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US, British Embassies in Yemen Close Due To al-Qaida Threat

The U.S. embassy in the capital Sana’a issued a message to American citizens in Yemen, urging them to remain vigilant
boost counter-terrorism support to the Yemeni government.

The U.S. embassy’s website said the threats come from al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, the group linked to the failed Christmas Day airplane bombing attempt in the United States.

The Nigerian suspect in the case told U.S. authorities he received training from al-Qaida affiliates in Yemen.

The closures come a day after U.S. General David Petraeus visited the capital, Sana’a, to discuss security issues with President Ali Abdullah Saleh. The influential general, who oversees the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, recently announced that Washington would more than double its security aid to the impoverished nation.

Britain has also announced plans to join with the United States in funding a counter-terrorism police unit in Yemen, as well as plans to hold an international conference on Yemeni security later this month.

Editor Hakim Almasmari, of the Yemen Post newspaper, thinks the conference might be advantageous if it results in more development projects for rural Yemen. But he fears what any foreign-backed military attacks could mean.

“Al-Qaida right now is not very strong,” Almasmari said. “Its followers are not more than 400 in all. However, if the U.S. does attack Yemen, al-Qaida will get stronger and stronger because people who lose their families in the airstrikes will join al-Qaida not because they want to but because they want revenge against the Americans and the Yemeni government for the attacks.”

The situation has gained new urgency as the government in Sana’a finds itself overwhelmed not only by the growing terrorist threat, but also two separate rebellions, one of which has become something of a proxy war, at least in rhetoric, between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

U.S. military experts have warned that vast reaches of the impoverished nation, with its booming population and dwindling resources, could spin permanently out of the government’s control.

Muslim extremists in Somalia, the role-model for failed states, said Friday they would send fighters to Yemen.

Yemen has vowed to keep foreign extremists out.

The U.S. embassy has faced attacks from the local al-Qaida group before, with an assault outside its gates in 2008 that left 19 people – civilians and militants – dead.

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Memory of an Attack September 2000
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Memory of an Attack September 2008

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Man claims in video to be US jihadist in Somalia

In the Somali capital, Mogadishu, a former fighter, Mohamed Muqtar, said he had met the man more than two years ago in the Islamist stronghold of Kismayo, Somalia’s third-largest town.

“This is the same man, the American man, I saw in Kismayo two years ago when I was being trained there,” he said. “This man was training us how to make land mines and explosives.”

He could give no details on how he was able to identify the man.

Farhan Haji, another former fighter who lives in Mogadishu pointed to the green shrubbery in the tape and said it did not look like Somalia.

“This could be a Hollywood actor anywhere in the world,” Haji said.

Another English speaker does not appear on the tape but raps over a track of Islamic devotional songs.

“Bomb by bomb, blast by blast, only going to bring back the glorious past,” the man chants atonally. “Mortar by mortar, shell by shell, I’m only gonna stop when I send them to hell.”

Ben Venzke, director of IntelCenter, the U.S. contractor that tracks extremist propaganda, told the AP that the video appears to be authentic.

“It was done in the same manner that all their releases are done,” he said. “We have absolutely no reason to believe it’s anything but an authentic (al-Shabab) video.”

California-born Adam Gadahn has appeared prominently in al-Qaida videos in the role of a top propagandist.

Gadahn, who goes by the nom de guerre of Abu Azzam al-Amriki, has appeared in videos talking about the defeat of America in Iraq and other battlefields with jihadists and urging Americans to convert to Islam. He has been indicted on treason charges, and the FBI has put a $1 million reward on him, calling him “an integral part of al-Qaida’s media and recruitment branch.”

It is not known, however, if Gadahn has ever played a leadership role in al-Qaida.

Some members of the thriving Somali community in Minneapolis and St. Paul have reported being questioned by the FBI as it investigates whether some young men are being “radicalized” in Minnesota and recruited to fight with terror groups in their homeland.

“This is the first time an American has been shown in a leadership/senior role advising/teaching a group of jihadists,” IntelCenter said in an e-mailed analysis. “This is a significant development and likely to be indicative of other developments within the group.”

Islamic groups in Somalia coalesced into a loose alliance with some clan militias to fight an insurgency against troops from predominantly Christian Ethiopia. The government had called in the Ethiopians to oust an umbrella Islamist group that held most of southern Somalia and Mogadishu for six months until December 2006.

Under an intricate peace deal the United Nations mediated, the Ethiopians withdrew in January and moderate Islamic leader Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed was elected president that month.

The weak government Ahmed took over in January controls virtually no territory and is struggling to prove its legitimacy, though Ahmed has been welcomed by influential Islamic clerics in this predominantly Muslim country.

Ahmed’s allies, however, control much of central and pockets of southern Somalia. The more hardline Islamist elements Ahmed split from last year such as al-Shabab, control most of southern Somalia.
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Western embassies in Yemen shut down after al-Qaeda threatens attack

January 4, 2010

James Hider in Sanaa, Sean O’Neill and Tim Reid
The British and American embassies in Yemen were shut down yesterday as al-Qaeda threatened an attack in response to Western promises of a renewed counter-terrorism effort in the country.

Spain also closed its embassy in the face of what a senior US official said was a direct threat from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the group behind the Christmas Day airline bomb attempt.

The US Government later informed airlines of a severe tightening of passenger screening. From today passengers from all countries, including the UK, will face random enhanced screening.

Other passengers from 14 countries deemed state sponsors of terrorism by the US, and some states perceived as having dangerous radical elements, will receive full-body pat-downs and have carry-on luggage searchedThe measures will focus on passengers from countries on the State Department’s “State Sponsors of Terrorism” list, as well as passengers from other “countries of interest” such as Nigeria, Pakistan and Yemen, a senior Obama Administration official said. Countries on the State Department list include Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria.

The US move came after Gordon Brown signalled a tightening of security at British airports, with passengers facing the prospect of full-body scans. The airport operator BAA said that it would introduce the scanners “as soon as practical”.

The fears of an attack on diplomatic staff in Yemen were underlined by John Brennan, the head of counter-terrorism at the White House, who said: “There are indications that al-Qaeda is targeting our embassy and our personnel and we’re not going to take any chances with the lives of diplomats and others who are at that embassy.”

A car bomb at the US Embassy in Yemen in 2008 killed 19 people.

The latest threat came just hours after Mr Brown said in a television interview: “Yemen has been recognised, like Somalia, to be one of the areas where we’ve got to not only keep an eye on, but we’ve got to do more.”

Britain and the US have pumped millions of pounds into developing Yemen’s security effort, only to see the al-Qaeda threat increase markedly in the past year.

The attempted bombing of an aircraft landing in Detroit, Michigan, on Christmas Day was carried out by a former London student, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who had been trained and controlled by al-Qaeda in Yemen.

It came after the Fort Hood army base shooting in Texas in November, in which 13 people died at the hands of a Muslim officer who had been in e-mail contact with Anwar al-Awlaki, an extremist cleric based in Yemen.

Mr Brennan told US television that the assessment was that al-Qaeda had “several hundred members in Yemen” and had “grown in strength”.

British security officials say that what they call “core al-Qaeda”, rather than an affiliated group, is operating in Yemen. A branch of the terrorist group, calling itself al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, emerged a year ago after the two wings in Yemen and Saudi Arabia unified.

Security analysts in Yemen told The Times that the new al-Qaeda there represented a shift away from insurgents with links to Osama bin Laden.

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