeni communications through all the country's telecommunications companies are proven. He said, "I would like to clarify at the outset that the Houthi group seized all public and private state institutions, and the" Sabafon "company was one of the largest companies that was affected by them, so that they changed the legitimate management of the company and set up a department affiliated with them. The group is fully responsible for all these crimes, "he said.
As for the espionage mechanism, the Houthis “set up eavesdropping and spying devices on all telecommunications companies after the seizure of the company. Thus, they succeeded in transforming the company into a means of espionage after its seizure, by installing and integrating hardware and software within the communication systems in order to be able to eavesdrop and locate; They also use the customer data they have available for this purpose as well. "
The Houthis' knowledge of their government whose government is not recognized internationally in Sana'a, for their illegal use of communications, prompted them to demand that local companies still under their control discontinue their communication and information link with the "SabaFon" wing, which split from the president in Sanaa. According to a document obtained by the newspaper, which was directed by the Deputy Minister of Communications and Information Technology, Dr. Hashem Muhammad Al-Shami to each of "Sabaafon, Yemen Mobile, MTN Yemen, and the Y Company", in which he called on them to cut their association with the dissident wing of "Sabafon" towards the liberated areas in South of the country.
Commenting on our repeated reports and our meetings with you, he said, "Interconnection with the alleged company" SabaFon "is strictly prohibited, which finally cut off the communication network between the governorates of the Republic on 9/20/2020, which is considered a sabotage act intended to increase suffering and discord among the people. One… and also not to accept or activate any new digital categories that were created for the alleged company without the approval of the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology - Sana'a, the only licensee. According to him.
The stage of entrapment and recruitment
The information we obtained indicates that the Houthi group is keen through security informants, which it has deployed in the various areas under its control, and even in the areas outside its control. The task of these informants is to collect as much information, data, and numbers as possible, then send them to the group’s operations rooms, which are concerned with monitoring the movements of Yemenis, especially those who are not loyal to the group.
In addition, the Houthis have assigned female members, within the so-called "Zainabiyat", to collect information about the families of the anti-group figures, and whoever suspects the group to monitor, and the task of these elements is to get close to those families and collect as much information as possible through them.
After collecting the necessary information, it is submitted to the competent authorities, in the Security and Intelligence Service, which is the device that the Houthis established on the ruins of the national and political security services. After that, it is determined whether the targeted person represents a danger and needs follow-up and monitoring, or targeting, so that the agency assigns executive bodies, either to arrest the victim, liquidate him, or continue to monitor him.
According to the exclusive documents we obtained and the sources that spoke to us, the next step is to place the target person's number under technical care. In the event that they are not able to obtain the target person’s number, the person closest to him will be placed instead. "Through technical attention to the number of the victim, his wife, or his children, all his information, private numbers and details of his movement are reached. This is followed by analyzing the data and extracting what concerns them from it." That way, the source says they can collect massive amounts of information by numbers.
Detention and extortion
In this context, we obtained information according to which the Houthis tried to use the people most frequent in the Marib Governorate, east of Yemen, to trade to pressure them and use them as spies to transmit news. Their numbers were put under surveillance and dozens of them were detained on malicious charges, including “cooperation with the forces of aggression”. "The legitimate Yemeni government forces and the Arab coalition" that supports them.
When talking with victims who went through the experience, we found that horror still prevailed over them, one of them tells his story, saying, “They stopped me at one of their points in Sana'a, and took me to a secret detention place, and they investigated every letter and contact I had, even the family messages for the numbers he used. It is Yemen Mobile and MTN. "
He pointed out that he was interrogated for a period of five hours, all about messages related to the process of sending and receiving goods, adding that “upon completion I was transferred to another place. In the new place I was surprised that one of my friends had about 12 days, and he, like me, did not know what the purpose of the investigation was. During the interrogation with me, someone told me literally, in the Yemeni dialect, what it means, “Do you want to leave or stay here?” I told him: Certainly I would like to get out, so he said, “We will release you now if you agree to work with us and provide us with all the news from“ Marib ” (Central city of Yemen) and we will provide you with facilities. ”After the victim refused the request for“ cooperation, ”they forced him to record a video in which he acknowledged his support for the Houthi project, to blackmail him with it in any circumstances that required it.“ As for dozens of victims, we have not been able to reach them so far because of their presence In the areas controlled by the group, because those who refused to cooperate are still in prison, and some of them died. "
In this context, we obtained a list of 200 people whose phone numbers were monitored, and those who were unable to reach his number added the phone of his wife or one of his first-degree relatives. It is likely to be censored.
Through the group’s attention to the details of the people whose phone numbers were collected, The Independent Arabia was able to know some details of the victims, and documented the testimonies of a number of them. Through field research, the newspaper's reporter met a number of them, heard their testimony in various Yemeni cities, and investigated their whereabouts in different cities for several months, so that he could finally meet 40 people, who were subjected to kidnapping, torture and raiding of their homes, as their families were subjected to intimidation. Among those who died during the military confrontations, after they aligned themselves with the government of Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi (the legitimate), and others who managed to flee to other areas that have been liberated.
What is the meaning of "orange"?
The story of the Yemeni educator Al-Dabiani, according to his account, goes back to the morning of Monday, February 22, 2016, the day he came to his family's home to take a car with his sick wife, heading with her to a hospital in Sana'a to undergo an operation. However, as soon as he moved his vehicle, he found himself surrounded by cars on all sides. In the beginning, he thought the matter was wrong or random surveillance, but besieging him, directing a machine gun at him and asking him to descend immediately, his suspicions were lost.
It was only minutes until the dialogue took another course, at which it reached an intensity with which the Houthi soldiers did not agree, granting him a deadline in which to take his wife to the hospital or home, and they also refused to undertake the task of addressing the wife's humanitarian situation. The only speech was, "You are wanted, ride with us, and convulsion is the master of the situation. At that, a passer-by, whose curiosity aroused the horror of what he saw, stood up and stood in the face of the soldiers advocating for my position in terms of finding a solution for my wife. But even he was confronted with severity and a threat, so I told him when I saw goodness in it. Take the wife to the children's school to continue her journey towards home, so that I can see my fate with them. "
During the first ten days of the continuous investigation, the conversation focused on the victim's phone messages, since the first day he received it, as he said that when they were subjected to interrogation, they printed all of those messages, on a mission that took about 3 hours from the printer due to the large amount of content. They did not leave in those letters stray or incoming unless they asked him about it, including the "home supply" that his wife asks him to bring to the family. For example, he added, "When my wife sends a request for oranges in a message, they insist that she means something other than oranges that people know, so the investigation takes hours on something that is understandable and cannot be interpreted, except in their minds."
After hiding him for two months without a trace or news, they transferred him to a well-known Yemeni prison called “Habra”, and “I was the last one to enter ward No. 9, thank God that I got out two years ago, but up to this moment there are still a number of detainees in Houthi prisons. It was me and them. In one place, unlike all those in prison, for example Dr. Lotf al-Farrasi from the province of Hodeidah - may God have captured him - an old man (almost over 75 years old, and he has all the diseases, and yet he is still in Houthi prisons. He was financially responsible in the Tihama region. When the Houthi group attacked his house ... they took all the family's phones, such as the wife, girls, and boys, and his personal phones, and they wanted to know every little and every big thing in their phones.
After she lost her eye, this was their request
As for the political activist and poet, Bardis Al-Sayaghi, she had the worst luck describing her previous activity, which seemed to raise the concerns of the pillars of Houthi rule, and therefore she paid the price for exceeding the normal torture to the loss of one of her body parts, which is her eye. However, the mobile phone messages were present in the Houthi questions, suspicions and concerns. According to her account documented with the "video", in which she stated that the attack was a trick that she did not play with, but she did not find any response to it, when the speaker added to her, saying, "Either you come to us or we come to you." And in prisons where she and dozens of Yemeni women, according to her version, were at the mercy of the notorious "Zainabiyat", she says that she was subjected to forms of torture, like many detainees who were even raped, in a conservative society, in which all those who disagreed were famous for neutralizing honor as a "red line."
She says, "I arrived and found everything equipped, including numbers that were registered in my name for different telecommunications companies, which I had forgotten. They told me: Confess everything if you do not want to be tortured, and after receiving a response, they charged me with" state terrorism and betrayal of the homeland ", and they gave me names Personalities of Saudi officers want me to pretend I know them, and I, by God, do not know them, but in the end I signed what they want after two months of kidnapping and torture after losing my right eye as a result of torture due to beating on the table when they were interrogating me.
The Houthis were in Sanaa, as Al-Sayaghi says, they kidnapped her on August 2, 2019 at 4 am, “When five crews accompanied by a bus of Zainabiyat came without a court order, and if I had anything, they would come in broad daylight. I almost opened the door except for the men. And the women entered in a brutal way, a scene that I could not forget, neither me nor my children until this moment, one was standing by me and the other searching me, while I was sleeping among my children and a group of armed men with their rifles aimed at me and my children, even my daughter tried to give me a cloak that covered myself and they rebuked her strongly and prevented her and did not show her mercy ".
Ultimately, however, the Yemeni activist was able to delude her jailers that she had become convinced of their political program, and would promote their ideological rhetoric to the masses, but instead found her way to escape.
Daylight abduction
Later, he asked me to lure politicians and activists in certain methods that were mentioned in previous interviews, then they released me and kept me under tight surveillance in order to give me time to think. I tried to gain time to escape from Sanaa and communicate with my family, but I was surprised on 7/27/2019 with four Military cars, containing Houthi gunmen, in addition to a bus carrying a group of Zainabiyat led by Sultan Zaben, Ahmed Matar, Abu Salah and Abu Saqr, stormed the residential complex in Faj Attan Abraj Al-Ansi, and entered my apartment on the 12th floor, Apartment No. 48, and destroyed all the furniture on it, and stole the possessions They took me to a secret, unknown location with a number of girls who had been kidnapped earlier. I learned that they were in the criminal investigation at a place known later as "Dar Al-Hilal" in Taiz Street 1 in front of Al-Zahrawi Market.
Al-Houry continues: “I was not officially investigated by the Houthi militia, nor was I arrested legally.
Al-Houthi's legal rationale
Regarding the Houthi evidence and their accusations, Sabra asserted that the court that is trying the journalists depends on the reports of the National Security and Political Security and the statements he provides to him as “communications belonging to kidnappers, even though they deny them and deny their connection to these numbers and ask to address the telecommunications company to verify these Messages and confirmation of those who follow these numbers, as it is the body legally authorized to do so and not the National Security or Political Security Agency, but the court does not respond to those requests and issues its rulings, most of which were death sentences. It pleaded in such cases and submitted those requests to the court, but it did not respond. "
As for the legality of this behavior, Yemeni law affirmed that it is "a crime of assault on the private life of a person, and this is punishable when the arrest warrant officers carry out it on their own initiative without referring to the judiciary."
For his part, President of the American Center for Justice "ICG" Abdul Rahman Berman considers that the judicial law is the only one authorized to deal with privacy such as mobile messages, as "Article 35 of the Yemeni constitution stipulates the freedom and confidentiality of postal, telephone and telegraphic transportation, and all means of communication are guaranteed," It is not permissible to monitor, search, divulge its secrecy, confiscate it, or delay it except in cases specified by the law by a judicial order. Spying on citizens and monitoring them, as well as arresting them, entrapping them, kidnapping them, subjecting them to torture, then transferring them to trials and issuing death sentences.
He explained that from the legal point of view, "it is not permissible to use the evidence extracted through eavesdropping and espionage, regardless of their gravity and degree of clarity, given that they were taken in an illegal manner, in addition to the fact that the Houthis are an armed group and not an institution or a state, and there is also a liability for the telecommunications company that has knowledge or It allowed wiretapping of citizens, and victims can resort to the courts, whether it is the local judiciary after the restoration of the state or the international judiciary for trademark companies that have a branch in Yemen, and thus these companies will face legal and civil responsibility that must compensate the victims for the damages suffered by them.
Awaiting responses
The "Ansar Allah" group led by Abdul-Malik Al-Houthi had colluded with former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh and overthrew the government in Sanaa in September 2014 before it took control of most of the Yemeni north and a dispute erupted between the two ruling partners, after the Arab coalition pressed militarily to restore Authority is vested in the internationally recognized government of Yemeni President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi. The latter chose Aden as a temporary capital after its liberation from Al-Houthi, who is in talks with his organization under international sponsorship, and finally concluded the exchange of prisoners as a goodwill gesture, to start final negotiations to end the humanitarian crisis in the war-exhausted country.
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