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GUARDIAN Tue, 19 Jan 2010 13:52:44 GMT
Government insists al-Qaida threat is exaggerated and far from top concern, but is keen to flaunt anti-terror credentials
It's not easy trying to follow Yemen's fight against al-Qaida. Until a bomber tried to down a US airliner over Detroit on Christmas Day, this rugged Arabian peninsular country had attracted little attention beyond the likes of the CIA and MI6 worrying that its "ungoverned spaces" were becoming a safe haven for jihadis. Now it is in the uncomfortable glare of intense international publicity.
Yemen's government insists the problem of terrorism is being exaggerated. It has tried from the start to suggest that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian student accused of carrying out the plane attack, was radicalised in London rather than in Sana'a, where he was studying Arabic.
Foreign journalists who have been streaming to this picturesque city since the new year are told by officials that al-Qaida is far from Yemen's biggest challenge: war in the north, unrest in the south, unemployment, illiteracy and shortages of water and oil all figure far higher on the list of national priorities. Ordinary Yemenis tend to agree.
Priorities are different at the heavily guarded US embassy in the capital. The checkpoints that surround it carry fading posters of Yemeni security personnel who were "martyred", with 15 others (some of them the al-Qaida perpetrators), in a September 2008 bombing. Fears of new attacks prompted closure of the US, British and other western missions earlier this month, apparently because of intelligence warnings. They are open again but security remains intense.
In the run-up to next week's London conference on Yemen, the government here is simultaneously bending over backwards to play down the threat from al-Qaida in the Arabian peninsula (Aqap) and flaunting its own robust anti-terrorist credentials.
"We understand the western mentality," quips one senior Yemeni with a smile. Not a day goes by without some new official claim of a deadly blow against the group: six men killed in air strikes on their vehicles; three more captured near the Saudi border; two more in a remote southern tribal area.
The Saudis did their bit yesterday by announcing that three wanted terrorists – they use the Arabic word "deviants", with its powerful Qur'anic resonance – had been killed in Yemen in September. Mugshots of supposedly dead al-Qaida fighters are posted on Yemeni government and news websites sometimes only minutes after an air attack is over.
Aqap challenges every statement made by those it scorns as "tyrants and crusaders." On Sunday it flatly denied a government claim to have killed Qasim al-Raimi, the group's military leader. It even boasted that Raimi and four or five of his fellow fighters were holding a celebratory meal after their escape.
The latest official boast is the capture of Said Ali al-Shihri, a Saudi who is the group's deputy leader, after he tried to bypass a roadblock in Shabwa, where tribes are said to be backing the jihadis. Shihri, a freed Guantánamo prisoner who is accused of involvement in the Sana'a embassy attack in 2008, would be a very big catch indeed. This claim may eventually turn out to be true but official credibility is so poor that western diplomats remain sceptical pending irrefutable confirmation. Too many others have proved premature or false.
Aqap in any event now urges supporters not to believe anything until they hear its own version of events. "It is a sad state of affairs when one trusts Aqap's statements more than the Yemeni government's press releases," said the highly regarded Yemen watcher Gregory Johnsen on his Waq al-Waq blog.
Still, there is a sense that the Yemeni government has raised its game: there is talk in Sana'a of better co-ordination between different agencies and ministries and troops being diverted from the war against the Houthi rebels in the north to concentrate on fighting al-Qaida. How long that will last – especially once current.....
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| Full List of Saudi Arabia articles |
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