1.

Late one night in May 2016, Naif al-Qaysi was riding shotgun in an old Landcruiser as it barreled down an empty highway through the desert connecting Saudi Arabia and Yemen. For the past six months Naif, then thirty-three, had been the governor of Al-Bayda, a large mountainous region in central Yemen, which he was trying to keep from falling under the control of the Houthis’ armed insurgency in the early years of the country’s brutal civil war. Now he was heading home from business in Riyadh. Naif’s colleague and cousin were chatting in the backseat when his phone buzzed with the name of an old friend. “Have you seen the news?” the friend asked. “No man I’m in the desert,” Naif replied. “The US has declared you a terrorist,” the friend told him. “You’re on the list.”

Naif instructed the driver to pull over to the side of the road, where the men pitched camp against a dune and brewed tea. Quickly they learned that the US Treasury, under President Barack Obama, had declared Naif a financier and senior official of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). He was now, in the eyes of the US government, a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist,” subject to a US asset freeze and travel ban.

The charge was so outlandish that it almost reassured them: clearly the Americans had made a mistake. Naif was a prominent politician who condemned violent extremism, a prodemocracy reformer who had grown-up in Al-Bayda. A few months earlier, AQAP had tried to assassinate him, peppering a car that they thought contained him with bullets. “When I spill your blood I will be justified in front of God,” one of their operatives texted him. “You discourage the youth from jihad.” Now, concluding that the whole thing was a mix-up, the men sang some poetry: “You piece of news! Oh you struck my heart—a lightning strike.” Then they drove home.

The next morning, from his house in Marib, Naif dialed the then president of Yemen, Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, offering to resign if the listing, however unfounded, caused too many problems. Hadi expressed his irritation at the US, who, despite a decade of counterterrorism operations in Yemen, had not consulted him. “Forget about this for now,” Hadi said, assuring Naif that he had his full support. Hadi had bigger problems to deal with: a year and a half earlier the Houthis had captured Sanaa, the country’s capital. Hadi was running what remained of the government from Saudi Arabia, as the conflict reverberated across the Gulf.

Naif returned to mobilizing Al-Bayda against the Houthi advance—the militia controlled some 30 percent of the province, and battles occurred weekly. Shortly after the Treasury announcement community leaders from Al-Bayda, Marib, and Al-Jawf provinces held a press conference rejecting the accusations against Naif and calling on the US to “stand by freedom, democracy, and the values ​​of justice and progress.” Naif was blocked from receiving funds from a regional and national bank, but another Yemeni bank continued to process his salary.

At first not much about his daily life changed, though his stomach dropped whenever he heard the low hum of a plane. For the past seven years the Obama administration had been bombing Yemen, claiming to target al-Qaeda members, although some of those killed turned out to be civilians, even children. That year American drone strikes in the country killed some 123 people. Did the US target men they labeled “global terrorists”? No one knew how the list worked.

Then, in February 2017, the United Nations Security Council placed Naif’s name on the Al-Qaeda and Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Da’esh) Sanctions List, established by Resolution 1267 (colloquially known as the 1267 List). Naif, they declared, was a leader of AQAP, facilitating the group’s expansion in Al-Bayda. The UN posted his passport number and other identifying information online: he was now on a global no-fly list and all his bank accounts were frozen. No one from the organization had contacted Naif to ask for an interview, assess his political leanings, or inform him he was under an international investigation. This list applies in all of the UN’s 193 member countries.  

President Hadi ordered the Ministry of Interior to investigate. Ahmed bin Ahmed al-Maisari, who then led the ministry, had suffered his own losses from al-Qaeda: a suicide bomber killed his father, and his brother died in an ambush. Al-Maisari told me they found no evidence to support the allegations against Naif. “It’s impossible that this guy is a terrorist,” he said matter-of-factly when we met in 2022 at a Tim Horton’s in a mall in Muscat, the capital of Oman. The Yemeni National Committee for Investigation of Alleged Human Rights Violations, led by the prominent women’s advocate Ishraq Fadhel al-Maqtari, conducted a separate review, which also cleared Naif.

None of those findings seemed to matter. Naif was named a terrorist by the European Union, Japan, Israel, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the United Kingdom, Qatar, and the Terrorist Financing Center in Saudi Arabia, among others. Neighbors began avoiding him and his children faced taunts at school. He could no longer receive his Yemeni salary. When we talked in October 2022, in his living room in Salalah, Oman—where he now resides in exile—Naif said that the long-term implications took some time to dawn on him: “I didn’t know how much this would affect my life.”

Between 1945 and 1990 the United Nations Security Council issued sanctions only twice: a trade embargo against Southern Rhodesia’s white-minority government and an arms embargo against apartheid South Africa. In the 1990s it started sanctioning states or governments in concert with military action, including Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, and Sierra Leone. Then, a year after the 1998 al-Qaeda attacks against the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the Security Council passed Resolution 1267, which mandated that member states freeze financial resources that directly belonged to or indirectly benefited the Taliban, hoping to pressure Afghan leaders to extradite Osama bin Laden.

From the beginning the 1267 List had serious flaws. Journalists found, for instance, that one of the individuals it originally named was dead; another was in prison. A senior UN official toldThe Guardian that the sanctions were “a bad idea” because they hindered humanitarian aid efforts. He added: “They are a blunt instrument. But in the end the UN Security Council is the boss, and we don’t query its judgement, even if it has a negative impact.”

After the September 11 attacks, the US radically expanded its use of targeted sanctions. With the support of Russia, it convinced the Security Council to widen the 1267 List to include people suspected of association with specific terrorist groups, first al-Qaeda and then, in 2015, ISIL (Da’esh). Overnight, the 1267 List went from focusing on a small number of individuals in Afghanistan, with a specific purpose, to sanctioning people from all over the world for an unlimited length of time as a “preventive measure.” The 1267 List does not rely on criminal standards defined by national laws; names are proposed in secret by member states, along with any supporting evidence, and then reviewed by a fifteen-person committee composed of diplomats representing the Security Council members, which approves or rejects by consensus. Listed individuals are never shown the evidence marshaled against them.

The answer to who counts as a terrorist is nebulous: the UN hasn’t settled on a definition of the word. Year after year the Security Council has added people around the world to the list, banned their travel, and frozen their assets based on classified intelligence from member states, in effect quietly globalizing the US “war on terror.” Some UN member states comply more than others with these orders, but the Security Council has passed additional regulations in the past decade to increase adherence, including creating a monitoring team that trains states on implementation and consults with national intelligence agencies. Starting in 2017, the UN also began mandating the use of tools, such as databases and travel software, that give states the power to make their own watchlists and block the movement of anyone they put on them—an unprecedented expansion of global travel surveillance.

Today the UN counts two main counterterrorism sanctions regimes among its fifteen sanction registers, which combined list some 730 individuals. As of May 2026, 249 individuals and eighty-eight groups were on the 1267 List. Listed individuals are in effect barred from participating in society: they cannot open bank accounts, work, or receive money from relatives or friends; government administrators control their finances; intelligence or security officials can monitor or harass them. They lose their privacy, their property rights, and their access to social security. Their families, too, can be surveilled. At a talk in Geneva in 2022, the former UN Special Rapporteur on countering terrorism and human rights Fionnuala D. Ní Aoláin noted that women and children are often caught in a “cascade effect”—sanctioned by association. The former Council of Europe investigator Dick Marty, in an interview with Süddeutsche Zeitung in 2010, called being sanctioned equivalent to “a civil death.”

Getting off the UN list is arduous. At the beginning, there was no appeals process. Then, in 2001, a Saudi businessman named Yassin Abdullah Kadi sued the EU for freezing his assets after he was included on the 1267 List. The case found its way to the European Court of Justice, where, in 2008, the judges ruled that the EU had infringed on Kadi’s fundamental rights by enforcing the sanctions without the right to a fair hearing or a way to challenge them. Pressure from European countries and eventually the US at the UN led to some reforms, including the creation of an independent ombudsperson’s office and a new rule that the 1267 committee had to share with individuals a narrative summary of reasons for their listing.

Those sanctioned can now file an appeal to the UN via an ombudsperson. Appointed by the UN Secretary General in consultation with the committee, the ombudsperson is essentially a mediator for a process that occurs outside a court. They request information from member states and conduct independent research, then interview the petitioner and others. It can take up to sixteen months for them to issue a report and recommendation, which the committee has to vote unanimously to accept.

Complicating the process further is the fact that the US can recommend sanctions based purely on intelligence information, while European countries do so only if there has been a criminal investigation. Sometimes the ombudsperson can access the initial intelligence from the listing state; other times they’re denied on national security grounds. Some of the Security Council committee members—the five permanent seats are Russia, China, the US, the UK, and France—refuse to exchange information with one another. Even less gets shared with the people on the list, and therefore with their legal counsel. Although the “reasons for listing” are given, this is often only a short statement of allegations. “The basis upon which the listing happens is in the shadow world of information, and the shadow world of intelligence agencies and cooperation between states,” Ní Aoláin has said.

Only a handful of lawyers are willing to navigate these peculiar procedures. Among them is an Edinburgh-based solicitor and legal scholar named Gavin Sullivan. An Australian-British citizen with a tangled mop of dark hair and professorial spectacles, Sullivan tends to work overtime on cases others avoid. In 2010 he was on staff at a human rights organization in Berlin when a migrants’ association in France contacted him. He scanned the email: a number of Tunisian immigrants in France had wound up on the UN al-Qaeda list, one of whom lost his bricklaying business, pushing his family, including four young children, into poverty. Sullivan was himself the son of a bricklayer and the first in his family to attend university; it made no sense to him that a Tunisian builder could end up on an international blacklist alongside men like bin Laden.

He took the man’s case, along with those of four others, and soon discovered how difficult it was to argue against secret evidence and unsubstantiated allegations. “You’re trying to defend someone, but you don’t know from what,” Sullivan told me. “It’s like shooting in the dark.” Eventually Sullivan got all five off the list, with the help of colleagues including the barrister Rachel Barnes and the Italian legal academic Alice Riccardi. But the requests for his assistance kept coming. One of his clients had been listed for more than fifteen years; for another case, Sullivan received a scant two paragraphs of information. Since that initial case, all six of the clients he has represented have been delisted. Overall, nearly 70 percent of delisting petitions are granted, indicating that a high number of people are mistakenly included in the first place.

In January 2016 Sullivan moved to the University of Kent, where he started teaching law. The UN does not provide legal aid to people trying to challenge the blacklist. Sullivan—who believes that everyone should be entitled to an adequate legal defense, especially during proceedings that rely on secret evidence—has had to carve out time around his day job, relying on volunteer translators to parse redaction-heavy case documents in multiple languages. While raising two young daughters, he started writing a book about the global listing architecture.

In late 2017 Sullivan and Barnes were contacted by Baraa Shiban, a well-known leader of the Arab Spring in Yemen who had fled the country in 2015, after the Houthis began abducting journalists, activists, and members of civil society. Now in London, Shiban asked the lawyers if they’d take on a new case: that of a bright Yemeni leader whose life had been derailed by the UN blacklist.  

2.

While the Arab Spring unfurled in Sanaa in 2011, Naif, then twenty-eight, was glued to the TV coverage from his home in Saudi Arabia. Born into a semi-prominent family in Al-Bayda, where tribes are an important form of social organization, Naif grew up hearing stories about the bravery of his father, Salih Salem al-Qaysi, a community leader who was murdered by bandits during a roadside ambush when Naif was five. This impressed upon him how important it was for the state to give its citizens basic security.

At university in Sanaa, Naif enrolled in Islamic Studies, a common precursor to legal, educational, or religious professions in the region. He had an appetite for self-improvement, reading self-help books and listening daily to BBC radio. When he was twenty-three he married a woman named Yasmin, also from Al-Bayda, who chose him from among a string of suitors. Naif appealed to her, she told me, because he was “a man of principles.”

After graduating Naif moved to Saudi Arabia for work, teaching for several years and then becoming an entrepreneur. He opened two successful car repair shops but was eager for a new challenge. In 2011 protests erupted against Yemen’s autocratic president of thirty-three years, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who had long benefited from US support. God has given a gift to the people, Naif thought. The demonstrations swelled, mobilizing over 100,000 people in the streets of Sanaa. Saleh was ousted the following year, replaced by a transitional government run by Hadi, the former vice president. Naif returned home permanently the next year, eager to join in Yemen’s political transition.

Back in Al-Bayda, Naif was anointed as his clan’s sheikh. He began meeting with different tribes, encouraging older leaders to listen to the demands of the young organizers. At that time there was a guerrilla al-Qaeda presence in Al-Bayda. They held no territory, but Naif worried about their appeal for disenfranchised young people, and he focused on advocating for nonviolent methods of political change. Others took notice. In 2013 Hadi appointed Naif as an advisor for the governorate of Hajjah.

Naif considered it his job to implement the recommendations of a ten-month, inclusive “national dialogue” process that had brought together a variety of constituencies—from political parties, including the former ruling party and the Houthis, to youth movements—to draft a new constitution for Yemen. The final document outlined a federal system and, among other changes, reduced the power of tribes in governance. The transition, it specified, would occur without Yemen “losing its soul or self, so the great peoples adopt their awakening without abandoning their mettle, character, and values.”

But in September 2014 the fledgling democratic process crumbled when the Houthis, a Zaydi Shia movement officially known as Ansar Allah, staged a coup. (The Houthis had previously waged six wars against the government between 2004 and 2010.) The Yemeni security forces collapsed, and war ensued. Saudi Arabia, opposed to the Houthis due to their affiliation with Iran, mobilized an “Arab Coalition” of ten countries to defend Hadi’s government, initially including the UAE and Qatar. The coalition launched extensive air strikes on Houthi-held territory and imposed a naval blockade, and soon humanitarian advocates were accusing its members of war crimes. Human rights groups found that Saudi planes dropping US- and Britain-supplied bombs were disproportionately killing civilians and destroying medical clinics.

Meanwhile the UAE pursued its own strategy. To avoid a Yemeni government aligned with their adversary the Muslim Brotherhood, the Emiratis funded brutal proxy militias in the south, which detained and killed politicians, imams, and civilians with impunity. (They also employed American mercenaries.) The US continued to aid the Saudi-led campaign, setting up an intelligence cell in Riyadh, but was focused on eradicating the al-Qaeda network, sometimes aided by the Emirates, and launching its own semiregular drone strikes.

Amid these shifting alliances, Yemenis tried to survive a collapsing economy, famine, cholera, landmines, and cluster bombs. “Life collapsed in one fell swoop,” writes Bushra al-Maqtari in her introduction to What Have You Left Behind (2023), a collection of civilian testimonies. “The dark irony of it all is that the agitators are always either beneficiaries of the respective military powers on the inside, or reside in Arab or European capitals, far from the war raging in their own country.”

As the Houthis moved outward from Sanaa, Naif formed a coalition of local tribes to defend the province. The Al-Bayda Tribal Coalition (it later became the Al-Bayda Tribes Resistance) unified six clans with different political leanings—bringing together partisans of the General People’s Congress, the Islamic Islah Party, the Socialist Party, and the Nasserist Party, among others. Energetic and respected, Naif wore military fatigues to meetings. His public profile rose, and in December 2015 Hadi appointed Naif as governor. His first task was to convert the informal Tribal Coalition into a professional army unit of the Yemeni government: the new 117th Brigade, which had some 2,200 members and an army leader, received funding from the Saudis for operations. Naif participated in operational command meetings of the Arab Coalition. “My team and I were building a comprehensive plan to liberate, secure, and develop the province,” he explained. Then the UN listing arrived.

Within four months, Naif no longer felt he could govern. He knew Hadi’s government still needed the UN and international partners, and feared the terrorist accusations would taint Al-Bayda. He resigned. Without a purpose or direction, he spent hours pondering how he had ended up on the list. As governor he’d made a lot of enemies. Had he been framed for his religious beliefs, for having served as an imam in his youth? Or for his outspokenness about Saudi Arabia’s war crimes? Naif had criticized the Saudis in private meetings, arguing that they were illegally bombing civilian targets. He’d also clashed with the Emiratis, who he felt were diverting attention from fighting the Houthis to countering the Islah Party, considered a proxy of the Muslim Brotherhood. Meanwhile, the Houthis and the former Saleh regime were known to slander their enemies as AQAP. It was a mistake, Naif realized, not to have publicized his activities as governor more in the media, although some of his speeches against violent extremism are still visible on YouTube. “I’m not savvy,” he told me sheepishly.

In those days a memory came back to him, and he wondered if it had anything to do with the listing. One day at a military strategy meeting with representatives of the UAE, after he appeared on the US’s list but before the UN added him to theirs, an Emirati officer had pressured Naif for direct intelligence briefings. If he cooperated with them, he recalled the man saying, they could get the Americans to take his name off the list. Spying is illegal under Yemen’s constitution, and Naif told the officer he reported only to the Yemeni president. The Emiratis issued vague warnings about how the consequences would multiply, but Naif was too busy to take the threats seriously; he spent his time trekking between hospitals to visit the wounded, military bases to meet with army commanders, and government offices to request aid for the displaced and families of the dead. But now he wondered: Had the UAE fed the UN false intelligence to punish him for refusing to spy?

Naif needed a lawyer, but he had no idea who could represent him. One day he got a call from Shiban, the Arab Spring organizer, who was working with Reprieve, a British human rights organization specializing in counterterrorism cases. Shiban suggested Naif fly to Istanbul to meet with him and the head of Reprieve. Straightaway Naif booked a ticket, traveling via Khartoum, but when he arrived in Istanbul the Turkish authorities blocked his entry.

Dejected, he decided to stay in Sudan. Life in Al-Bayda had become increasingly dangerous. Earlier that year a US Special Forces raid to capture al-Qaeda militants had killed some twenty-five civilians, including nine children under the age of thirteen. Both the Houthis and al-Qaeda were targeting former and current members of Yemen’s government. Reprieve ultimately couldn’t on take Naif’s case and began searching for lawyers with expertise in sanctions.

Yasmin and the children joined Naif in Sudan, and in September 2017 he rented a farm outside Khartoum. In Al-Bayda, meanwhile, the Houthis swiftly advanced, gaining territory. Multiple factors likely contributed to the Houthi takeover, but al-Maisari told me that Naif’s absence had “crippled the province.”

After a difficult stretch in Sudan—the usually fierce Yasmin felt isolated and adrift in their new home—two fortuitous events occurred. The first was that Oman offered Naif and his family entry on account of his status as a tribal leader, overlooking the UN travel ban. The family moved to Muscat, then to Salalah, a small city on the Arabian Sea some two hours from the Yemeni border. The second was that Gavin Sullivan agreed to represent Naif before the UN.

Before he became Naif’s lawyer, Sullivan and his wife discussed the possibility that they too could end up on a blacklist. What if their finances were frozen? A retaliatory listing would have severe consequences. But Sullivan’s wife, who confronts powerful interests in her work as a labor union organizer, was in favor of taking on the case. Sullivan agreed to represent Naif on a pro bono basis before the UN. His legal team got to work; in June 2021, four years after Naif’s UN listing, they filed an appeal.

At the time the UN ombudsperson was Daniel Kipfer Fasciati, an experienced Swiss criminal judge. He reviewed the reasons for Naif’s listing: the Security Council alleged that Naif was associated with al-Qaeda, and had sanctioned him for

“participating in the financing, planning, facilitating, preparing, or perpetrating of acts or activities by, in conjunction with, under the name of, on behalf of, or in support of” and “supplying, selling or transferring arms and related materiel to” Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

The narrative summary—which was shared with Naif and Sullivan—furthermore stated that Naif was a senior official and a financial supporter of AQAP, obtained money for AQAP from parties outside Yemen, facilitated the expansion of AQAP in Al-Bayda, and transferred money and weapons to AQAP fighters. In addition, it alleged that Naif had “served as an AQAP facilitator who provided financial support to AQAP to help it take control of parts of Yemen…and financed AQAP training camps.” Naif vigorously denied all the allegations.

That summer Fasciati started comparing evidence shared by UN member states with Sullivan’s delisting petition. He learned that the US had requested Naif’s listing and that other states, including the Saudis, had submitted intelligence information. He met with these governments behind closed doors, then traveled to Oman to conduct interviews, including with al-Maisari and other high-ranking Yemeni officials. Naif slipped on a silvery gray suit and met with Fasciati in November 2021. Sullivan, without the money to pay for a flight, represented Naif via Zoom: over the years he and other lawyers had tried to get funders to support the Transnational Listing Project, but even progressive donors said they saw legal defense for listed people associated with al-Qaeda as a lost cause.

Fasciati walked Naif through the allegations, and then Sullivan and his team explained that many of Naif’s official activities as governor had seemingly been twisted into examples of terrorist activity. Naif had received external funding—but it was from Saudi Arabia for provincial military activities. He had organized not a terrorist base but an official army training camp for the 117th, which exists to this day. Naif’s pro bono legal team submitted forty pieces of evidence to Fasciati: army payment slips, photos of the camp, text messages from AQAP threatening to murder the man the UN now claimed belonged to them.

Particularly disturbing to Sullivan was that part of the listing seemed to stem from a fundamental misunderstanding by the US government of the relationship between Yemeni tribes and al-Qaeda. Tribal organization is particularly important in rural parts of Yemen, where the majority of the population lives. Western commentators and policy experts for years had falsely claimed that certain tribes were aiding al-Qaeda, when the reality was that individual recruitment to al-Qaeda was based not on tribal affiliation but on factors such as poverty and disenfranchisement. Some of the tribes in Al-Bayda with whom Naif had legitimate dealings, Sullivan came to think, had been conflated with AQAP, a problem documented by scholars such as Helen Lackner. “Particularly in the media, but also in officialdom, there has been a tendency to take a simplistic approach based on the widespread prejudices about tribes, and to link the concept of tribalism with the presence of al Qaeda and other jihadi groups,” Lackner writes.

Then there was the US’s history of muddled intelligence when it came to Yemen. The US has on multiple occasions admitted to acting on erroneous intel in the country, including in 2010, when they killed the deputy governor of Marib, one of former President Saleh’s political rivals, in a missile attack that relied on Yemeni government intelligence. A US official later said “we think we got played.” There are many other reports of US drone strikes hitting civilian targets in Yemen; a brief by the Atlantic Council stated in 2014 that “the United States frequently claims to have killed the same high-level figure multiple times, which raises serious questions about the accuracy of intelligence used to select targets as well as the precision of the strikes.” Tribal affiliation and false intelligence might have led to Naif’s initial listing by the US Treasury, but the UN listing, which other countries supported, seemed politically motivated. Still, Sullivan had no access to the original listing material, nor any way to question the US, Saudis, Emirates, or others.

After three years as ombudsperson, Fasciati resigned in June 2021, citing the office’s lack of independence. In public reports he criticized the institutional weakness of the position, explaining, for instance, that states periodically refused to grant him access to interview petitioners and that listing information could be of poor quality, sometimes gained under torture. But by the time he left in December most of his work on Naif’s case was complete.

In a publicly available report to the Security Council, Fasciati issued a scathing overview. The original listing rationale was seemingly in conflict with basic facts about the Yemeni war: “For example, a government military training camp was attributed to Al-Qaida, even though it could not possibly have been under the control of Al-Qaida.” Furthermore, “it could not be established whether the information had been collected by the intelligence services of different countries or had originated from one source and been shared by that source with the services of other countries,” raising the possibility that one state could have manipulated others.

In March 2022 the new ombudsperson, Richard Malanjum, shared the office’s official recommendation with Sullivan. The confidential report, which was delivered to the Security Council and which I reviewed, put its conclusion in stark terms: “Unlike any other case that I have considered so far, it is striking that the listing information and publicly available information about the Petitioner on the one hand, and the comments on it from the Petitioner and from other interviewed persons on the other hand, are diametrically opposed and irreconcilably contradictory.” The report states that intelligence from Saudi Arabia was blatantly wrong, citing claims that Naif was in Yemen supporting terrorist activity when he had already left the country. (Information about any intelligence from other UN member states supporting the allegations is redacted.) The ombudsperson’s office found the total accusations so implausible, given Naif’s public persona as a statesman, that they only made sense if Naif was a double agent. The ombudsperson found no proof this was the case, and while he could not state with certainty why Naif had been listed, a “likely hypothesis is that at least some of the false accusations were intentional.”

Naif was at home eating dinner when Shiban called from London. “Do you remember the promise you made to take Yasmin and the family on vacation to Turkey?” Shiban asked. “Yes, and I’m sticking to my promise,” Naif replied, wondering what Shiban was on about. “You should start packing,” Shiban said, his normally steady voice trembling. “You’ve been delisted.” It was a moment, Naif told me, of “indescribable joy.” News travels fast around the Yemeni community in Salalah; guests began arriving at Naif’s house to celebrate. They lingered long into the night.

3.

When Sullivan, Shiban, and I arrived at Naif’s roomy house in Salalah on a humid weekday in October 2022, Naif jumped out of the gate grinning. “Welcome! Welcome, Gavin,” he said, kissing the man on both cheeks. “You did a brilliant job with my case.” It was Naif’s first time meeting his lawyer in person. Naif, who has thick eyebrows and a broad nose, was sprightly in a white robe and brown leather slip-on sandals. He ushered us in past two parrots and up to the roof, where a circle of cushioned chairs made an informal salon next to a gurgling fountain.

The sun fell slowly, illuminating the astroturf. Naif sat cross-legged on a chair, snacking on dates as Yemenis arrived to pay their respects to Sullivan: the former head of the teacher’s union of Al-Bayda, the former governor of the island of Socotra, various sheikhs, the head of the Marib Emergency Unit, the former minister of fish. The guests discussed the events that had brought them to Salalah: one had been shot protesting for democracy in Al-Bayda, another detained by a UAE-run proxy militia for nine months.

“Our neighbors, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, don’t share the same hopes we do—we want pluralism,” the former representative of Al-Bayda’s teacher’s union remarked. “Welcome to the Yemeni sessions,” joked Shiban, who, dressed in a faded t-shirt and jeans, still looked very much the student organizer. The men teased Shiban, who had made the local TV news for banning khat at his wedding. He was against it, primarily, for climate reasons, as the crop requires an immense amount of water—an unpopular stance among the guests who liked to occasionally imbibe.

Amid the chatter, Naif leaned over and informed Sullivan that he had recently flown to Istanbul to visit some friends. Upon arrival, he was denied entry, detained for twelve hours in a holding cell, and sent back to Muscat. Sullivan pulled out an electronic tablet and began taking notes. The airport officials had given Naif a piece of paper in Turkish, which he now handed over. “The hardest part,” Sullivan whispered, not wanting to distract from the revelry, “is that when you come off the UN list, you stay on other lists.”

This had happened to Sullivan’s other clients, too. One man I spoke with, Youssef Abdaoui, a Tunisian living in Italy, had been taken off the UN list in 2014. When he flew to Romania to reunite with his wife and children, he was arrested at the airport and deported. The authorities, Sullivan said, had given him a twenty-one-year travel ban due to “an unspecified threat to public order.” Sullivan has been unable to determine why Romania denied Abdaoui entry. No process exists to compensate delisted individuals for the years they were blacklisted, erase the character assassination that lives indefinitely on the Internet, or remove them from national lists.

The next morning I found Sullivan hunched over his laptop in a coffee shop, looking for a lawyer in Istanbul who could challenge Naif’s Turkish entry ban. There were only three days left to appeal the decision in a local court. That night, as we walked through downtown Salalah, inhaling the fumes of diesel exhaust and passing shops selling jugs of amber Yemeni honey, thought to cure all manner of ailments, a white sedan pulled up. “You’re Naif’s friends!” the driver said, grinning. “I’ll take you to eat Yemeni food!” Sullivan peered at the man warily over his glasses. “Who are you?” he asked, scanning the vehicle and the street. On a recent trip to Tunisia to conduct interviews with listed individuals, Sullivan found that his hotel room had been broken into; state intelligence officials trailed him on motorbikes. But it turned out Naif had sent the man to make sure we did not eat at a mediocre restaurant.

Representing listed individuals had consumed Sullivan. In addition to his case work, he was researching the UN’s use of global technologies for predictive watchlisting. At the end of 2017 the Security Council passed resolution 2396, which directed the ISIL and Al-Qaeda Sanctions Committee to expand the 1267 List to target “foreign terrorist fighters,” a vague term used primarily to describe Americans and Europeans who join armed groups abroad. It mandated that all countries create watchlists of “known and suspected terrorists” and share them internationally. The first Trump administration had pushed for the resolution (then-counterterrorism coordinator Nathan Sales boasted at a conference that “by making watchlists mandatory, the Security Council has taken a U.S. initiative and made it the international norm”), but it also received support from private corporations and other powerful countries. “It’s a great example of US, Russia, and Chinese interests aligning,” Eric Rosand, a senior State Department official under the Obama administration, told me.

The UN’s Office of Counter-Terrorism now owns and installs tracking software called goTravel, created by the Dutch government, that scoops up airline passenger details in countries that install it, analyzing names and itineraries for “suspicious patterns” to inform decisions about who is allowed to board a plane or cross a border. In 2021 the office’s deputy, a former US State Department official named Raffi Gregorian, told West Point’s The Countering Terrorism Center Sentinel that to better predict terrorist travel they were working on “algorithms that tell the data systems what to look for, like people between age twenty and twenty-five traveling from Mogadishu to Nairobi and then on to Frankfurt, if that happens to be a travel pattern of interest.” (I emailed Gregorian several times, but he did not reply.) A UN pilot project called goFintel has experimented with developing algorithms to identify “suspicious” individuals and ban them from making financial transactions, including based on open-source social media data and the 1267 List.

When Naif first came to Oman he didn’t have a residence permit. Once, as he was driving about town running errands, he was stopped by the police and had to wait on the side of the road until they verified his identity and status. It was unnerving, so he stopped going out. The Omanis initially told him that they didn’t want to upset the Americans or the UN by making his stay officially legal. But prominent Yemenis advocated on his behalf, and about a year later the Omanis issued the permit.

Now when Naif needs space, he hops in the car and heads for the canyons and wadis that rise behind Salalah’s coastal plain. He hikes a trail through a nature reserve that meanders past waterfalls and between boulders, descending to a bright turquoise river. During the monsoon season the ground turns a feverish green, but the rest of the year it’s dry and cracked from the heat. Solitude in Salalah is rare, but out here it is possible to think.

Often, as Naif walks, he worries about his debts. Initially he had received income from his car repair businesses in Saudi Arabia, but eventually he was forced to sell those businesses and other investments for cash. Today he is still blocked from receiving any money through banks because of the US Treasury sanctions and has fallen deep in arears. Still he was grateful, because his family’s wealth and political connections had kept him afloat. He knew that other men on the list had experienced far worse.

Naif’s marriage with Yasmin had been strained by the relocations: two years ago she considered a divorce. Lately they were doing better. (Naif married a second wife a few years ago, as is customary in some parts of Yemen, but she was more shielded from the listing’s fallout, since the family had already settled in Oman.) Naif and Yasmin frequently discussed how to protect their family. They did not want their children to be surveilled, and they forbade their older sons from visiting Yemen, terrified that they could be somehow targeted, kidnapped, or killed.

Sullivan, who is now at the University of Edinburgh, is filing an appeal for Naif with the American government to get him removed from the Treasury’s list. This is likely to be extraordinarily difficult: according to a 2020 analysis done by West Point’s Combatting Terrorism Center, between 2001 and 2016 the Treasury listed some 718 people as Specially Designated Global Terrorists; only twenty-five have been delisted while they were still alive. The Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), which manages the process, does not have to share the basis of their allegations or name major witnesses during an appeal. Listed individuals can only submit a petition once. During his research into another client listed by both the US and the UN, Kamel Darraji, Sullivan stumbled via Wikileaks upon cables the State Department had sent in 2009 indicating that they found no grounds for Darraji’s listing. Today, although he was delisted by the UN in 2012, Darraji is still a Treasury sanctioned terrorist. He has been on the list for twenty-two years. (OFAC did not respond to a request for comment.)

Outside of the Treasury’s terrorist sanctions lists, which as of this April contained some 17,000 names, the US is increasingly using sanctions to target journalists and political opponents. In a strange twist, last year the Trump administration sanctioned a former 1267 List ombudsperson—the Canadian lawyer and judge Kimberly Prost—for her more recent work as a judge of the International Criminal Court, along with eight of her colleagues. The US has also sanctioned multiple Palestinian human rights organizations, as well as the UN investigator Francesca Albanese, who successfully sued the US government. Prost, in an interview with Al Jazeera, reflected on the effects of the listing. “I thought I had a good understanding of the impact of sanctions. But until you experience it, it doesn’t become real to you,” she said. “Immediately, you have no credit cards. It doesn’t matter where they were issued or what bank, because of the control of the Americans over the SWIFT system. It cripples you in our modern world.”

Naif’s inclusion on the Treasury’s list has not prevented members of the American government from approaching him for intelligence. Naif met them first in Salalah at the Millennium Hotel, a family-friendly resort with a generous breakfast buffet. Later they met in Muscat in the Officers Club of the Omani Royal Court. A man who called himself Mike and who Naif described as “looking like Sullivan”—middle-aged, white, short dark hair flecked with gray—wanted to get Naif’s views on countering al-Qaeda in Al-Bayda. “Not by drones,” Naif recalls telling him. “We need to work along two tracks: for those who don’t have jobs, we create opportunities, and for those who are involved in criminal acts, they go through a fair judicial process.” He connected Mike to security officials in Al-Bayda, helping him out as a favor to the Omanis. The Americans promised to work on delisting him, but the years passed without any change.

When I spoke to Naif recently, the Americans in Muscat were still soliciting his insights into Yemen’s grinding war. The country remains divided between the Houthi-controlled north and west, including Sanaa, and the south, where the Presidential Leadership Council (PLC), Yemen’s internationally recognized government, is based in the coastal port of Aden. Saudi Arabia and the US continue to back the PLC. The UAE-funded Southern Transitional Council split from the PLC last year and tried to capture two southern provinces, but the PLC regained the territory in late 2025, and the UAE withdrew from the country earlier this year.

Meanwhile, in response to the Israeli genocide in Gaza, the Houthis have attacked ships in the Red Sea and fired missiles at targets in Israel. Both the Biden and Trump administrations launched retaliatory attacks against the Houthis, until the Omanis brokered an official cease-fire. The Red Sea, the anthropologist Samar Al-Bulushi told me, has become the most militarized space in the world. In all this the interests of regular Yemenis have been ignored. “Around me the list of the dead grows longer and longer: family, relatives, friends, neighbors—all civilians killed for no reason,” al-Maqtari wrote in What Have You Left Behind? That list is now over 350,000 names long.

One afternoon while we were in Salalah, Naif piled his younger children in the car—Saba, Sultan, Aya, and Salah—along with Sullivan, Shiban, and myself and headed to the beach. We stopped to buy the kids ice cream bars, and then pulled up at the Arabian Prosthetics Center, where specialists rehabilitated dozens of war-wounded Yemenis (it has since shut down). Close to 90 percent of the patients had stepped on landmines. Naif helped people in Al-Bayda travel to the facility, then visited them while they were fitted for new limbs. Inside it smelled of fresh plaster and paint, and the ovens were firing to mold the prosthetics.

On the drive out of town we passed long lines for drive-through coffee and half-built homes wedged against gentle umber hills. Naif stared ahead as he drove, unusually silent. After passing a military checkpoint on the town’s outskirts, we turned down a narrow road that curved up and around a bend; beyond was a gleam of blue. The children shrieked and stuck their hands out the open windows. Naif took them on a walk, up a rock-hewn path along a cliff edging the sea. Tucked into his belt was a Jambiya that used to belong to his father. We passed a few tourists as three-year-old Sultan raced ahead of us barefoot, impervious to danger. Saba and Aya clamored up a ledge and called for their dad. Naif hurried over, extending his arms wide. The girls jumped.   

Life here was safe, and Naif was indebted to the Omanis. But he dreamed that his children would have a more expansive future. Aya likes to read and loves art. Saba is interested in medicine; Naif thinks she might be a doctor, Sultan a military commander, Salah a pilot. They know they’re Yemeni, and Naif tells them stories of the smoky green mountains in Al-Bayda, but he doesn’t want them to live in the past. He worries the listing will somehow affect them when they least expect it, when they try to board a plane or open a bank account. His oldest child is about to graduate from high school and wants to study cybersecurity abroad, but because of the sanctions Naif cannot transfer funds for tuition.

The place Naif most wants to go is Yemen, where he yearns to be part of the political process again. “In Yemen’s political scene, if you’re not present, you’re basically gone,” Naif said. Despite the UN delisting, high-ranking Yemeni officials have signaled that in the country’s current political climate it’s still improbable that he will be able to return, as long as he remains listed by the American government. Sometimes Naif thinks about the strangers who made that initial decision. It was a simple series of administrative functions: an entry on a spreadsheet, a line on a No Fly list. This data did not represent a life, but it could permanently alter one. Naif still holds out hope that the US will clear his name. Until then, if there’s one thing the past ten years have taught him, it’s how to wait.