From The Times
December 31, 2009

Yemen becomes the focus of conflict for President Obama

James Hider and Giles Whittell: Analysis

The global war on terror began a year before September 2001, when a speedboat with militants and half a tonne of explosives rammed an American destroyer anchored in the Yemeni port of Aden. Seventeen US Navy sailors died.

Nearly a decade later, Yemen is again the front line in a conflict that President Obama refuses to call a war but one that has changed little since his predecessor rallied the American nation with a security doctrine that he summarised in two words: “Let’s roll.”

Yemeni officials announced yesterday that security forces had stormed an al-Qaeda hideout and arrested militants north of Bajil in the impoverished country’s western Deir Jaber region.

It was the latest assault in a proxy war being fought by the fragile Yemeni Government with the quiet but rapidly increasing support of US trainers, intelligence and military hardware. Last year the Pentagon gave Yemen less than $5 million (£3 million) in military aid. This year, after a visit by General David Petraeus, the head of Central Command who is also overseeing the war against the Taleban in Afghanistan, it has given the Yemeni Government $67 million.

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The sum is dwarfed by the estimated $30 billion cost of the Afghan surge that Mr Obama announced this month — but if the failed Christmas Day aircraft terrorist attack is any guide, the threat to the US from militants in Yemen is more acute than the danger posed by their spiritual leaders in Afghanistan and Pakistan. A letter to Mr Obama, which was published yesterday from three senators — John McCain, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham — underscored the fears. They requested an immediate halt to the transfer to their homeland of Yemeni Guantánamo Bay detainees, two of whom lead the reinvigorated terror cell al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

The US was active in Yemen after the 2001 terror attacks but when the Pentagon’s attention shifted to Afghanistan and Iraq, the country slipped from Washington’s radar. That started to change in 2006 when 23 al-Qaeda members escaped from a prison in Yemen and renewed attacks on foreign tourists and Western institutions, such as the US Embassy in Sanaa, which was hit by a suicide bomber last year.

Security experts fear that al-Qaeda is trying to turn the lawless country — the homeland of Osama bin Laden’s father — into a base of operations, taking advantage of the security and economic crises that have undermined a weak government.

With prodding from the West, the Yemeni Government has renewed its attacks on AQAP. Last week it claimed to have killed 34 leaders. Among them was thought to be Anwar al-Awlaki, the Islamist preacher believed to have groomed Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab — who was held after the Christmas Day aircraft attack — and to have exchanged e-mails with Major Nidal Malik Hasan before the killing spree at Fort Hood in Texas last month. Al-Awlaki’s death has not been confirmed.