On A Dagger's Edge
Yemen has become America's surprise ally in fighting terrorism. But can the Muslim nation survive its own struggle with endemic poverty and extremism?
Such commitment makes last month's brazen prison break particularly embarrassing. Twenty-three prisoners, including 13 convicted al Qaeda fighters, tunneled out of their cells; U.S. officials say they clearly had inside help. One of them--convicted Cole bomber Jamal Badawi--had escaped once before and was recaptured 11 months later. "The longer they remain at large, the more the threat level rises," says a senior U.S. official. The incident raised new doubts about Yemen's reliability. "At best," the official says, "it was a combination of negligence, stupidity, and greed."
Despite such lapses, cooperation on counterterrorism has largely improved. A major turning point came when Yemeni security forces turned up plotters who wanted to target Saleh's personal airplane. The pre-9/11 al Qaeda leadership in Yemen has been purged; in the most spectacular incident, the group's former leader in Yemen, Qaed al-Harethi, was killed deep in the desert by a missile fired from an unmanned U.S. Predator drone in 2002, apparently with Yemen's acquiescence.
Yemen has also created a Coast Guard that, with U.S. support, is beginning to patrol the nation's ports and its long, jagged coastline. "Now, as ships start to feel safer, they are starting to return," says Col. Lotf al-Baraty, the Coast Guard director in Aden. Still in its infancy, the Coast Guard will soon try to police some of the world's wildest smuggling waterways, across the Gulf of Aden from lawless Somalia. "As they stop more smugglers and illegal immigrants," says Cmdr. Scott Cull, the U.S. naval attach? in Yemen, "it makes it more difficult for the terrorists to get through."
All these efforts have paid off. U.S. News has learned that Yemen has helped foil three al Qaeda-related plots since late 2004, including one planning attacks in neighboring Saudi Arabia. Another cell of nearly a dozen included several fighters who had returned from Iraq, apparently under the direction of Abu Musab Zarqawi. Officials believe that Zarqawi was trying to build a long-term presence in Yemen but that his operatives became restless and began plotting more immediate attacks on targets including the Sheraton Hotel in Aden and the U.S. Embassy in Sana. The group was captured after U.S. intelligence passed a tip to Yemeni security forces. "This was a serious group," says a U.S. diplomat. "You just wonder how many others are out there."
For Yemen, the conflict in Iraq dredges up an alarming parallel. Yemenis vividly remember the aftermath of the long battle against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and how the battle-hardened Yemeni volunteers who returned carried out some of al Qaeda's earlier attacks. Now, several hundred Yemenis are estimated to have traveled to Iraq to fight in the past three years. "We are waiting for when the war is finished in Iraq. We have to be ready," says Col. Yahya Saleh, the chief of staff for the Central Security Force (which includes the Counterterrorism Unit) and a nephew of the president. "If they come back, they will come back with more hate, and they will have been trained there, in explosives and other skills." The government has started to crack down, stopping young men at the airport on their way to countries like Syria.
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