Word: peninsulas
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Ever since the thwarted Dec. 25 attack on a Detroit-bound airliner by a suicide bomber allegedly trained in Yemen, the U.S. has ramped up its counterterrorism aid to the government in Sana'a--courting the ire of militants there. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the group that claimed responsibility for the plane attack, threatened to strike against foreign officials in Yemen, prompting the U.S. and British embassies to close. The buildings reopened on Jan. 5, after successful raids by Yemeni security forces on al-Qaeda hideouts and the subsequent arrest of three suspected terrorists. Several other embassies have...
Pity poor Yemen. Three armed conflicts are being fought in the nation that hugs the southwestern corner of the Arabian Peninsula: there is a separatist insurgency in the south and a fight between the mostly Sunni government forces and Shi'ite rebels in the north, while in the east, home of Osama bin Laden's ancestors, the local affiliate of his network is plotting to undermine the government of President Ali Abdullah Saleh...
...such interest to the U.S. government that it tried to kill him. On Dec. 24, the Yemeni military, pressed by the CIA, fired rockets into his home south of Sana'a. Al-Awlaki was not the principal target - the top leadership of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) was thought to be meeting there - but U.S. officials were hoping the strike would also take out the cleric. He wasn't home...
...allowed a suspect known to U.S. intelligence to board an airliner allegedly carrying explosives on his body. On Jan. 7, the President's top counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, laid out what he said were the facts of the failure. "It was known that AQAP [al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the group that took responsibility for the attempted attack] not only sought to strike U.S. targets in Yemen," Brennan said, "but that it also sought to strike the U.S. homeland. Indeed, there was a threat stream of intelligence on this threat." (See pictures from the life of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab...
...Brennan said the intelligence community had failed in not pursuing that threat stream and piecing it together with other information it had gathered. "We didn't follow up and prioritize the stream of intelligence indicating that al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula sought to strike our homeland, because no one intelligence entity or team or task force was assigned responsibility for doing that follow-up investigation. The intelligence fell through the cracks. This happened in more than one organization...