Word: al-qaeda
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...Washington wants to continue to cooperate with Saleh and is encouraging his government to take the lead in rooting out al-Qaeda. The U.S. boosted counterterrorism funding for Yemen from less than $5 million in 2006 to $67 million in 2009 and has been dispatching CIA and military personnel to train Yemeni forces. U.S. Centcom commander General David Petraeus said on Jan. 1 that military assistance would double in the coming year. But outside observers are skeptical of how much effect more guns and money will have, especially if the largesse is appropriated by a corrupt bureaucracy. In any event...
...Arabian Peninsula and home to 23.8 million people - compared with 28.7 million in neighboring Saudi Arabia - Yemen is one of the poorest countries in the Middle East. It has a long history of being both a source of militants and a staging ground for jihadist attacks. In 2000, al-Qaeda fighters rammed an explosives-packed speedboat into the U.S.S. Cole in the port of Aden, killing 17 sailors. Militants have also attacked the U.S. embassy in Sana'a several times...
...More ominously, Yemen's social and economic problems have created a vacuum for al-Qaeda to fill. Squeezed out of Iraq and Afghanistan, al-Qaeda operatives have regrouped in Yemen's lawless mountain regions east of Sana'a and have merged with al-Qaeda's Saudi branch to form al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Led by Naser Abdel-Karim Wahishi and Saeed Ali Shehri, a Guantánamo detainee who was released in 2007, AQAP may constitute 200 core members supported by thousands of locals. Terrorism experts worry that with a firm footing in Yemen, al-Qaeda...
...tied to some kind of reform process that both addresses Yemen's endemic corruption and devolves some power from Saleh. At the top of the wish list would be a political reconciliation between the central government and the Houthis. Not all is grim. With the right incentives, tribes in al-Qaeda areas could be induced to turn against the extremists, along the lines of the Sunni awakening in Iraq, according to Najeeb Ghallab, a Sana'a University political analyst. "The situation is moving from bad to worse," he says, "but there's a golden chance to save Yemen...
...high number of civilian casualties inflicted in the resulting strikes may be the factor that prompted him to go back to the other side. The Jordanians, of course, were greatly embarrassed by the incident, and their denial of the claim that al-Balawi had never been genuinely committed to the fight against al-Qaeda will be received by many with a measure of skepticism. (See TIME's photoessay "Double Agents: A Photo Dossier...