Sanaa, February 09: The Yemeni government on Tuesday dismissed Al-Qaeda threats and said it will strike the militants “around the clock,” after the group’s local branch called for attacks on US interests worldwide.
Yemen “will not be intimidated by Al-Qaeda threats,” the interior ministry said in a statement. “Security forces will continue to combat any violation of the law and will strike terrorist hideouts wherever they are found.”
On Monday, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s (AQAP) second-in-command, Said al-Shihri, called for attacks on “American and Crusader interests” around the globe.
Shihri also said AQAP aims to gain control of the strategic Bab al-Mandab strait, which connects the Gulf of Aden to the Red Sea, and called for cooperation between AQAP and the Somali insurgent group Al-Shebab.
Al-Qaeda threats “do not frighten the security forces” and the threats “reflect the isolation and despair of terrorist elements in Yemen,” the interior ministry said.
“There is no truce with the terrorists,” it said. Yemen’s security forces will “track terrorist elements throughout Yemen, around the clock.”
Shihri urged Yemeni tribes, “especially Al-Awalak, to fight the agents who are plotting with the Crusaders against the Muslims.”
Al-Awalak is the tribe of Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni-American cleric with reported links to US Major Nidal Malik Hasan, who went on a deadly shooting rampage in Texas in November, and to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian suspected of trying to blow up a US passenger jet on December 25.
“We salute the glorious invasion of Farouk,” Shihri said. “We repeat what our Sheikh Osama said, that America will not dream of security until we live in security in Palestine.”
Shihri also criticised the governments of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which “plays the most important role in the region… to protect the oil interests of the Jews and the Christians.”
“The criminals of Al-Saud family are carrying out a war on the Muslims as proxies for the Zionist-Crusaders,” he added of the Saudi ruling family.
The announcement came shortly after Sanaa stepped up its campaign against AQAP, backed by US intelligence.
Speaking on Sunday, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that while a nuclear-armed Iran would pose a threat, the threat from Al-Qaeda was greater.
“I think that most of us believe the greater threats are the trans-national non-state networks,” she said of Al-Qaeda and its affiliates in Afghanistan, North Africa, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen.
She cautioned that Al-Qaeda was evolving to become “more creative, more flexible and more agile.
“They are, unfortunately, a very committed, clever, diabolical group of terrorists who are always looking for weaknesses and openings and we just have to stay alert,” Clinton said.
—Agencies