Word: arabian
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...hard to find - and Abdulmutallab or any other bombers would likely be able to obtain the explosive on the black market if they couldn't synthesize it themselves. The shoe bomber Richard Reid tried to use PETN to destroy a plane over the Atlantic in 2001, and the Saudi Arabian government has reported that the chemical was used in a thwarted assassination attempt on the country's counterterrorism chief in August. "It's a nice high explosive," says Oxley...
...claim of responsibility was a haughty cackle, even if the operation it reveled in had ended in failure. In an Internet post* on Dec. 28, 2009, the group al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula declared that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's alleged attempt to blow up Northwest Flight 253 over Detroit on Christmas had demonstrated the "frailty" of American intelligence, "making all they have spent upon security technologies a waste to them." In an additional shout-out, it praised "the hero mujahid [Major] Nidal Hasan," the accused perpetrator of the Fort Hood, Texas, massacre, as an exemplar of the mission...
Stretched around the southern heel of the Arabian Peninsula and home to 23.8 million people - compared with 28.7 million in geographically much larger Saudi Arabia - Yemen is one of the poorest countries in the Middle East. It came into being when North and South Yemen merged in 1990. Long a source of jihadis, the region sent hundreds of fighters to the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan and - to judge by the number of captured, killed and identified insurgents in Iraq - continues to be one of the biggest suppliers of fighters to regional conflicts. It is common knowledge...
...past two years, al-Qaeda in Yemen began to regroup, spurred by the dramatic 2006 prison break of its leader Naser al-Wahishi and 22 other members. Early this year, Wahishi announced a 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 in Yemen, al-Qaeda could launch attacks on the Red Sea gateway to the Suez Canal...
While some western analysts say that al-Qaeda seeks to overthrow Yemen's government, Hassan disagrees, saying that al-Qaeda only seeks to establish a base there - a link between the Horn of Africa and the rest of the Arabian Peninsula - and that so long as Saleh leaves al-Qaeda alone, they'll do the same for him. "The government still sometimes thinks it is too costly for it to fight al-Qaeda. If you ask them to go and fight al-Qaeda, they say 'Why? And what do I get back?'" says Hassan. Fighting al-Qaeda would mean losing...