Word: yemen
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...fallout may emerge from probes into why the Cole was refueling in Aden in the first place. An Administration official said the U.S. was aware of "a general uptick in activity" in the past month among rogue groups hoping to use Arab-Israeli tensions as a justification for mischief. Yemen is a fertile staging ground for such mischief; the country is one of the world's poorest, and the government wields little control over the feuding tribes that roam through the hinterland...
...Indeed, Yemen has made little progress in cracking down on terrorist cells working within its borders. One of America's chief nemeses, Osama bin Laden, has ancestral roots there and boasts a following. Earlier this year, a cabal of 28 suspected Bin Laden loyalists who met initially in Yemen was indicted by Jordan for plotting New Year's attacks on American and Israeli tourists. The country has also become a crossroads for veterans of the war in Afghanistan, some of whom later made their way to conflicts in Bosnia and Chechnya...
...recent years the U.S. has sought to improve ties with Yemen, hoping to pressure the government to defuse terrorist cells, draw the country away from its sometime ally Saddam Hussein and gain a foothold at the tip of the Saudi peninsula. Sending Navy ships to refuel in Yemen ports made strategic sense in that regard. "[Diplomacy] was at the heart of the motivation," Admiral Clark said last week. But the diplomacy outstripped the security. Crawling with terrorists who see the U.S. as invaders on the peninsula and protected only by a weak central government located 200 miles to the north...
...coming days the onshore investigators will look at violent indigenous Yemeni groups, like the Aden-Abyan Islamic Army, a terrorist organization whose former leader was executed last year for the kidnapping of 16 Western tourists in 1998. But the more likely suspects, experts say, are international troublemakers operating in Yemen. Bin Laden, who attempted to blow up an Aden hotel housing U.S. service members in 1992, has helped recruit and support several fanatically anti-American terrorist cells, including the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Army of Yemen, which is headed by Bin Laden's brother...
...signs from the Yemeni government last week were not encouraging. President Ali Abdullah Saleh not only refused to acknowledge that the Cole bombing, and a Thursday-night grenade attack on the British embassy in San'a, might be the work of terrorists; he went so far as to declare, "Yemen does not have any terrorist elements...