YEMEN THE NEW HOME OF ALQAEDA? JIHAD GEOGRAPHY
JIHAD GEOGRAPHY IS SILLY….THE ENTIRE ARAB/MOSLEM WORLD SUPPORTS THIS…..RSK
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/6898945/Detroit-terror-attack-Yemen-is-the-true-home-of-Al-Qaeda.html
The Detroit airline bomb plot was planned in the land of bin Laden’s ancestors. Richard Spencer reports.
To try to blow up an airliner by sewing explosives into your underpants might seem more a ruse of desperation, something out of Blackadder, than anything from the standard terrorist training manual.
That is a very different view from how it is being presented to us, of course: as a new and dangerous tactic in a war in which no means of attacking the enemies of Islam goes unexplored.
It may be hard to contain a smile, but the frightening truth that emerges from the Christmas Day attack on Flight 253 is that both standpoints are equally true. Shuffled from country to country, targeted by drones, electronic eavesdropping and ever more vigilant and intrusive security procedures in the world’s major cities, al-Qaeda and its associates are both desperate and inventive.
Long before Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab boarded his plane in Lagos it was clear that al-Qaeda had torn up the standard training manuals. Since the day of its most stunning victory in 2001, its methods have become more, not less, extraordinary.
Most recently there was the attempted assassination in August of the Saudi Arabian prince who oversees that country’s anti-terror programme. Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, whose father is interior minister and Saudi Arabia’s third-ranking royal behind the king and the crown prince, is an imaginative tactician. He has been uncompromising in his determination to deal with al-Qaeda in recent years, but broad-minded enough to use rehabilitation as his favoured method.
He was therefore receptive when he took an unexpected telephone call in August from a terrorist named Abdullah Hassan al-Asiri, a man who ranked high on his list of wanted al-Qaeda suspects.
Al-Asiri had fled to Yemen, but said that he wanted to give himself up – and, as a mark of his esteem for Prince Mohammed, to do so in person. The prince, remarkably, agreed and a time was fixed, but as al-Asiri approached he detonated an explosive device, blowing himself to pieces and injuring the prince.
Al-Asiri, it was later discovered, had managed to breach the intensive security with which the prince surrounds himself by hiding the explosive in his rectum. Airports around the world are now considering whether their own security procedures – and their scanning devices – can deal with this new form of attack. The only consolation, for those shuddering at the potentially invasive security implications, is al-Asiri’s lack of success. The blast was shielded by his body to such a degree that only the prince’s hand was injured.
It is natural, when the world’s security agencies compare these two not dissimilar attacks, that their focus will be upon Yemen, where both were apparently plotted. In some ways, the country is the spiritual home of al-Qaeda – it is the ancestral home of Osama bin Laden, whose father was born in the valley of Hadramawt, still a base today for al-Qaeda activity.
Of the remaining 198 inmates of the US military prison in Guantanamo Bay, nearly half are from Yemen, and it is their presence that most explains why President Barack Obama has found the prison more difficult to close than he envisaged. Many of those already released, and not just Yemenis, have turned up in Yemen’s al-Qaeda camps, often after going through Prince Mohammed’s rehabilitation courses. Fahd Saleh Suleiman al Jutayli, who was released from Guantanamo in 2006, was killed in northern Yemen in a shoot-out with government forces in September: his family were informed by another former Guantanamo inmate, Yusuf Mohammed al-Shehri, who had also returned to Yemen. Al-Shehri himself was killed by Saudi soldiers in a shoot-out at a checkpoint on the road from Yemen a couple of weeks later. He and a colleague were dressed as women. His brother, Said al-Shehri, may be the deputy leader of al-Qaeda in Yemen and it is possible that he was killed in an air raid two weeks ago.
The attraction of Yemen for radical Islamists is simple. It may not have a sympathetic host government, as was the case in Afghanistan before 2001 and Sudan in the mid-Nineties. On the contrary, the government is an ally of the United States. But it is weak, and the country is deeply divided, tribalistic and violent. In a country where many men go armed, identifying a terrorist is difficult.
It is also being torn apart by civil war. The growing strength of the al-Qaeda presence in the country was foretold only a few months ago, as the government launched an all-out offensive in the north of the country against a previously obscure Shia armed opposition group known as the Houthis. As Yemeni jets strafed their strongholds in and around the northern city of Sa’ada, sending refugees pouring south, diplomats and analysts were warning that the failure to reach a peaceful settlement on one front was pushing Yemen closer to the abyss on many others, risking it becoming a “failed state”.
It is already host to thousands of refugees from the conflict in Somalia, just across the Gulf of Aden, a country where the government’s grip over its provinces, once lost, has proved impossible to regain.
Joost Hiltermann, author of a report for the International Crisis Group on the conflict at the time, warned that President Obama could be forced to act. “You might well see American advisers, maybe even some special troops, go in for special operations,” he told The Daily Telegraph in September.
There is little doubt that the US presence in Yemen is already strong and that it is going to become more visible. In any case, the Detroit attack should be seen as part of a continuing battle between al-Qaeda in Yemen and America. This is a fight that includes the attack on the USS Cole in Aden in 2000, when 17 crewmen were killed; the suicide car-bombing of the US embassy in the capital Sana’a last year and the two major incidents in the last fortnight.
A Yemeni air attack on an al-Qaeda camp, in which 34 alleged terrorists were killed, was backed by American intelligence operatives with the personal approval of President Obama, according to the New York Times.
The fall-out from that attack has been overshadowed by the Detroit incident, but may yet prove more significant. Among those targeted in a second raid on Christmas Eve were al-Qaeda’s presumed leaders on the Arabian peninsula, including Said al-Shehri, and the noted radical preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, the cleric who was in email contact with Major Nidal Hasan, the US army psychiatrist who went on a shooting rampage in Fort Hood, Texas, in November.
It is not known which of these men, if any, were killed. But Al-Awlaki and his associates will be a key focus for those in Britain examining the fall-out of the Detroit affair.
Al-Awlaki’s videos, in which he explained his radical theories, have circulated in Britain, and he has even given lectures by video at meetings on British campuses, including in London.
In Yemen, he was for a time attached to Iman University, the college on the edge of Sana’a which is regarded as a recruiting ground for al-Qaeda.
Scores of foreign Muslims attend its courses, which are avowedly academic, but which are overseen by Abdul Majid al-Zindani, who proclaims his religious and academic credentials but is on the United States’ watch-list of global terrorists. John Walker Lindh, the American Muslim convert captured in Afghanistan in 2001, was a former graduate.
We do not know if Abdul Mutallab followed the well-worn path to Iman University. He told his family that he was studying Arabic in Yemen, and has told his interrogators that he went to an al-Qaeda camp north of Sana’a. If so, he left long before the recent raids on al-Qaeda, and its operations may now be severely weakened. Even if that is the case, it is unlikely that it will give up the fight: it has received worse blows.
“The war between al-Qaeda and the United States is a global war,” says Riad Kahwaji, director of the Institute for Near East and Gulf Analysis in Dubai, who warned in October that President Obama’s indecision on issues such as Afghanistan was creating a dangerous vacuum in the region.
Al-Qaeda was decentralised, he said, meaning that attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan did not necessarily damage operations out of Yemen. On the other hand, increased watchfulness in the West of known operatives meant that it was being forced to rely on “amateurs”, including students like Abdul Mutallab, who were from good families and could use their international status to slip under the radar, but who had had only the briefest of formal training.
What the failed Detroit bombing showed above all, he said, was the danger of trying to classify al-Qaeda sympathisers as more or less committed or dangerous.
“All of them are dangerous,” he said. “All of them are dangerous, depending on where they are and what they are capable of doing. A person who is able to influence others in their writings or speeches is as dangerous as someone who can build a bomb.”
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