US citizen abandoned in Yemen makes call on smuggled cellphone in which he is heard screaming for his life and saying guards are ‘beating me with a stick’

An American citizen abandoned in a Yemeni jail amid the country’s spiralling chaos is heard screaming for his life in a newly released telephone call.

“They’re trying to kill me, they’re trying to kill me here at the prison,” Sharif Mobley yells to his sister, who recorded the conversation.



Various voices are heard yelling in anger in the background of the call, which Mobley made through a smuggled cellphone early on Thursday morning.

A frightened-sounding Mobley says that guards at the military prison “are beating me with a stick” in what he considers a life-threatening assault.

“They’re trying to take me right now, they’re about to take me. There are a lot of people on the phone. I gotta go,” Mobley is heard saying.

The last time Mobley’s lawyers at the human rights group Reprieve were able to contact him on the smuggled phone, he was in a prison on a military base in the capitol, Sana’a. That call was the first time Mobley’s lawyers had heard from him for over a year, after he went missing from the centrally located prison where he was awaiting trial on a murder charge.

With the abrupt collapse of Yemen’s government during the Houthi-led coup in January and the emergence of a Saudi-led war of restoration backed by the US, Mobley found himself in an even more precarious position. Mobley said in a late March phone call he could hear anti-aircraft fire from the roof of the base’s prison complex.

“I don’t know if I’m going to make it out alive,” Mobley said then.

Since the coup, the US State Department has refused to evacuate American citizens stranded in Yemen, even as it withdrew its own diplomatic and military personnel. It cautioned US citizens to leave immediately even as it declined to provide resources to aid their departure.

Mobley’s case is unique, and not only because he was in prison during the coup. The US has been implicated in his initial 2010 capture off the streets of Sana’a: soon afterward, he was interrogated by men identifying themselves as representatives of the FBI and Defense Department, who sought information of the now-killed Anwar al-Awlaki, a member of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula.

US diplomats have visited Mobley in prison during his disappearance, but refused to share Mobley’s whereabouts with his family and attorneys.

Citing Mobley’s privacy, the State Department has refused to comment to the Guardian about his conditions for over a year. It has yet to fulfill a Freedom of Information Act request the Guardian filed in 2014 for records indicating its involvement in his initial capture.

Mobley was initially thought to have ties to Awlaki, but Yemen dropped terrorism charges in court. His family categorically deny Mobley was involved in extremism. The US ambassador at the time of his capture, Stephen Seche, told the Guardian in February: “I think that we should be very worried about his whereabouts.”

On the tape of Thursday’s call, Mobley is initially unable to find his usual attorney, who is apparently on vacation. He urges his sister to tell anyone at Reprieve: “Tell them they’re trying to kill me here.”

Alka Pradhan, a Reprieve attorney, implored the Obama administration to save Mobley’s life.

“For months, the US has ignored the desperate pleas of this young American, who we can now hear being savagely beaten by Yemeni guards. Sharif’s elderly mother in New Jersey is terrified that her son has been beaten to death, and is baffled by her government’s silence. If a US passport means anything, it is that our government will not callously abandon us to be murdered abroad. The US must take urgent action to save Sharif’s life, before it is too late,” Pradhan said in a statement.