Beirut, October 31: On Friday, as news emerged of a plot to send explosives in courier packages from Yemen to synagogues in Chicago, the world’s attention was focused on the threats brewing in Yemen’s hinterlands, where US citizens appear to be helping the local branch of al-Qaeda take aim at the US.
In recent months, US intelligence officials have grown increasingly concerned about Yemen, despite a renewed cooperation on counter-terrorism with the Yemeni authorities in the past year. Al-Qaeda’s regional arm has stepped up its recruitment drive on the Internet, issuing an English-language magazine that includes articles with titles like “Make a Bomb in Your Mother’s Kitchen”. The most recent issue of Inspire was published last month and includes an article by an American citizen named Samir Khan titled “I am Proud to be a Traitor to America”.
It is not clear how many Americans are working with al-Qaeda in Yemen.
“These are people with both access to explosives and knowledge of how the US works,” said Bernard Haykel, a professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton University. “And in Yemen, you can walk into a local branch of FedEx and mail something to the US. You can’t do that in Somalia or in rural Afghanistan.”
Qaeda’s Yemen-based branch, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, does not consider the US a key target, analysts say. The group has tried to strike at Saudi Arabia, and says it aims to topple the Yemeni and Saudi governments. But attacking the US draws broader publicity, and may be helpful with recruiting. Al-Qaeda’s regional arm took credit for a suicide attack on the American Embassy in Sanaa in September 2008.
Al-Qaeda’s presence has also led the US to vastly increase its military and economic assistance to Yemen. Many Yemeni and American analysts say they fear that President Ali Abdullah Saleh has a financial interest in maintaining some level of threat in his country. Another source of concern is the rising chaos of Yemen, which has a fast-growing, desperately poor population of 23 million and is running out of water.
The country’s meager oil reserves, a key source of revenue, are also running dry. The government has limited control outside of major cities, where powerful tribes hold sway and are sometimes willing to shelter Qaeda members.
-Agencies