Word: qaeda
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...Qaeda is not just under more pressure from the West. It's also under more pressure from fellow Muslims. Across the greater Middle East, notes Jenkins, governments that once took a passive, or even indulgent, view of al-Qaeda have been frightened into action by jihadist attacks on their soil. Al-Qaeda's butchery has wrecked its image among ordinary Muslims. After jihadists bombed a wedding in Amman in 2005, the percentage of Jordanians who said they trusted bin Laden to "do the right thing" dropped from 25% to less than 1%. In Pakistan, the site of repeated attacks, support...
...this means that even in places like Pakistan and Yemen where al-Qaeda or its affiliates retain some organizational presence, it is much harder to train lots of would-be terrorists for complex, mass-casualty attacks. In response, al-Qaeda seems to be relying more on solo operators, people like Abdulmutallab, Fort Hood gunman Major Nidal Malik Hasan and Najibullah Zazi, the Afghan American arrested last year for allegedly plotting to blow up buildings in New York. These lone wolves are harder to catch, but they're also less likely to do massive damage. Al-Qaeda's new motto, according...
...Jordanian intelligence officer in a Dec. 30 suicide bombing--the agency's worst such incident in more than 25 years--were shocking enough. Even more alarming were reports that the attacker, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, 32, was a double agent who had been providing information on al-Qaeda to U.S. and Jordanian officials for at least a year. Analysts say that in addition to straining ties between intelligence communities in Washington and Amman, the incident could hinder progress in hunting down terrorists, including Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's No. 2. Some officials speculate that al-Balawi...
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...
...meeting, the heads of the intelligence agencies admitted to a string of mistakes that brought Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab within a fortuitous malfunction of blowing up Flight 253 over Detroit. The National Security Agency had known from an intercept in Yemen that al-Qaeda had recruited a Nigerian to carry out a terrorist attack; another intercept had suggested some sort of attack around Christmas. The State Department had learned from the U.S. embassy in Abuja, Nigeria, that the son of a prominent Nigerian banker had joined extremists in Yemen. The CIA had even produced a background report on Abdulmutallab. All this...