A False Dawn for Yemen's Militants

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Throughout Yemen's political crisis, the West's chief concern has been that spreading chaos in the country will offer al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) an opportunity to expand its operations. Now that Yemen's president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, is in Saudi Arabia for emergency medical treatment, leaving the country in uncertain hands, these worries have only become more urgent. Saleh has often argued that any political vacuum that would follow his rule could prove dangerously hospitable to al Qaeda and similar groups -- a warning that, in reality, is based far more on political posturing than on a real assessment of the terrorist threat.

For years now, Saleh has used the specter of al Qaeda to drum up political and financial support, mainly from the United States and Saudi Arabia. This strategy first took shape in November 2005, when he traveled to Washington to meet then U.S. President George W. Bush. Saleh expected his American hosts to congratulate him for eradicating the al Qaeda cells responsible for attacks on the U.S.S. Cole and the M.V. Limburg; instead, he was castigated for failing to achieve political and economic reforms. As he saw it, the danger of al Qaeda was the sole reason behind U.S. support for Yemen.

Three months later, the terrorist threat in Yemen took on new life when 23 experienced jihadis escaped from a high-security prison in Sana'a. A number of attacks on high-profile targets followed, mostly against Western tourists -- international oil workers in Marib and Hadhramaut in September 2006 and Spanish tourists at Marib in July 2007. Western diplomats were also targeted, most notably those at the U.S. Embassy, which came under a complex assault in September 2008. The attackers clearly wanted to damage Yemen's reputation and reduce tourism and oil revenues. Saleh, however, also stood to benefit from al Qaeda's rise: his less assertive response to terrorism than previously -- compared to, for example, his crackdown against those responsible for the Cole bombing -- may have been intended to raise the profile of jihadi groups in Yemen, and thus attract funding and training from the West for additional counterterrorist units to be controlled by members of his family.

In practice, the regular Yemeni army has performed most counterterrorist operations, and these special units have largely been deployed against domestic political opponents: the Zaydi revivalist Houthis in the north, who rebelled against governmental corruption and state sponsorship of Salafism; militants linked to the Joint Meeting Parties, the country's opposition coalition; and now the leaders of Hashid, Yemen's most powerful tribal confederation, who have come under attack after criticising Saleh for backing out of a deal to transfer power. Over the years, the Saleh regime has labelled each of these groups as terrorists in order to justify using forces that the state plainly regards as a sort of Praetorian Guard. In reality, the regime apparently feels far more threatened by domestic political enemies than by al Qaeda.

Not that Yemen isn't home to genuine terrorists. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula came into being in January 2009, when al Qaeda in Yemen merged with the remnants of al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia, which had been disrupted by Saudi security operations. At the same time, Anwar al-Awlaki, a Yemeni-American Islamist cleric and propagandist, began to work with AQAP. Since January 2009, AQAP has assassinated scores of Yemeni security officials, mounted a sophisticated two-phase attack on South Korean targets (first attacking a tourist party at Seiyun in March 2009, then attacking the investigative team in Sana'a three days later), dispatched the now infamous "underwear bomber" Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, and attempted to blow up commercial airliners with bombs hidden in computer printers. It has also targeted the neighbouring Saudi regime: in an August 2009 suicide attack, an AQAP terrorist injured* Saudi Arabia's Deputy Minister of the Interior, Prince Muhammad bin Nayef, and in October 2009 two more would-be suicide bombers were killed trying to cross the Yemeni-Saudi border. (Their exact targets are unknown -- probably Saudi royals -- but they had two additional suicide vests, suggesting a major operation.) And then, as a sign of its increasing savviness, AQAP launched a slick online publication called Inspire, aimed at aspiring jihadis around the globe, particularly in the West.

But this catalogue of putative successes masks a number of fundamental vulnerabilities. It remains unclear how many members AQAP actually has -- perhaps a few hundred -- because incidents are often attributed to it inaccurately. For example, the Abida tribe near Marib, an area in Yemen's east rich in oil and natural gas, became enraged after a U.S. drone strike killed a senior sheikh in May 2010, possibly due to Saleh's duplicity. In response, the tribe has severed the main road in the area, interrupted power supplies to Sana'a, and blocked oil exports -- strikes that the Saleh regime regularly blames on al Qaeda. (In truth, the similarity of tactics often makes it difficult to determine whether tribesmen or jihadis are responsible for a particular attack.)