US forces quietly open covert front in Yemen
Pentagon to spend $70m to train and equip local forces
WASHINGTON - In the midst of two unfinished major wars, the United States has quietly opened a third, largely covert front against Al Qaeda in Yemen.
A year ago, the CIA sent many field operatives with counterterrorism experience to the country, according a former top agency official. At the same time, some of the most secret Special Operations commandos have begun training Yemeni security forces in counterterrorism tactics, senior military officers said.
The Pentagon is spending more than $70 million over the next 18 months to train and equip Yemeni military, Interior Ministry, and coast guard forces, more than doubling previous military aid levels.
As US investigators sought to corroborate assertions by a 23-year-old Nigerian man that Al Qaeda leaders in Yemen had trained and equipped him to blow up a Detroit-bound
The country has long been a refuge for jihadists, in part because Yemen’s government welcomed returning Islamist fighters who had fought in Afghanistan during the 1980s. The Yemen port of Aden was the site of the audacious bombing of the US Navy destroyer Cole in October 2000 by Qaeda militants, which killed 17 sailors.
But Qaeda militants have intensified efforts to build a base in Yemen in recent years, drawing recruits from across the region and mounting more frequent attacks on foreign embassies and other targets.
The White House is seeking to nurture ties with the government of President Ali Abdullah Saleh and prod him to fight the local Al Qaeda affiliate, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, even while his impoverished country grapples with internal turmoil.
With fears also growing of a resurgent Islamist extremism in nearby Somalia and East Africa, administration officials and American lawmakers said Yemen could become Al Qaeda’s next operational and training hub, rivaling the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan where the organization’s top leaders operate.
“Yemen now becomes one of the centers of that fight,’’ said Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut and chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. He visited the country in August. “We have a growing presence there, and we have to, of special operations, Green Berets, intelligence,’’ he said on “Fox News Sunday.’’
US and Yemeni officials said that a pivotal point in the relationship was reached in summer after secret visits to Yemen by General David H. Petraeus, the US regional commander, and John O. Brennan, President Obama’s counterterrorism adviser. Saleh agreed to expanded assistance in response to growing pressure from the United States and Yemen’s neighbors, notably Saudi Arabia, from which many Al Qaeda operatives had fled to Yemen, the officials said.
“Yemen’s security problems won’t just stay in Yemen,’’ said Christopher Boucek, who studies Yemen as an associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. “They’re regional problems, and they affect Western interests.’’
Al Qaeda’s profile in Yemen rose sharply a year ago, when a former Guantanamo Bay detainee from Saudi Arabia, Said Ali al-Shihri, fled to Yemen to join Al Qaeda and appeared in a video posted online.
Yemen’s remote areas are notoriously lawless, but the country’s chaos has worsened in the past two years, as the government struggles with an armed rebellion in the northwest and a rising secessionist movement in the south. Yemen is running out of oil, and the government’s dwindling finances have affected its ability to strike Al Qaeda.
Meanwhile, there have been increasing Yemeni ties to plots against the United States. A Muslim man charged in the June 1 killing of a soldier at a recruiting center in Little Rock, Ark., had traveled to Yemen.
A radical cleric in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki, has been linked to numerous terrorism suspects, including Nidal Malik Hasan, the US Army major who faces murder charges in the shooting deaths of 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, in November.
In the latest issue of an Internet magazine of Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen, the group’s leader, Nasser al-Wuhayshi, praised use of small bombs to attack an enemy, in a foreshadowing of Friday’s drama in Detroit.
Yemen escalated its campaign against Al Qaeda with airstrikes on Dec. 17 and last Thursday that killed about 60 militants.
