Al-Qaeda Resurgent
By Trends • Jul 15th, 2008People often forget that the first attack bin Laden launched against the West occurred in the southern port city of Aden in 1992. His men bombed a hotel used by American Marines deployed in neighboring Somalia. And bin Laden’s family comes from Hadramaut, a deeply conservative Sunni area.
Jihadi infiltration. Western intelligence agencies attest that Yemen’s military and security services are riddled with al-Qaeda activists or sympathizers, as is the army and many government branches. The 2006 breakout was widely seen by the Americans, who are constantly sty-mied by Saleh’s ambiguous policies, as “an inside job” carried out with PSO personnel and Islamist sympathizers.
If that was indeed the case – and it fits the pattern of regime complicity that has emerged over the years – it would seem to have backfired on Saleh. The hardcore jihadis who led the breakout are now clearly prepared to challenge him on his own doorstep unless he plays ball.
In the face of heavy pressure from Washington, Saleh has dismissed some PSO officials. But diplomatic sources in Sana’a say that has only happened at the “lowest levels.” According to Kamran Bokhari, a specialist on jihadi terrorism with the Texas-based intelligence consultancy Strategic Forecasting, none of the Muslim states that employed jihadis to achieve policy objectives in the late-1970s and 1980s “has been able to quit the relationship and remain unscathed.”
“For various reasons, the once-symbiotic relationship between the governments of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and their jihadi proxies have turned adversarial,” Bokhari continues, “while in Syria’s case the storm is brewing. The jihadis have come back to bite the hand that fed them.”
