“When I fought with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, there were no bombings of civilians.”


ADEN, Yemen ? It is not often that you see an old comrade in arms of Osama bin Laden hoisting the American flag outside his home.

Yet there on the videotape was Tareq al-Fadhli, the hero of jihadist campaigns in Afghanistan and South Yemen, raising the Stars and Stripes recently in the courtyard of his house, not far from here. As the tape continues, Mr. Fadhli can be seen standing solemnly at attention as “The Star-Spangled Banner,” America’s national anthem, blasts from a sound system.

The videotape, disseminated on the Internet, has helped to redefine the public persona of a man who, as a onetime Islamist guerrilla, loyalist politician and now wouldbe American ally in South Yemen, has been at the center of this country’s turbulent recent history. It has also profoundly irritated the Yemeni government, which labels Mr. Fadhli one of the country’s most dangerous terrorists.

Reminded of the accusation, Mr. Fadhli chuckled. No one ever accused him of terrorism until last year, he said, when he joined a rising southern Yemen independence movement and became an opponent of the country’s longtime president, Ali Abdullah Saleh. “I was in the ruling party of this country for 15 years,” he said.

“I was in the highest authority ? I walked into the Republican Palace without an appointment ? and nobody ever accused me of such a thing. But now that I have joined the Southern Movement, they say it. And it is not true.”

Mr. Fadhli made a brazen offer to put his jihadist connections in the service of the United States.

“When I fought with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, there were no bombings of civilians, and I would never have supported them,” he said. “The Americans were our allies back then, and what I am doing now by raising the American flag is a continuation of this old alliance.”

Mr. Fadhli is the scion of one of the south’s most prominent families, and he says he could no longer bear the Yemeni government’s unfair treatment of his homeland. He and other Southern Movement leaders accuse the government, based in the north, of discriminating against the south and plundering its oil wealth.

For all his jihadist past, several acquaintances say, Mr. Fadhli is an easygoing fellow with a taste for Scotch and little sympathy for extremists.

In 1987, at the age of 19, he left to fight in Afghanistan. Like many Yemenis, his war was less about religion than a desire to punish Communists for the takeover of South Yemen. Over the next three years, he fought, befriended Mr. bin Laden and was wounded at Jalalabad, he said.

In the early 1990s, North and South Yemen unified, and Mr. Fadhli returned home to begin the long process of recovering his family’s ancestral land holdings .

Relations between north and south soon soured, and in 1994 a brief civil war broke out. Mr. Fadhli, who had been in prison on suspicion of having tried to kill a Socialist official, was released on the condition that he gather his old jihadist friends to help fight the southern Socialists.

He did so, and got plenty of help from his old friend Mr. bin Laden, who used his own family’s vast fortune to supply weapons, ammunition and fighters from abroad. (Both Mr. bin Laden and Mr. Fadhli have been suspected of playing roles in a 1992 terrorist attack on two tourist hotels in Aden; Mr. Fadhli said this was not true.)

After the northern victory, he flew to Sudan in late 1994 for one last visit with the Qaeda leader.

“I thanked him for his support,” Mr. Fadhli said .

Although he deplores the September 11, 2001, attacks and terrorism in general, Mr. Fadhli retains some affection for his old comrade. “I personally like this man, this legendary personality, who is facing the world in a universal war even now,” he said.

Of all the roles Mr. Fadhli has played, that of hereditary sultan seems closest to his heart .

“My land is my identity,” he said.


By ROBERT F. WORTH