What's in a Name

Late last night, apparently not having much of a social life, I was catching up on some reading when Haykal Bafana linked to a story on twitter about how al-Qaeda had banned the sale of qat in the center of Ja'ar.

As interesting as the story was, what really caught my eye was the fourth and final picture, which shows a building that is labeled Ansar al-Shariah's Police Department in the Emirate of Waqar.

This, I thought, was interesting for a couple of different reasons.  First, Ansar al-Shariah is running its own police department.  Wow.  Hard to overstate the significance of that.

Second, I was confused by the name Emirate of Waqar - it wasn't a name I'd heard of earlier, and the story referred to Ja'ar - a major city in the governorate of Abyan.  So, as happens a number of times every day, I was driven back to my trusty Mu'jam al-buldan of Tribes and Places in Yemen.

The two references to Waqar in the geographical dictionary were both to families and neither was in Abyan, so, surprisingly, no help there.

But today Ansar al-Shariah released issue 7 of its newsletter - dated December - in which it announced that it has changed the name of Ja'ar to Waqar.  Yep, that's right, Ansar al-Shariah is changing the names of cities in Yemen, a very obvious way of saying the old is gone and the new is here.

According to the newsletter, this is the first city to come under the rule of Ansar al-Shariah, and it appears as though the group is doing what it can to implement its own laws in the city, and that includes establishing a police force.

Now there is still much we don't about what is happening in Abyan - even more than what we usually don't know - but one thing seems clear: now that Ansar al-Shariah is established to such a degree in Ja'ar (Waqar) that it has its own police force and is controlling the sale of qat it is going to take a concentrated effort on the part of the Yemeni government to uproot them.  That is if the Yemeni government ever returns to a time when it has the strength to go after them directly.

Right now Yemen's central government is more fiction than fact, at least outside of the major urban areas.

This is just one more piece of evidence that suggests Ansar al-Shariah is following the Taliban model and attempting to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of Yemen's government in Abyan.  Ansar al-Shariah has put down roots and it is going to take a lot more energy and effort than Yemen can currently produce to get them out.  Ansar al-Shariah isn't going away anytime soon.