In the midst of two unfinished major wars, the US has quietly opened a third, largely covert front against al-Qaeda in Yemen.
A year ago, the CIA sent some of its top field operatives with counterterrorism experience to the country, according to a former top agency official. At the same time, some of the most secret Special Operations commandos have begun training Yemeni security forces in counterterrorism tactics, senior military officers said.
The Pentagon is spending more than US$70 million over the next 18 months, and using teams of Special Forces personnel to train and equip Yemeni military, Interior Ministry and coast guard forces, more than doubling previous military aid levels.
Yemen has long been a refuge for jihadists, in part because Yemen’s government welcomed returning Islamist fighters who had fought in Afghanistan during the 1980s. The Yemen port of Aden was the site of the audacious bombing of the US Navy destroyer Cole in October 2000 by al-Qaeda militants that killed 17 sailors.
But al-Qaeda militants have made much more focused efforts to build a base in Yemen in recent years, drawing recruits from throughout the region and mounting more frequent attacks on foreign embassies and other targets. The White House is seeking to nurture enduring ties with the government of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh and prod him to fight the local al-Qaeda affiliate, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, even while his impoverished country grapples with seemingly intractable internal turmoil.
With fears growing of a resurgent Islamist extremism in nearby Somalia and East Africa, administration officials and US lawmakers said Yemen could become al-Qaeda’s next operational and training hub, rivaling the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan where the organization’s top leaders operate.
“Yemen now becomes one of the centers of that fight,” said Senator Joseph Lieberman, chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, who visited the country in August.
“We have a growing presence there, and we have to, of Special Operations, Green Berets, intelligence,” he said on Fox News Sunday.
US and Yemeni officials said that a pivotal point in the relationship was reached in late summer after separate secret visits to Yemen by General David Petraeus, the US regional commander, and John Brennan, US President Barack Obama’s counterterrorism adviser.
Saleh agreed to expanded overt and covert assistance in response to growing pressure from the US and Yemen’s neighbors, notably Saudi Arabia, from which many al-Qaeda operatives had fled to Yemen, as well as a rising threat against the country’s political inner circle, the officials said.
“Yemen’s security problems won’t just stay in Yemen,” said Christopher Boucek, who studies Yemen as an associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. “They’re regional problems, and they affect Western interests.”
Al-Qaeda’s profile in Yemen rose sharply a year ago when a former Guantanamo Bay detainee from Saudi Arabia, Said Ali al-Shihri, fled to Yemen to join al-Qaeda and appeared in a video posted online.
Yemen’s remote areas are notoriously lawless, but the country’s chaos has worsened in the past two years as the government struggles with an armed rebellion in the northwest and a rising secessionist movement in the south.
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