San Diego, USA – A former US special forces commando made millions of dollars carrying out assassinations for the United Arab Emirates in Yemen, according to court documents cited in a New York Post report published Thursday.
The documents come from a federal lawsuit unsealed last week in San Diego and filed by Yemeni lawmaker Anssaf Ali Mayo, who says he survived a 2015 bombing carried out by American military veterans working for a private security firm on behalf of the UAE.
The complaint says Spear Operations Group, a Delaware-incorporated private military contractor founded in 2015 by Abraham Golan, an Israeli-Hungarian dual national, and former US Navy SEAL Isaac Gilmore, targeted Mayo.
It names Golan, Gilmore, and former US Army Special Forces member Dale Comstock as defendants, accusing them of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and attempted extrajudicial killing.
Mayo’s legal team says the operation against him formed part of a wider campaign of targeted killings in southern Yemen at a time when the war was widening, and regional powers were deepening their involvement.
$1.5 million a month
According to the lawsuit, Spear struck a deal with the UAE to carry out what the filing describes as “targeted assassinations” in Yemen for $1.5 million a month, plus bonuses for successful killings.
The complaint says former American special operations personnel joined the missions and deployed to southern Yemen as the conflict entered a violent new phase.
It says the deal was brokered in Abu Dhabi and later backed by a network of contractors, former soldiers, and Emirati-linked intermediaries.
The lawsuit also revives earlier reporting that Mohammed Dahlan, the exiled former Palestinian politician who later became an adviser to UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, took part in discussions linked to the arrangement.
At the centre of the case is the December 29, 2015, attack on Mayo in Aden, where he was then a prominent figure in Al-Islah, the Yemeni political party associated with the Muslim Brotherhood.
The complaint says the assassination team tracked his movements and planted explosives outside the party’s headquarters, intending to detonate the device and shoot any survivors who came out of the building.
Mayo escaped shortly before the blast. He later left Yemen and now lives in Saudi Arabia, where he says he still suffers the psychological effects of the attack while living apart from much of his family.
‘I was running it’
The allegations first drew international attention in 2018, when BuzzFeed News reported that American veterans had been hired by the UAE to target political and religious figures in Yemen.
In that reporting, Golan openly acknowledged the programme, saying there had been a targeted assassination operation in Yemen and that he had run it.
The newly unsealed lawsuit brings those allegations into a US courtroom and could become one of the most significant legal tests yet of whether foreign contractors can be held accountable in the United States for violence allegedly carried out abroad during a regional war.
The case also casts fresh light on the UAE’s role in southern Yemen, where Abu Dhabi built influence through local allied forces while publicly framing its activities as part of a counter-terrorism campaign.
The UAE has long denied targeting people with no links to terrorism and has said its actions in Yemen were carried out at the invitation of the country’s internationally recognised government.
Rights groups and investigative journalists have repeatedly challenged that defence.
Shadow war
A BBC Arabic documentary aired in 2024, working with the legal charity Reprieve, reported that the UAE had funded and directed a covert assassination network in southern Yemen that targeted politicians, clerics, and civil society figures.
Reprieve later said its review of 160 killings carried out between 2015 and 2018 found that only 23 of those killed had verifiable links to terrorism.
The same investigation reported that Spear may have continued receiving UAE money into 2020 and alleged that contractors trained local counter-terrorism units linked to the Southern Transitional Council, the southern separatist force long backed by Abu Dhabi.
Those findings deepened longstanding concerns that Yemen’s war had created a murky security landscape in which foreign contractors, local militias, proxy forces, and covert operations overlapped with little public accountability.
The lawsuit also highlights the shifting alliances that shaped much of the Yemen conflict.
When Saudi Arabia and the UAE intervened militarily in 2015 after Houthi rebels tightened their hold over Sanaa and much of northern Yemen, the UAE and Al-Islah were nominally on the same side against the Houthis.
But that relationship later deteriorated sharply as Abu Dhabi intensified its hostility towards Muslim Brotherhood-linked movements and backed rival southern factions.
Al-Islah-UAE tensions
By 2017, tensions between Al-Islah figures and UAE-backed groups had become increasingly visible in Aden and other parts of the south, exposing the fragmentation inside the anti-Houthi camp.
Although the UAE later announced a drawdown of its direct military presence, it retained substantial influence through southern allies, especially the STC, and remained a key player in areas stretching from Aden to the strategic waters around the Bab al-Mandab Strait.
More than a decade after the war began, Yemen remains deeply fractured. The Houthis are entrenched in the north, rival authorities compete for influence in the south, and millions of civilians still live amid displacement, hunger, and collapsing public services.
The United Nations says more than 22 million people across Yemen need humanitarian assistance and protection, underscoring the scale of a crisis that has long outlasted many of the international headlines it once commanded.
Against that backdrop, Mayo’s case is likely to draw attention not only as a personal quest for accountability, but also as a rare attempt to test in a US court whether one of Yemen’s alleged assassination programmes can be traced to the men accused of carrying it out.
No court has yet ruled on the claims, and the allegations remain contested.
However, the lawsuit has reopened one of the darkest and least transparent chapters of the Yemen war, where the battle was fought not only by armies and militias, but also, according to the complaint, by outsourced and deniable violence operating in the shadows.
