Somalia wrote a brief memo entitled âIs al-Shabaab the Next al Qaiâda?â The analystâs conclusion was that given the fact that the Pakistani Taliban, through Faisal Shahzad, had tried to detonate a car bomb in Times Square just two months earlier, he wondered if the bombing signaled that yet another local terrorist organization had crossed the Rubicon and âgone global.â
Rarely visited by Westerners, and virtually unknown to Americans save for the most avid readers of National Geographic magazine, Yemen is a country steeped in history and legend. Located on the southwestern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen can rightfully claim to be one of the cradles of civilization because it lay astride the ancient incense and spice trade routes that ran up and down the Red Sea. Walking through the downtown of Yemenâs capital, Sanaâa, is to be transported back to the time of the Arabian Nights . A small piece of Yemenâs former glory can be seen in the medieval Old City of Sanaâa, which is dominated by an ornate 2,500-year-old fortified citadel. As they have for centuries, every Yemeni male proudly owns a rifle (there are 65 million guns in a nation of only 18 million people) and wears an ornate curved dagger called a jambiya .
As picturesque as it may be, Yemen today is one of the poorest and least developed nations on the planet. Although the Yemeni government is dedicated to trying to modernize the nation, the deeply religious and tradition-bound Yemeni tribesmen have stubbornly resisted the central governmentâs efforts to bring the country into the twenty-first century, becoming a bastion of support for al Qaeda. Yemen is not only the ancestral home of Osama bin Ladenâs family, but it has produced more al Qaeda fighters per capita than any other country in the world. At one point in time, bin Ladenâs personal bodyguard was made up entirely of Yemenis because of their loyalty. As of 2009, of all the al Qaeda fighters being held at the U.S. military-run confinement facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the ninety-nine Yemenis made up by far the largest single group.
In April 2002, seven months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a company of 150 U.S. Army Green Berets arrived in Sanaâa to begin the process of training Yemeni security forces to hunt down the al Qaeda terrorists hiding in Yemen. According to a former official at the CIAâs Counterterrorism Center, at the time there were at least twenty top al Qaeda officials and over one hundred fighters hiding in northern Yemen. The top two al Qaeda fugitives in Yemen that the U.S. intelligence community wanted, dead or alive, at the time were Mohammed Hamdi al-Ahdal and Ali Qaed Senyan al-Harthi, both of whom were suspected of being involved in planning the October 12, 2000, suicide bombing of the destroyer USS Cole , which killed seventeen American sailors. But the Yemeni military training program never got off the ground because in late 2002 the last of the Green Beret teams were withdrawn from Yemen as part of the military buildup for the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
It took six years before the U.S. intelligence community once again began to pay attention to Yemen. In early 2008, reporting reached Washington from the small CIA station in the U.S. embassy in Sanaâa indicating that al Qaeda, long dormant in the region, was beginning to make a comeback in Yemen. In March 2008, al Qaeda operatives launched a mortar attack on the U.S. embassy in Sanaâa. The mortar shells missed the embassy and landed instead in the playground of a nearby girlsâ school. Six months later, on September 17, 2008, a team of al Qaeda militants dressed in Yemeni police uniforms attacked the main gate of the U.S. embassy in Sanaâa. After a twenty-minute gun battle with Yemeni police, the attack was beaten back and six of the attackers were killed, but so were six Yemeni policemen and seven civilian bystanders.
A few
Rarely visited by Westerners, and virtually unknown to Americans save for the most avid readers of National Geographic magazine, Yemen is a country steeped in history and legend. Located on the southwestern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen can rightfully claim to be one of the cradles of civilization because it lay astride the ancient incense and spice trade routes that ran up and down the Red Sea. Walking through the downtown of Yemenâs capital, Sanaâa, is to be transported back to the time of the Arabian Nights . A small piece of Yemenâs former glory can be seen in the medieval Old City of Sanaâa, which is dominated by an ornate 2,500-year-old fortified citadel. As they have for centuries, every Yemeni male proudly owns a rifle (there are 65 million guns in a nation of only 18 million people) and wears an ornate curved dagger called a jambiya .
As picturesque as it may be, Yemen today is one of the poorest and least developed nations on the planet. Although the Yemeni government is dedicated to trying to modernize the nation, the deeply religious and tradition-bound Yemeni tribesmen have stubbornly resisted the central governmentâs efforts to bring the country into the twenty-first century, becoming a bastion of support for al Qaeda. Yemen is not only the ancestral home of Osama bin Ladenâs family, but it has produced more al Qaeda fighters per capita than any other country in the world. At one point in time, bin Ladenâs personal bodyguard was made up entirely of Yemenis because of their loyalty. As of 2009, of all the al Qaeda fighters being held at the U.S. military-run confinement facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the ninety-nine Yemenis made up by far the largest single group.
In April 2002, seven months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a company of 150 U.S. Army Green Berets arrived in Sanaâa to begin the process of training Yemeni security forces to hunt down the al Qaeda terrorists hiding in Yemen. According to a former official at the CIAâs Counterterrorism Center, at the time there were at least twenty top al Qaeda officials and over one hundred fighters hiding in northern Yemen. The top two al Qaeda fugitives in Yemen that the U.S. intelligence community wanted, dead or alive, at the time were Mohammed Hamdi al-Ahdal and Ali Qaed Senyan al-Harthi, both of whom were suspected of being involved in planning the October 12, 2000, suicide bombing of the destroyer USS Cole , which killed seventeen American sailors. But the Yemeni military training program never got off the ground because in late 2002 the last of the Green Beret teams were withdrawn from Yemen as part of the military buildup for the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
It took six years before the U.S. intelligence community once again began to pay attention to Yemen. In early 2008, reporting reached Washington from the small CIA station in the U.S. embassy in Sanaâa indicating that al Qaeda, long dormant in the region, was beginning to make a comeback in Yemen. In March 2008, al Qaeda operatives launched a mortar attack on the U.S. embassy in Sanaâa. The mortar shells missed the embassy and landed instead in the playground of a nearby girlsâ school. Six months later, on September 17, 2008, a team of al Qaeda militants dressed in Yemeni police uniforms attacked the main gate of the U.S. embassy in Sanaâa. After a twenty-minute gun battle with Yemeni police, the attack was beaten back and six of the attackers were killed, but so were six Yemeni policemen and seven civilian bystanders.
A few
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