W.J. Hennigan
Not long after a U.S. drone strike killed his brother-in-law
and a nephew in a village in central Yemen, Faisal bin Ali Jaber
received a phone call from a Yemeni government official.
The man invited the engineer to Sana, the nation’s capital, to discuss why a drone had targeted and killed five men meeting under a palm tree in Khashamir after dark on Aug. 29, 2012.
Jaber appeared at the government building, but he was given no explanation or apology. Instead he was handed a plastic bag with $100,000 in sequentially marked $100 bills, a relative fortune in the Arab world’s poorest country, he said.
“They told me, ‘We are not authorized to tell you where this money came from, but take it,’” Jaber, 58, said via an Arabic interpreter in a phone interview from Montreal, where he now lives. “I knew it must be the American government, so I wondered: ‘Why they would do this? Why would they pay this blood money in secret?’”
The man invited the engineer to Sana, the nation’s capital, to discuss why a drone had targeted and killed five men meeting under a palm tree in Khashamir after dark on Aug. 29, 2012.
Jaber appeared at the government building, but he was given no explanation or apology. Instead he was handed a plastic bag with $100,000 in sequentially marked $100 bills, a relative fortune in the Arab world’s poorest country, he said.
“They told me, ‘We are not authorized to tell you where this money came from, but take it,’” Jaber, 58, said via an Arabic interpreter in a phone interview from Montreal, where he now lives. “I knew it must be the American government, so I wondered: ‘Why they would do this? Why would they pay this blood money in secret?’”
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