"UAE has funded political assassinations in Yemen, BBC finds"

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has funded politically motivated assassinations in Yemen, a BBC investigation has found.

Training provided by American mercenaries - hired by the UAE in 2015 - has then been used by Emiratis to instruct locals, sparking a surge in targeted killings, a whistleblower says...

The UAE government has denied the allegations in our investigation - that it had assassinated those without links to terrorism - saying they were "false and without merit".

The killing spree in Yemen - more than 100 assassinations in a three-year period - is just one element of an ongoing bitter internecine conflict pitting several international powers against each other in the Middle East's poorest country...

I have been reporting on the conflict in my native Yemen since it began in 2014. The fighting led to the government losing control of the country's north to the Houthis - who over the years have become savvier and better equipped...

Under international law, any killing of civilians without due process would be counted as extra-judicial.

The majority of those assassinated were members of Islah - the Yemeni branch of the Muslim Brotherhood... is banned in several Arab countries - including the UAE where its political activism and support for elections is seen by the country's royal family as a threat to their rule.

Leaked drone footage of the first assassination mission, first reported by BuzzFeed News in 2018, gave me a starting point from which to investigate these mysterious killings. It was dated December 2015 and was traced to members of a private US security company called Spear Operations Group.

I finally met one of the men behind the operation shown in the footage in a restaurant in London in 2020. Isaac Gilmore, a former US Navy Seal who later became chief operating officer of Spear, was one of several Americans who say they were hired to carry out assassinations in Yemen by the UAE.

He refused to talk about anyone who was on the "kill list" provided to Spear by the UAE - other than the target of their first mission: Ansaf Mayo, a Yemeni MP who is the leader of Islah in the southern port city of Aden, the government's temporary capital since 2015.

I confronted Mr Gilmore over the fact that Islah had never been classified as a terrorist organisation by the US authorities...

[Repreive] investigated 160 killings carried out in Yemen between 2015 and 2018. They said the majority happened from 2016 and only 23 of the 160 people killed had links to terrorism. All the killings had been carried out using the same tactics that Spear had employed - the detonation of an improvised explosive device (IED) as a distraction, followed by a targeted shooting.

The most recent political assassination in Yemen, according to Yemeni human rights lawyer Huda al-Sarari, happened just last month - of an imam killed in Lahj by the same method...

By 2017, the UAE had helped build a paramilitary force, part of the Emirati-funded Southern Transitional Council (STC), a security organisation that runs a network of armed groups across southern Yemen...

The BBC has found that despite the American mercenaries' stated aim to eliminate the jihadist groups al-Qaeda and Islamic State (IS) in southern Yemen, in fact the UAE has gone on to recruit former al-Qaeda members for this security force...

Reprieve has received a leaked UAE document that shows Spear was still being paid in 2020, though it is not clear in what capacity.

We asked Spear's founder, Abraham Golan, whether his mercenaries had trained Emiratis in assassination techniques, but he didn't respond.

We put the allegations in our investigation to the UAE government.

It said it was untrue that it had targeted individuals with no links to terrorism, and that it supported counter-terrorism operations in Yemen at the invitation of the government of Yemen and its international allies.

"The UAE has acted in compliance with applicable international law during these operations," it said...