Life on the List

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 b...