Word: yemen
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...Abdullah Saleh has a phrase for it. Ruling Yemen, he says, is like "dancing on the heads of snakes." Saleh, Yemen's President, has had plenty of practice. As an army officer back in 1978, he took power in North Yemen after the assassination of the previous President. (North Yemen had become an independent state after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire in 1918.) In 1990 he led the North to victory in a war against South Yemen, the territory that was once the British colony of Aden, and has ruled the unified nation ever since. He's done...
...Saleh, 67, finds his snake-dancing skills being tested as never before. The suspicion that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian who allegedly tried to blow up a flight to Detroit on Christmas Day, trained for his mission with al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen has renewed attention on the nation as a breeding ground for extremists. Saleh - a professed U.S. Ally - has promised action and indeed has sent hundreds of extra soldiers to the front lines of al-Qaeda-dominated territory east of Sana'a. But U.S. officials view him as a fickle leader facing a difficult array of threats - from...
...Troubled History Stretched around the southern heel of the Arabian Peninsula and home to 23.8 million people - compared with 28.7 million in neighboring Saudi Arabia - Yemen is one of the poorest countries in the Middle East. It has a long history of being both a source of militants and a staging ground for jihadist attacks. In 2000, al-Qaeda fighters rammed an explosives-packed speedboat into the U.S.S. Cole in the port of Aden, killing 17 sailors. Militants have also attacked the U.S. embassy in Sana'a several times...
...indication of Yemen's salience in the fight against terrorism: of the 200 or so detainees still held at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, some 90 - more than from any other country - are Yemeni. And one indication of the confidence (or lack of it) that the U.S. has in Saleh's government: last year, officials determined that 40 to 50 of those detainees were safe to send back to Yemen for eventual release, but last month it was decided to keep them at Gitmo. Why? Because, said a State Department official, "We all took a look at Yemen...
...Government opponents claim that Saleh's use of state resources to bolster his circle of supporters has left the rest of the country to rot. But not all of Yemen's problems are Saleh's doing. The country faces a severe water shortage, in large part because of the national addiction to khat, a shrub whose young leaves contain a compound with effects similar to those of amphetamines. (The crop accounts for roughly a third of the country's water usage.) Moreover, Yemen's production of oil - which constitutes 90% of its exports - is limited and could...