Britain and the United States have closed their embassies in Yemen after receiving reports of an imminent attack as the impoverished Arabian Peninsula nation emerges as a third major front in the global war against al-Qaeda.
The threat underscored what intelligence experts have labelled the “spreading franchise” of the Islamist terrorist network – from its beginnings two decades ago on the Pakistani-Afghan frontier to its insurgency in U.S.-invaded Iraq to its cells now existing in as many as 20 countries in North Africa, Arabia and central Asia.
U.S. President Barack Obama's top counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, estimated the group known as al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) – a year-old merger of the Yemeni and Saudi Arabian branches – has several hundred members in Yemen, making it the largest al-Qaeda concentration outside Pakistan and Iraq.
And while the core ideology of al-Qaeda remains rooted in Sunni Islam political radicalism, analysts say the organization is evolving into a trademark, a brand name, attached to increasingly autonomous regional units as the leadership of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border become more isolated.
There is AQAP, al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia (the Iraq unit), al-Qaeda Organization in the Islamic Maghreb (the North African organization implicated in the kidnapping of Canadian diplomats Robert Fowler and Louis Guay) as well as major units in Somalia, Syria, Egypt, Turkey and central Asia.
AQAP has been blamed for the attempted aircraft bombing Christmas Day of a flight bound from Amsterdam to Detroit.
Al-Qaeda militants in the Yemeni port of Aden in 2000 rammed the naval destroyer USS Cole with an explosives-packed speedboat, killing 17 sailors. In September, 2008, al-Qaeda fighters attacked the U.S. embassy on the outskirts of the capital, Sanaa, leaving 19 people dead. An al-Qaeda plot to bomb the British embassy three years earlier was foiled, U.S. authorities say the organization has used Yemen as a base to attack U.S. interests since the Cole incident – bombing hotels and restaurants as well as Western embassies.
Yemen's location at the heart of the Arab world, its history of tribal control, poverty and corruption and an ongoing civil conflict could make it the crucible of a future war, U.S. officials have said privately according to the Associated Press.
The U.S. and Britain say they will fund a counter-terrorism police unit in Yemen, and the British government will host an international conference on January 28 with the aim of devising a strategy to counter political radicalization in Yemen.
U.S. General David Petraeus, who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, made a surprise visit to Yemen over the weekend and announced – after meeting with Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh – that Washington this year will more than double the $67-million (U.S.) in counterterrorism aid it gave to the country in 2009. Only Pakistan currently receives more U.S. money for this purpose.
Officials in Washington and London said the decision to close the embassies came as a result of “special intelligence.”
Mr. Brennan, the White House counterterrorism adviser, said there were “indications al-Qaeda is planning to carry out an attack outside of Sanaa – possibly our embassy. We're not going to take chances with our embassy personnel.”
One American was killed in the 2008 embassy attack.
The British embassy sits atop a hill in northern Sanaa, surrounded by blast walls, security cameras and razor wire with its main buildings dug deep into the hillside and key offices underground.
The U.S. embassy is a few kilometres away, set back from the road and surrounded by heavily fortified checkpoints, blast walls and ramps. Canada does not have an embassy in Yemen.
Spain also announced it was restricting access to its embassy. There have been a number of al-Qaeda terrorists arrested in Barcelona and Madrid.
Academic specialists on Yemen have described the country as being on the lip of becoming a failed state like Somalia, and have said it cannot continued to be governed without huge amounts of counter-terrorism assistance.
Gregory Johnson, an expert on Yemen at Princeton University, said that assistance could extend to direct U.S. military involvement. But he added: “Al-Qaeda in Yemen is far too entrenched and strong for a military miracle to work.”
With a report from Associated Press.
