Washington, January 22: Yemen’s emergence as a hotbed for Al-Qaeda militants has not come as a surprise, top US General David Petraeus said Thursday, adding he had been concerned about the country for some years.
Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has dug in near the Yemeni capital amid a military crackdown.
That the group has emerged there “is not something that is a total surprise for us at all,” Petraeus, the top commander of US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, told the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington.
“Yemen was very much at my sights as much as two years ago when I was a commander in Iraq … Part of the countries we were focused on as source of foreign players was Yemen,” Petraeus said.
The general said he had traveled there in November and December 2008 after being appointed head of Central Command and insisted US forces had strengthened their intelligence there.
“We got along with building the kinds of efforts that were necessary to develop the intelligence baseline,” he said, adding those efforts enabled raid operations in December that killed or imprisoned dozens of Al-Qaeda members.
Petraeus stressed the fight against Al-Qaeda in Yemen was part of the “greater challenge (dealing with) development, aid, and the economic issues that are often reasons that individuals become extremists.”
Earlier this week the United States named AQAP a terrorist group in a bid to cut support to the outfit.
State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said the group has claimed it was behind a number of attacks against Saudi, Korean, Yemeni, and US targets since it was founded in January 2009.
—Agencies