From: Berhane Habtemariam (Berhane.Habtemariam@gmx.de)
Date: Thu Jun 24 2010 - 12:10:12 EDT
Is Yemen becoming a jihadist plotter's paradise?
By Frank Gardner
BBC News
24/06/2010
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Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East, has many problems, including
a wild province that is al-Qaeda's home on the Arabian peninsula. But a
US-backed military campaign against the militants may be making matters
worse.
The Yemeni ambassador looked uncomfortable.
A small, affable man in a tan suit, Mohamed Taha Mustafa sat patiently at
the conference table in London last week, while his country's woes were
counted out in public.
Dwindling oil reserves, rising unemployment, a capital city that risks being
the world's first to run out of water, a simmering insurgency in the north,
a separatist movement in the south, and now a growing base for al-Qaeda in
the tribal heartland in-between.
"Help us," said the ambassador when it was his turn to speak.
"Come and invest in our country, we have so many projects."
But I could see the Kuwaiti ambassador shaking his head. His country, he
explained, could never forgive Yemen for not condemning Saddam's invasion,
back in 1990.
"Oh for heaven's sake," whispered a fellow journalist. "They really need to
get over that, it was all of 20 years ago."
But memories are long in the Middle East. Privately, Arab diplomats admit
that as long as Yemen's soldier-turned-president Ali Abdullah Saleh remains
in power, Yemen will never be fully rehabilitated by its rich Gulf Arab
neighbours.
'Growing menace'
But Yemen is worrying them, and for good reason. A few days ago, just after
dawn in the steamy Indian Ocean port of Aden, a van drew up and four men got
out, armed with machineguns and rocket-propelled grenades.
Within hours they had shot and blasted their way through the southern
headquarters of the government's security apparatus, surprising officers at
an early morning flag-raising ceremony.
Seven officers were killed, and a cleaning lady, two more women and a child,
and the attackers left with a number of militants they had freed from the
cells. Everyone immediately suspected al-Qaeda.
Reformed and reborn in Yemen in January last year, al-Qaeda in the Arabian
Peninsula (AQAP) has become a growing menace not just for Yemen's government
but for others further afield.
Last August it dispatched a suicide bomber to Saudi Arabia.
Pretending to give himself up, he managed to get into the same room as the
prince in charge of counter-terrorism, then detonated his hidden explosives.
In the end, he was the only one to die, but his masters in Yemen promised to
send others and in December they dispatched Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to
Detroit with enough explosives in his underwear to bring down a plane, if
his device had worked.
Yemen suddenly mattered.
Tribal friction
So who are al-Qaeda in Yemen and how have they managed to build a base
there?
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AQAP is not very big. It has perhaps a few hundred dedicated members under
arms, mostly Saudis and Yemenis.
Some have come back from years of incarceration in Guantanamo Bay, pretended
to renounce violence, then slipped across the border from Saudi Arabia.
Others were involved in a mass jailbreak from a Yemeni prison in 2006.
Today they are to be found mostly in Marib, a restless tribal province east
of the capital.
When I first went there in 1985, I was struck by the wild, lawless nature of
the place.
Our taxi driver drove with a loaded pistol sliding around the dashboard,
attempting to steer while he combed his hair and chewed the narcotic leaf
khat, all at the same time.
Years later, in 2002, I suggested to Marib's provincial governor that
Western governments suspected his province was harbouring a number of
al-Qaeda leaders.
"Most unlikely," he replied with a smile. "We have complete control."
But later that week, when I took an escort of trusted tribesmen into a
remote valley, I found evidence of the sort of heavy-handed government
tactics that were turning tribesmen into insurgents.
An elderly farmer showed me the tailfin of an unexploded missile he said the
air force had fired into his mud-walled house in its pursuit of the
militants.
Now, eight years on, something very similar is happening.
Urged on by Washington, the Yemeni government is engaged in a determined
campaign to eliminate, or at least contain, al-Qaeda within its borders.
The CIA's unmanned aerial drone strikes have resumed, much to the annoyance
of ordinary Yemenis, and government tanks and artillery have been shelling
the houses of suspected militants. Late last month an airstrike went badly
wrong, killing Marib's deputy governor and his bodyguards, the very man who
was trying to persuade the tribes not to side with al-Qaeda.
There was a furious reaction. The tribesmen blew up oil pipelines and
brought down electricity pylons.
The president has had to order an official enquiry.
The truth is that in Yemen the tribes do not much care for al-Qaeda, but nor
do they have much love for their government, accusing it - with some
justification - of corruption and mismanagement.
Left to fester, Washington fears that Yemen could easily turn into a
plotter's paradise, riddled with jihadist training camps.
And so the airstrikes and the largely unseen military campaign continues.
And when rumours spread that Yemenis are being killed on Washington's orders
the tribes see red, making it easier for al-Qaeda to recruit, train and hide
in this bleak, barren landscape.
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