Al Qaeda Looking To Yemen As Next Base

WASHINGTON (Boston Globe) - As the United States steps up the hunt for Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, some of the terrorist network’s veteran operatives are leaving the region and flocking to Yemen, where an escalating civil war is turning the nearly lawless Arab nation into an attractive alternative as a base of operations, according to US and foreign government officials. Citing intelligence reports and intercepted communications, officials said they believe dozens of battle-hardened followers of Osama bin Laden have recently traveled to Saudi Arabia’s poor southern neighbor, joining other Al Qaeda sympathizers there who are attempting to make the remote mountainous province of Ma’rib, west of the capital of Sana, a new sanctuary.

A senior defense official said US military and intelligence officials, who have armed drones and special operations forces based in nearby Djibouti in the Horn of Africa, are devising new ways to combat the threat, but declined to provide details.

“There is, indeed, concern about the establishment of Al Qaeda elements in Yemen,’’ said the official, who is directly involved in counterterrorism operations in the Middle East.

Al Qaeda operatives in Yemen have been implicated in a series of recent bombings that killed tourists and damaged oil facilities, and are tightening their grip by assassinating local officials in key villages. Others have been captured in recent days trying to smuggle dozens of suicide vests from Yemen into Saudi Arabia, according to a Saudi government official who declined to be identified when discussing intelligence matters.

Several of the leading Al Qaeda figures now in Yemen were released from the US prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, including Ibrahaim Al Rubaish, one of the groups’ leading religious ideologues, who is affectionately known as the “poet of Guantanamo,’’ according to militant videos broadcast on the Internet and considered authentic by US intelligence officials.

Rubaish was captured in Pakistan in late 2001 and handed over to the United States, which held him in Guantanamo until 2006, when he was released to Saudi Arabia to undergo a rehabilitation program. Rubaish and other former Guantanamo inmates later escaped Saudi Arabia and at least 10 of them recently appeared on Saudi Arabia’s list of most-wanted terrorists. Many on the list are believed to be in Yemen.

The growing Al Qaeda activity there comes as Yemen’s nascent democratic government, which held its first contested presidential election in 2006, contends with a two-front civil war against rebels in the north and a separatist movement in the south.

“We have seen [Al Qaeda] who have left Pakistan, Afghanistan, even Iraq, congregating there,’’ said the Saudi official, who has been briefed on recent intelligence. “There is a central government fighting separatists in the south and others in the north and an Al Qaeda base in the central part. Yemen does not have the resources to match up.’’

As a result, a growing number of US lawmakers are raising alarms that the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula, at the center of one the most active smuggling routes from Africa to Asia, could be the next place where Al Qaeda gains a foothold to plan future attacks.

“The circumstances in that country are very much vulnerable to penetration by terrorists to use it as a base, particularly if it becomes too difficult [for them] in Afghanistan and Pakistan,’’ Senator Ben Cardin, a Maryland Democrat and member of the Foreign Relations Committee, said in an interview.

Cardin last week authored a resolution that stated that “the combination of security threats and development challenges Yemen faces is unlike any other country in the world’’ and that it is “urgent that the United States and international community use all appropriate measures to help.’’

Despite assurances from top commanders last week that the US surge in Afghanistan will not hamstring counterterrorism efforts elsewhere, Senator Russ Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat and a member of the Intelligence Committee, said he believes the Obama administration needs a far more global strategy to prevent Al Qaeda from taking root in Yemen and other failed states such as Somalia.

“We are making a very strategic error in the war against Al Qaeda,’’ Feingold said in an interview, adding that applying US military and economic resources almost entirely to Afghanistan and Pakistan is a “fundamental misunderstanding’’ of the threat.

Yemen holds a special place in the history of Al Qaeda.

Many Yemenis traveled to fight with bin Laden - whose father was born in Yemen - against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, which served as an incubator for the Sunni Muslim extremists who later founded Al Qaeda. They were welcomed home afterward, along with other mostly Arab veterans of the anti-Soviet war.

The bombing of the USS Cole, which killed 17 American sailors in 2000, took place in Aden Harbor and there have been several subsequent attacks aimed at the US embassy in Sana. Hundreds of Yemenis went to fight for the Taliban after the US-led invasion in 2001; about half of the remaining inmates at the terrorist prison in Guantanamo Bay are Yemeni.

Meanwhile, Yemen’s location next to oil-rich Saudi Arabia, where Al Qaeda has been trying to overthrow a government it sees as illegitimate protectors of Islam’s holiest sites, is also a central attraction for jihadists.

“We are talking about veteran Al Qaeda figures, an open space mostly ungoverned, and a very sensitive location - religiously and economically - that is close to [Al Qaeda’s] traditional recruitment market,’’ said Evan Kholmann, a specialist on radical Muslim groups who has testified on behalf of the US government in terrorism cases.

Yemen, with a population of roughly 23 million, is also a notoriously unstable country, with tribal and ethnic divisions that often turn violent.

New fighting erupted late last month between the government and Houthi rebels in the north who are seeking a theocratic government. The Yemeni government contends the Shi’ite Muslim tribe is receiving covert assistance from Iran, which Tehran denies. Saudi Arabia has also joined Yemen in the fight in recent days, using military aircraft to bomb Houthi positions to stop their advance on the Saudi-Yemeni border.

Since 2004, the conflict has displaced at least 150,000 people, according to UN estimates. Meanwhile, the Yemeni government is also confronting an increasingly active separatist movement in the south - all in the face of dwindling water resources, growing poverty, and quickly diminishing oil reserves.

“When you look at everything that is going on in Yemen, there is a terrible situation taking place before our eyes,’’ said Christopher Boucek, a Middle East specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington who has done extensive research in Yemen.

For Yemen’s government, he said, “fighting Al Qaeda is not a first-order priority, probably not even a second-order priority. And that means more and more spaces for Al Qaeda-affiliated or aligned organizations.’’

Intelligence officials trace the resurgence of Al Qaeda activity there to earlier this year, when Al Qaeda’s main offshoot in Saudi Arabia publicly merged with the group Al Qaeda in Yemen, creating what is now being called Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

“We have witnessed the reemergence of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, with Yemen as a key battleground and potential regional base of operations from which Al Qaeda can plan attacks, train recruits, and facilitate movement of operatives,’’ Michael E. Leiter, the director of the US National Counterterrorism Center, recently told a congressional panel. “Al Qaeda leaders could use the group and the growing presence of foreign fighters in the region to supplement its transnational operations capability,’’ he said.

Peter Bergen, a specialist on Al Qaeda at the New America Foundation in Washington, says the epicenter of Al Qaeda planning is likely to remain the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area for the foreseeable future. But if unchecked, the trend in Yemen could change that.

“Yemen is in the middle of a civil war, everybody has a weapon, and it’s mountainous,’’ he said. “It’s kind of like Afghanistan in the ’90s.’’

By Bryan Bender

Boston Globe

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