Word: yemenis
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...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 in the tearooms of the Yemeni capital of Sana'a and in Western embassies that the government of northern Yemen used jihadis to help defeat the south in the civil war that ended in 1994. But the symbiotic relationship between the government and al-Qaeda shifted after 9/11 and the American invasion of Iraq, when...
...post-9/11 cooperation between the U.S. and Yemeni governments met with considerable success - so much so that Yemen later fell off the radar to some extent as the Bush Administration shifted its focus back to battling insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. But in the 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...
Meanwhile, the Sana'a government is in the middle of another ferocious war, against its Houthi minority, Yemeni followers of the Zaydi sect of Shi'ite Islam. That introduces the shadow - both real and imagined - of the primary Shi'a power in the region, Iran, which is happy to take credit even if its actual influence may still be negligible. When Iran is mentioned, however, both the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, the predominant Sunni power in the region, start quaking. And al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, no friend to any of the parties, is happy to sow destabilization...
...Yemen connection: For several years, counterterrorism officials have said that al-Qaeda has been looking to consolidate and expand its base in the country of Osama bin Laden's ancestors. Yemeni authorities, prodded by Washington, have recently mounted an operation to wipe out the terrorist havens - including a missile strike this week that, officials in the Yemeni capital Sanaa say, killed 30 top al-Qaeda operatives. But if Abdulmutallab's plot did indeed originate in Yemen, then it would suggest that much more remains to be done. (See how al-Qaeda is creating a crisis in Yemen...
Initial reports that the airstrike may have been the work of the CIA seem to have been mistaken: Yemeni authorities say it was their jets that conducted the dawn operation, in the province of Shabwa, 400 miles south of the capital Sana'a. In a statement, the Yemeni embassy in Washington D.C. said the strike targeted a meeting of "scores of Yemeni and foreign Al Qaeda operatives." The meeting had been called to discuss retaliation for government raids in mid-December on al-Qaeda hideouts in Abyan and Sana'a provinces...