Word: als
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...suppliers of fighters to regional conflicts. It's common knowledge in the tearooms of Sana'a and in Western embassies that the government of northern Yemen used jihadis to help defeat the south in the civil war that ended in 1994. But the symbiotic relationship between the government and al-Qaeda shifted after 9/11 and the American invasion of Iraq, when the Yemeni government worried that it too might be on the receiving end of U.S. military action. Sana'a helped the U.S. with the assassination of a leader of al-Qaeda in 2002, by missile attack from a Predator...
That accommodation has begun to fray as al-Qaeda has stepped up its targeting of foreign interests in Yemen, most notably through a foiled attempt to storm the U.S. embassy in September 2008. Early this year, the head of al-Qaeda in Yemen, Naser al-Wahishi, announced the merger between his organization and al-Qaeda's Saudi branch to form al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a move that caused the U.S. director of national intelligence to note that Yemen was "re-emerging as a jihadist battleground and potential regional base of operations for al-Qaeda." With a base...
...encourage President Ali Abdullah Saleh to be more aggressive. "The view from Sana'a doesn't match the view from Washington," says Gregory Johnsen, a U.S. expert on Yemen. "The Yemeni government is much more concerned with fighting the Houthis in Saada and with the secessionists in the south. Al-Qaeda ranks a distant third. The government doesn't see it as a Yemeni problem. [It sees it as] a foreign problem." (See pictures of President Obama in Saudi Arabia...
...doesn't help that several high-level al-Qaeda operatives - including al-Wahishi - have mysteriously escaped from Yemeni prisons in the past, or that former inmates of the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo have resurfaced as active operatives in Yemen. But Johnsen thinks the U.S. is too focused on a military solution. "Obviously you have to eliminate key fighters, but the U.S. has done that before," he says. "Unless you address the underlying issues - especially poverty - you'll just be fighting a different incarnation of al-Qaeda every few years...
...replenished only very slowly. Experts predict that Sana'a, a city of almost 2 million, could run dry in as few as 10 years. The social upheaval from such an environmental catastrophe and the refugees it could produce might create an even more perfect breeding ground for al-Qaeda. "I tell [the U.N. refugee agency] that they should start buying tents" for drought-displaced families, says Michael Klingler, a hydrologist and the local director of GTZ, the German aid agency...