Yemen's fight with rebels a regional concern - washingtonpost.com

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Sunni-Shiite tensions grow as Saudis allege Iran's involvement

By Sudarsan Raghavan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, November 14, 2009

MAZRAQ, YEMEN -- Along the jagged, oatmeal-colored mountains of northern Yemen, civil war has transformed the windswept landscape into a canvas of human misery, bolstering al-Qaeda's efforts to create a haven in the Middle East's poorest nation.

It is a war largely hidden from the rest of the world the past five years, and it pits the Hawthi rebels, who are Shiites, against Yemen's government. In recent days, however, it has also drawn in Saudi Arabia. Yemen and Saudi Arabia, both ruled by Sunnis, accuse Shiite Iran of backing the rebels, raising the specter of a proxy war that could elevate sectarian tensions in this oil-rich region.

The fighting could have serious implications for the U.S. anti-terrorism effort in a failing nation where al-Qaeda is gaining strength, Western diplomats and Yemeni analysts say. The war is drawing attention and scarce resources away from efforts to combat poverty, a secessionist movement in the south and piracy along the nation's shores. A prolonged conflict, they say, could further weaken Yemen's government and deepen societal fissures, allowing al-Qaeda militants to thrive.

"The longer the war in the north continues and the longer the problems in the south continue without resolution, the more we pave the road for al-Qaeda," said Yahya Abu Asbu, a Foreign Ministry official and deputy secretary general of the Yemeni Socialist Party. "Yemen will become more dangerous than Somalia."

Ruling party officials concede that the war is siphoning resources from other pressing problems, but they say their priority is to crush the rebellion.

"You cannot say the Hawthis are less dangerous than al-Qaeda," said Yasser Ahmed Bin Salim al-Awadi, who heads the government's ruling bloc in parliament. "Al-Qaeda is not doing something like what the Hawthis are doing now."

The war has forced more than 175,000 Yemenis to flee their homes; many more remain trapped in areas gripped by violence.

Ali Abdu and his family are among the war's newest victims.

They escaped to Saudi Arabia two months ago. But last week, the Hawthi rebels crossed into Saudi Arabia and attacked a Saudi patrol. The kingdom retaliated by bombing rebel positions in Yemen, but also forced Abdu and hundreds of other desperate refugees back across the border.

Evading bombs and bullets, the family reached Mazraq, a crowded refugee camp less than five miles from the front lines.

"It is our destiny," said Abdu, 45, with no hint of emotion. He paused, then added: "Only Allah knows why they are fighting."

The clans

The Hawthis, who believe in the Zaydi branch of Shiite Islam, ruled northern Yemen as a religious imamate for nearly a millennium before being overthrown in a 1962 coup. Ever since, Yemen's rulers have been wary of them and other Zaydi clans. The Zaydis make up more than a quarter of Yemen's population and constitute a majority in the north.

The rebels accuse the government of trying to dilute their religion by installing Sunni fundamentalists in mosques and official positions in some Zaydi areas. The government maintains that Hawthis seek to bring back the Zaydi imamate.

The conflict began in 2004 with a few hundred rebel fighters. It has grown into a full-fledged insurgency that Yemen's undisciplined military has struggled to contain, despite its deployment of military units and resources to the north. Last year, the fighting reached the outskirts of Sanaa, the capital.

In the town of Mazraq on Thursday, the market was crowded with disheveled Yemeni soldiers in ragtag uniforms. Many carried aging Kalashnikov rifles and rode in the back of pickup trucks, chewing khat, a mildly narcotic leaf popular in Yemen.

Yemeni officials expressed confidence that they could crush the rebellion, now that the Saudis were pushing from the north. The kingdom is deeply concerned about having a hostile Shiite region on its southern border.

The rebels say they staged the border attack, which killed a Saudi soldier, because of Saudi support for Yemen. Hawthi rebel commanders have denied Iran is supporting them. Iran, too, has denied arming or financing the rebels. Yemen and Saudi Arabia have not provided credible evidence of Iranian support, Western diplomats and analysts say.

Still, Saudi Arabia's entry into the conflict has touched a nerve with Iran. This week, Iran's foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, declared that no nation should "interfere" in Yemen's internal affairs, a veiled snipe at Saudi Arabia. Some analysts say if Saudi Arabia continues to attack the rebels, Iran might decide to back the Hawthis, if it hasn't already, as a way to gain leverage over Riyadh.

"Iran believes the biggest obstacle to its growing influence in the region is Saudi Arabia," said Najib Ghallab, a political researcher at Sanaa University. "To weaken Saudi influence, Iran believes Yemen is the starting point."

Sectarian differences

Many Yemenis say al-Qaeda is already taking advantage of the government's focus on the north. An al-Qaeda ambush this month in the east that killed five security officials raised questions over whether the thinly stretched government can control the entire country. "In this environment, security is weak and the government is busy with wars. This is the environment al-Qaeda wants."

Some officials allege that the Hawthis are allied with the Sunni militants of al-Qaeda, but they provide no evidence. Most analysts view it as an attempt by a weak government to generate support from the United States and other Western powers that fear Yemen is descending into chaos. The Hawthis have long been deeply antagonistic toward hard-line Sunni fundamentalists, making any alliance with al-Qaeda unlikely.

Critics of the government declare that the war can be ended quickly through negotiations. They accuse Yemen's president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, of engaging in war to bolster his military authority, weaken political rivals and milk more economic and military aid from Western powers.

Awadi dismissed such suggestions. "It's not in the government's interest to make war in the hope it will bring more instability."

As the conflict rages, sectarian and tribal animosities are deepening. In the camp, some refugees said Hawthis had forced Sunnis from their villages.

"They were the first to be exposed to any dangers," Ahmed Garela Al-Balawi, 43, a Zaydi Shiite who fled Haidan, a Hawthi stronghold, said last week.

In Sanaa, government forces have detained Shiites thought to support the Hawthis, human rights activists say. Shiites have been banned from sensitive jobs and were ordered to hand in weapons, said Hassan Zaid, the Shiite leader of the al-Haq party, which supported the Hawthis. His party has since been dissolved.

Awadi doesn't dispute taking action against Hawthi supporters, but he said there were no sectarian motives.

Outside the camp, Ahmed Davish, 37, shooed away flies buzzing around his face. He and his family had arrived five days earlier -- also forced from Saudi Arabia.

In the previous years of war, Davish, who is Sunni, returned to his village of Raza to live side by side again with Shiites. This time, "it's very difficult to return," he said. "You should be a Hawthi, or you will be killed."

Saudi Forces Bomb Yemeni Rebels on Southern Border - WSJ.com

By MOHAMMED ALY SERGIE, SUMMER SAID and MARGARET COKER

RIYADH -- Saudi Arabia launched bombing raids Thursday against Yemeni rebels along the border between the two countries, marking a significant escalation in efforts to stamp out an insurgency that Yemen has struggled to contain.

The raids followed the killing of a Saudi soldier when a border patrol was fired on by "infiltrators" Wednesday, according to Saudi state media. The Saudis warned of a fierce retaliation.

Yemen began a military offensive this summer, called Operation Scorched Earth, against the rebel group, known as the Houthi. The flare-up of a five-year-old conflict has raised fears that al Qaeda members who have found refuge in Yemen could take advantage of instability on the rugged, porous border to attack Saudi Arabia.

The Houthi, which isn't connected to al Qaeda, is fighting for autonomy against what it calls an ineffectual and corrupt central Yemen government. The government calls the uprising treasonous. Members of the group, which is named for its founder, practice an offshoot of Shiite Islam, instead of the Sunni Islam that most Yemenis adhere to.

Saudi Arabia is a strong supporter of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh and a major donor to its impoverished southern neighbor. A top Saudi official recently reiterated Riyadh's commitment to ensuring Yemen's internal security.

The mobilization of Saudi forces is a rare event for the country, which boasts one of the most high-tech and largest military forces in the region.

Details of the Saudi military response Thursday were difficult to confirm. The territory involved is remote and mountainous. The Saudi government declined to comment on the military action or confirm details.

Residents in the Saudi town of Jizan, about 50 miles from the Yemeni border, reported hearing squadrons of fighter planes roaring toward the border before daybreak Thursday. The sorties continued until the end of the day, said one resident, who said he also saw Saudi infantry troops moving toward the border.

Saudi forces evacuated some towns north of Yemen's border which armed infiltrators had occupied Tuesday, carried out airstrikes in Saudi territory and took control of the area, the official Saudi Press Agency reported early Friday.

Rebel leaders told the Associated Press that Saudi bombs had hit their positions well inside Yemeni territory and caused numerous civilian casualties.

The Saudi television network Al Arabiya, which has a reporter on the Saudi-Yemen border, reported that the Saudi military was bombing rebel positions along the border as well as inside Yemen. The network said at least 40 rebels had been killed. That number was impossible to verify, as were reports of civilian casualties.

A doctor working at King Fahd Hospital in Jizan said Thursday night that staff there had been told to prepare for military casualties. Hospital workers had already treated numerous Saudi soldiers who had been wounded in the incursion earlier in the week, he said.

Yemeni diplomats denied that Saudi forces had entered Yemeni airspace or moved across the border into Yemen. "The Houthi insurgents continue to disseminate false information to deflect media attention from their collapsing morals and foothold," said Mohammed Albasha, a spokesman for the Embassy of the Republic of Yemen in Washington.

During this summer's battles, both the army and the rebels accused outside capitals of interceding on their enemy's behalf. Yemen claims Iran is helping arm the rebels, and the rebels say Riyadh has helped the central government.

The rebels deny getting any help from Tehran, which has offered to mediate in the conflict. A Yemeni Interior Ministry official said that the Saudis had never intervened militarily in Yemen.

The five-year-old conflict between the Houthi rebels and the Yemeni government has uprooted more than 150,000 Yemeni civilians from their homes and added to a deteriorating security situation in the country.

Besides dealing with the rebels in the north and a separatist threat in the south, the government is struggling to contain al Qaeda militants who are establishing havens in lawless parts of the country.

Saudi officials say the Houthi insurgency distracts the Yemeni president from what they see as the more important task of disrupting those jihadi groups.

Saudis have kicked out or jailed most of their homegrown al Qaeda and are watching the Yemen border closely to keep militant cells there out of the kingdom. This summer, a Yemen-based al Qaeda militant attempted to assassinate the Saudi deputy interior minister, a member of the ruling family.

Maoist Rebels Widen Deadly Reach Across India - NYTimes.com

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By JIM YARDLEY

BARSUR, India — At the edge of the Indravati River, hundreds of miles from the nearest international border, India effectively ends. Indian paramilitary officers point machine guns across the water. The dense jungles and mountains on the other side belong to Maoist rebels dedicated to overthrowing the government.

“That is their liberated zone,” said P. Bhojak, one of the officers stationed at the river’s edge in this town in the eastern state of Chattisgarh.

Or one piece of it. India’s Maoist rebels are now present in 20 states and have evolved into a potent and lethal insurgency. In the last four years, the Maoists have killed more than 900 Indian security officers, a figure almost as high as the more than 1,100 members of the coalition forces killed in Afghanistan during the same period.

If the Maoists were once dismissed as a ragtag band of outdated ideologues, Indian leaders are now preparing to deploy nearly 70,000 paramilitary officers for a prolonged counterinsurgency campaign to hunt down the guerrillas in some of the country’s most rugged, isolated terrain.

For India, the widening Maoist insurgency is a moment of reckoning for the country’s democracy and has ignited a sharp debate about where it has failed. In the past, India has tamed some secessionist movements by coaxing rebel groups into the country’s big-tent political process. The Maoists, however, do not want to secede or be absorbed. Their goal is to topple the system.

Once considered Robin Hood figures, the Maoists claim to represent the dispossessed of Indian society, particularly the indigenous tribal groups, who suffer some of the country’s highest rates of poverty, illiteracy and infant mortality. Many intellectuals and even some politicians once sympathized with their cause, but the growing Maoist violence has forced a wrenching reconsideration of whether they can still be tolerated.

“The root of this is dispossession and deprivation,” said Ramachandra Guha, a prominent historian based in Bangalore. “The Maoists are an ugly manifestation of this. This is a serious problem that is not going to disappear.”

India’s rapid economic growth has made it an emerging global power but also deepened stark inequalities in society. Maoists accuse the government of trying to push tribal groups off their land to gain access to raw materials and have sabotaged roads, bridges and even an energy pipeline.

If the Maoists’ political goals seem unattainable, analysts warn they will not be easy to uproot, either.

Here in the state of Chattisgarh, Maoists dominate thousands of square miles of territory and have pushed into neighboring states of Orissa, Bihar, Jharkhand and Maharashtra, part of a so-called Red Corridor stretching across central and eastern India.

Violence erupts almost daily. In the past five years, Maoists have detonated more than 1,000 improvised explosive devices in Chattisgarh. Within the past two weeks, Maoists have burned two schools in Jharkhand, hijacked and later released a passenger train in West Bengal while also carrying out a raid against a West Bengal police station.

Efforts are under way to open peace negotiations, but as yet remain stalemated. With the government offensive drawing closer, the people who feel most at risk are the tribal villagers who live in the forests of Chattisgarh, where the police and Maoists, sometimes called Naxalites, are already skirmishing.

“Earlier,” said one villager, “we used to fear the tigers and wild boars. Now we fear the guns of the Naxalites and the police.”

The counterinsurgency campaign, called Operation Green Hunt, calls for sending police and paramilitary forces into the jungles to confront the Maoists and drive them out of newer footholds toward remote forest areas where they can be contained.

“It may take one year, two years, three years or four,” predicted Vishwa Ranjan, chief of the state police in Chattisgarh, adding that casualties would be inevitable. “There is no zero casualty doctrine,” he said.

Once an area is cleared, the plan also calls for introducing development projects such as roads, bridges and schools in hopes of winning support of the tribal people. Also known as adivasis, they have faced decades of exploitation from local officials, moneylenders and private contractors, numerous government reports have found.

“The adivasis are the group least incorporated into India’s political economy,” said Ashutosh Varshney, an India specialist at Brown University, calling their plight one of the “unfinished quests of Indian democracy.”

The Maoist movement first coalesced after a violent 1967 uprising by local Communists over a land dispute in a West Bengal village known as Naxalbari, hence the name Naxalites.

Some Communists would enter the political system; today, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) is an influential political force that holds power in West Bengal. But others went underground, and by the 1980s, many found sanctuary in Chattisgarh, especially in the region across from the Indravati River known as Abhujmad. From here, the Maoists recruited and trained disgruntled tribal villagers and slowly spread out. For years, the central government regarded them as mostly a nuisance. But in 2004, the movement radicalized, authorities say, when its two dominant wings merged with the more violent Communist Party of India (Maoist).

Authorities in Chattisgarh then deputized and armed civilian posses, which have been accused by human rights groups of terrorizing innocent villagers and committing atrocities of their own in the name of hunting Maoists. Now, violence is frequent, if unpredictable, like the ambush near the village of Laheri, in Maharashtra State, carried out by the Maoists on Oct. 8.

That morning, following a tip, a police patrol chased two Maoist fighters and stumbled into a trap. Two hundred Maoists with rifles and machine guns lay waiting and opened fire when the officers came into an exposed area of rice paddies. Seventeen officers died, fighting for hours until they ran out of ammunition.

“They surrounded us from every side,” said Ajay Bhushari, 31, who survived the ambush and is now the commanding officer in Laheri. “They were just stronger. They had more people.”

The Maoists felled trees across the only road leading to the village. The police, already wary of using roads because of improvised explosive devices, marched their reinforcements 10 miles through the jungle, arriving too late at the scene.

Officer Bhushari said violence in the area had risen so sharply that the police now left the fortified defenses of their outpost only in large groups, even for social outings. The Maoists also killed 31 police officers from other nearby outposts in attacks in February and May.

“It’s an open jail for us,” he said. “Either we are sitting here, or we are on patrol. There is nothing else.”

About 40 miles from Laheri, a processing plant owned by Essar Steel has been closed for five months. Maoists sabotaged Essar’s 166-mile underground pipeline, which transfers slurry from one of India’s most coveted iron ore deposits to the Bay of Bengal. “I’ve told my management that I’ll take a team and do the repairs,” said S. Ramesh, the project manager for Essar. “But I can’t promise how long it will last.”

The Essar plant is part of broader undertaking by the government and several private mining companies to extract the resources beneath land teeming with guerrillas. Mr. Ramesh said 70 percent of India’s iron ore lay in states infiltrated by Maoists; production in this area is stalled at 16 million tons a year even though the area has the potential to produce 100 million tons.

Mr. Ramesh fretted that India’s growth would be stunted if the country could not exploit its own natural resources. Yet he also cautioned that the counterinsurgency operation was no cure-all. “That alone is not going to help,” he said. “We are not fighting an enemy here. We are fighting citizens.”

With police officers dying in large numbers and Maoists carrying out bolder attacks, the debate around the insurgency has sharpened in India’s intellectual salons and on the opinion pages and talk shows.

The writer Arundhati Roy recently called for unconditional talks and told CNN-IBN that the Maoists were justified in taking up arms because of government oppression. Others who are sympathetic to the plight of the adivasis say the Maoist violence has become intolerable.

“You can’t defend the tactics,” said Mr. Varshney, the Brown University professor. “No modern state can accept attacks on state institutions, even when the state is wrong.”

Local people are caught in the middle. On a recent market day in the village of Palnar, women balancing urns of water on their heads and bare-footed, emaciated men came out of the forests to shop for vegetables, nuts or a rotting fruit fermented to produce local liquor. As peddlers spread their wares over blankets, the nearby government office was locked behind a closed gate.

“It’s a bad situation,” said one villager who asked not to be identified, fearing retribution from both sides. “The Naxalite activities have increased. They have their meetings in the village. They tell the people they have to fight. The people here do not vote out of fear.”

Another man arrived on a motorcycle from a more distant village. Several months ago, the police raided his village and arrested more than a dozen people after accusing them of being collaborators. A few were Maoist sympathizers, the man on the motorcycle said, but most were wrongly swept up in the raid. Now, Operation Green Hunt portends more confrontation.

“Life is very difficult,” the man said. “The Naxalites think we are helping the police. The police think we are helping the Naxalites. We are living in fear over who will kill us first.”

Hari Kumar contributed reporting.

Yemen’s North Hit by Bloodiest Fighting in Years - NYTimes.com

Image by Erik D via Flickr

By ROBERT F. WORTH

BEIRUT, Lebanon — The Yemeni Army fought back a major offensive by rebels in the northern city of Sadah early Sunday morning, killing dozens of insurgents, witnesses and Yemeni officials said.

The battle appears to have been the boldest rebel attack yet in five weeks of renewed fighting in Yemen’s remote and mountainous Sadah Province, near the border with Saudi Arabia. The Houthi rebels have been clashing intermittently with Yemen’s government for five years, and the latest round of fighting, which erupted last month after a yearlong cease-fire, has been the bloodiest so far.

The attack began just before dawn Sunday, witnesses said, as hundreds of Houthi rebels ambushed three military checkpoints and tried to take over the presidential palace in Sadah, the provincial capital.

The rebels appear to have hoped the start of the Muslim holiday of Id al-Fitr and the government’s announcement of a unilateral suspension of fighting on Friday would give them the element of surprise.

But the better-armed military was ready and fought the rebels back, witnesses and officials said. Reports of the death toll varied, with some news agencies saying more than 140 rebels had been killed. There was no word on whether any Yemeni soldiers died.

The foiled ambush came days after a government airstrike in Amran Province, near the border with Sadah, killed dozens of civilian refugees, drawing condemnations from human rights groups. The Sadah conflict has displaced tens of thousands of people, international monitors say, leaving many refugees stranded without adequate food or water.

The Yemeni government says the rebels are preventing civilians from leaving the conflict zone, and has accused them of using civilians as human shields.

Despite their geographical isolation, the rebels have acquired an increasingly sophisticated arsenal, largely by capturing or buying government weapons. In propaganda videotapes, Houthi soldiers can be seen driving Yemeni Army tanks. The Yemeni government has accused the rebels of receiving unofficial support from Iran, but the Houthis deny it. The conflict in Sadah, which began in 2004, has a sectarian element: the Houthis are Zaidis, an offshoot of Shiite Islam that is fairly common in Yemen, and the government has used radical Sunni militants as proxy forces against them.

The government has accused the Houthis of trying to restore the traditional Zaidi-led imamate that largely ruled Yemen until 1962. The Houthis deny it, saying they merely want more autonomy in Sadah and restitution for war damages.

The Sadah conflict has underscored the vulnerability of Yemen. Desperately poor, the country is also facing a separatist movement in the south and a resurgent presence of Al Qaeda that has become a deep concern for the United States. The government’s ability to cope with such challenges has long been limited by Yemen’s deep tribal traditions and its rugged terrain.

Khaled al-Hammadi contributed reporting from Yemen.

New Evidence of Venezuelan Aid for Colombian Rebels

By SIMON ROMERO

CARACAS, Venezuela — Despite repeated denials by President Hugo Chávez, Venezuelan officials have continued to assist commanders of Colombia’s largest rebel group, helping them arrange weapons deals in Venezuela and even obtain identity cards to move with ease on Venezuelan soil, according to computer material captured from the rebels in recent months and under review by Western intelligence agencies.

The materials point to detailed collaborations between the guerrillas and high-ranking military and intelligence officials in Mr. Chávez’s government as recently as several weeks ago, countering the president’s frequent statements that his administration does not assist the rebels. “We do not protect them,” he said in late July.

The new evidence — drawn from computer material captured from the rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC — comes at a low point for ties between Venezuela and Colombia. Mr. Chávez froze diplomatic relations in late July, chafing at assertions by Colombia’s government that Swedish rocket launchers sold to Venezuela ended up in the hands of the FARC. Venezuela’s reaction was also fueled by Colombia’s plans to increase American troop levels there.

“Colombia’s government is trying to build a case in the media against our country that serves its own political agenda,” said Bernardo Álvarez, Venezuela’s ambassador in Washington, describing the latest intelligence information as “noncorroborated.”

Mr. Chávez has disputed claims of his government’s collaboration with the rebels since Colombian forces raided a FARC encampment in Ecuador last year. During the raid, Colombian commandos obtained the computers of a FARC commander with encrypted e-mail messages that described a history of close ties between Mr. Chávez’s government and the rebel group, which has long crossed over into Venezuelan territory for refuge.

The newest communications, circulated among the seven members of the FARC’s secretariat, suggest that little has changed with Venezuela’s assistance since the raid. The New York Times obtained a copy of the computer material from an intelligence agency that is analyzing it.

One message from Iván Márquez, a rebel commander thought to operate largely from Venezuelan territory, describes the FARC’s plan to buy surface-to-air missiles, sniper rifles and radios in Venezuela last year.

It is not clear whether the arms Mr. Márquez refers to ended up in FARC hands. But he wrote that the effort was facilitated by Gen. Henry Rangel Silva, the director of Venezuela’s police intelligence agency until his removal last month, and by Ramón Rodríguez Chacín, a former Venezuelan interior minister who served as Mr. Chávez’s official emissary to the FARC in negotiations to free hostages last year.

In the message, Mr. Márquez discusses a plan by Mr. Rodríguez Chacín to carry out the deal near the Río Negro in Amazonas State in Venezuela. Mr. Márquez goes further, explaining that General Rangel Silva gave the arms dealers documents they could use to move around freely while in Venezuela.

Intelligence of this kind has been a source of tension between Colombia and Venezuela, with the government here claiming the information is false and used to further political ends. Colombian officials, by contrast, argue that the intelligence proves that the FARC survives in part on its ability to operate from Venezuela’s frontier regions.

The latest evidence, suggesting that the FARC operates easily in Venezuela, may put the Obama administration in a tough spot. President Obama has recently tried to repair Washington’s relations with Venezuela, adopting a nonconfrontational approach to Mr. Chávez that stands in contrast to the Bush administration’s often aggressive response to his taunts and insults.

But the United States and the European Union still classify the FARC as a terrorist organization. The Treasury Department accused General Rangel Silva and Mr. Rodríguez Chacín last year of assisting the FARC’s drug trafficking activities, opening the officials to freezes on their assets, fines and prison terms of up to 30 years in the United States. Venezuela has said the men are not guilty of those charges.

“We do not comment on intelligence matters,” said Noel Clay, a State Department spokesman, in relation to the latest captured communications. A spokesman from the Colombian Foreign Ministry declined to comment on the matter.

Computer records obtained in the Colombian raid in Ecuador last year appeared to corroborate the assertion that Venezuela helped the FARC acquire the Swedish-made rocket launchers at the heart of the latest diplomatic dispute between the two countries. The launchers were purchased by the Venezuelan Army in the late 1980s but captured in Colombia in combat operations against the FARC last year.

The FARC’s use of Swedish arms has an added dimension: the rebels kidnapped a Swedish engineer in Colombia in 2007, holding him hostage for nearly two years — during which he was reported to have suffered brain damage and paralysis from a stroke — before releasing him in March.

“The issue of these weapons is extremely serious for us,” said Tommy Stromberg, the political officer at the Swedish Embassy in Bogotá, the Colombian capital, which also oversees Sweden’s affairs in Venezuela. Mr. Stromberg said Venezuela had bought Swedish arms as recently as 2006. “We have asked Venezuela’s Foreign Ministry for clarification on how this happened, but have not had a response.”

The computer records from the raid in Ecuador last year also seem to match some of the information in the new communications under review by Western intelligence officials.

For example, a message obtained in the Ecuador raid and written in September 2007 contained an earlier reference to the arms deal discussed recently by the FARC. In the earlier message, Mr. Márquez, the rebel commander, referred to dealers he described as Australian, and went into detail about the arms they were selling, including Dragunov rifles, SA-7 missiles and HF-90M radios, the same items he discusses in the more recent communications.

Another file from the Ecuador raid mentioning an offer from the FARC to instruct Venezuelan officers in guerrilla warfare matches recently obtained material from a rebel commander, Timoleón Jiménez, that says the course took place. Other communications refer to FARC efforts to secure Venezuelan identity cards in a plan overseen by General Rangel Silva, the former Venezuelan intelligence chief.

In other material captured as recently as May, Mr. Márquez, the rebel commander, said Mr. Chávez had spoken personally with Mr. Jiménez, expressing solidarity for the FARC’s struggle. Then Mr. Márquez went into more mundane matters, referring to unspecified problems the FARC had recently encountered in La Fría, an area in Venezuela near the border with Colombia.