At about 4:30 a.m. on Feb. 3, 2006, 23 jihadi prisoners held in the basement of the maximum-security prison on the edge of Sana’a began crawling through a 140-meter tunnel leading to the women’s restroom in the al-Awfaq Mosque. From there, they melted away in the pre-dawn light before the muezzin could call the faithful to the day’s first prayer.

There were 17 hardened al-Qaeda veterans in the group, some from the cells that carried out suicide bombings on the USS Cole in October 2000 and the French oil tanker Limburg in 2002. The breakout was seen as a huge victory for the jihadis, who had been on the ropes in Yemen since late 2003. With the jailbreak from a prison run by the Political Security Organization (PSO), Yemen’s main intelligence unit, which answers directly to President Ali Abdullah Saleh, a four-and-a-half-year counter-insurgency effort by the Americans in Yemen went down the drain. Today, most of the jihadis remain at large, and the investigation into the Cole bombing has unraveled.

New in Yemen. More importantly, the young al-Qaeda firebrands who escaped soon usurped the older generation of jihadis. Now that they’re at the helm of the organization in Yemen, they unleashed a fresh campaign in mid-2007. And they’re gathering momentum.

Yemen’s new jihadi supremo is Nasir Abdel Karim al-Wuhayshi, one of the leaders of the Great Escape. He has accused the older generation of jihadis of cutting deals with Saleh’s regime, to refrain from attacking the government in exchange for turning a blind eye to their activities. “This no-holds-barred ap-proach is a relatively new one in Yemen, where negotiation and compromise are much more common methods,” says Gregory Johnson, a Yemen expert with the Jamestown Foundation, an American think-tank that studies terrorism.

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