Packaged terror

Yemen emerges as the latest threat to the West after parcel bombs emanating from the country were intercepted at airports.

IN December 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian who was on a student visa in Yemen, monopolised the world headlines when he attempted to detonate plastic explosives sewed to his underwear while on board a Detroit-bound American airliner.

Yemen is back in the news, once again for the wrong reasons. This time, packages containing PETN (pentaerythritol trinitrate), an explosive that is hard to detect but extremely powerful, originating from Yemen and headed for the United States and the United Kingdom, were intercepted in the nick of time in Dubai and in Britain's East Midlands airport.

The militant Islamist organisation, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), has claimed credit for both the attempts. In a statement released in the first week of November, the AQAP claimed that it downed a cargo plane in Dubai in September. An aircraft belonging to UPS, a U.S. delivery firm, had crashed on September 9 in Dubai.

We downed the plane belonging to the American UPS company but because the media of the enemy did not attribute responsibility for the action to us we kept quiet about the operation until the time came that we hit again, said a statement posted on Islamist websites.

Many European countries were quick to ban cargo emanating from Yemen after the packages were discovered in late October. The U.S. authorities claimed that they were aware of the threat a couple of weeks before the packages were detected. Aviation and counterterrorism experts say that it is extremely difficult to detect explosives as thousands of planes with thousands of packages operate on a daily basis in airports throughout the world.

Yemen, along with Somalia, has emerged as the latest threat to the West. Islamists opposed to the American presence in Arab and Muslim countries have gained a foothold in Yemen. Even in the best of times, the central government in Sana'a only had a tenuous control over the hinterland, where tribal warlords rule the roost. Yemen is also awash with light arms.

Thousands of Yemenis, with the tacit support of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), had participated in the jehad in Afghanistan in the 1980s. They came back radicalised. It is, therefore, not surprising that Al Qaeda is able to find willing recruits for its cause in Yemen. Besides, the AQAP has recruited many Saudis who were forced to flee their country after massive security crackdowns there following the events of September 11, 2001. It was Saudi intelligence that alerted the West about the latest parcel bombs from Yemen. Graduates from Saudi-financed Salafi schools have filled Al Qaeda ranks in Yemen. Salafism is the fundamentalist version of Islam favoured by the Saudi establishment and conservative Muslim scholars.

American pressure

Since the beginning of the year, the Obama administration has been piling pressure on the Yemeni government to take decisive action against the AQAP and other groups opposed to the presence of foreign troops on the Arabian peninsula. The government of the long-ruling President Ali Abdullah Saleh has been flooded with counterterrorism dollars from Washington. The U.S. military aid to Yemen has been increased to $155 million this year. The Pentagon has earmarked $1.5 billion for the next five years as security assistance for the country. In 2006, Yemen received only $5 million in military aid. U.S. economic aid though remains paltry.

Before being arm-twisted into cooperating with the U.S., Saleh was among the few Arab leaders who had opposed the first Gulf War (1990-91). Yemen, which was a member of the United Nations Security Council at the time, had voted against the declaration of war against a fellow Arab country. American retribution was immediate. The administration of George Bush Senior cancelled the entire aid budget for Yemen, which anyway amounted to only $70 million. It was meant to send a signal to other nations about the consequences of not toeing the American line on key international issues. Earlier this year, the Barack Obama administration announced that it was giving Yemen $70 million in aid for counterterrorism operations.

Washington has been insisting for some time now that the AQAP poses a genuine threat to U.S. interests in the region. The CIA, in a recent report, described the AQAP as a more urgent threat to American security than Al Qaeda. The group is comparatively more active in Yemen than in other countries of the region. But most Yemenis, according to reports in the Arab and Western media, feel that the West is exaggerating the threat. U.S. officials themselves admit that there could be at the most around 600 Al Qaeda fighters in Yemen. Yemenis feel that the U.S. is trying to find an excuse to occupy their country militarily.

The people of Yemen have now more cause to be concerned. After the latest attempt to down American passenger aircraft, the U.S. military and the political establishment have been making loud demands for a military presence in Yemen. They want the Obama administration to give the green signal to allow U.S. Special Operations Command units to strike at targets inside Yemen. U.S. Special Forces are already engaged in training Yemeni soldiers. The Obama administration has announced that the U.S.-born preacher Anwar al-Awlaki and Ibrahim Hassan al-Assiri, the alleged mastermind of the two failed bomb attacks, are on its death list. Both of them are supposed to be in Yemen.

President Saleh is reluctant to involve U.S. forces openly in counterterrorism and counter-insurgency operations inside Yemen. Public opinion in the country is overwhelmingly against such a move. But the beleaguered President, facing tribal insurrection in the north and an escalating secessionist movement in the south, could succumb to U.S. pressure. Like the Pakistani government, the government in Sana'a is dependent on U.S. aid for survival and is forced to turn a blind eye to its territory being used by the U.S. for covert operations, including drone attacks. U.S. Special Forces drones and warplanes have been active in Yemen since the 2001 attack on USS Cole. Many militants and anti-government tribal leaders have been targeted in these operations.

The killing of innocent civilians in the drone attacks and counter-insurgency operations has angered the local population. The U.K. think tank Chatham House stated in a recent report that Western policies on Yemen could push the people there towards radicalisation and militancy. An expert on Yemen, Genny Hill, who co-authored the report, said that increased military cooperation between the U.S. and Yemen had not provided the necessary results. There have been a number of [military] strikes where the U.S. is alleged to have been involved. The key thing to note is that Al Qaeda's leadership remains intact despite increase in resource and increase in activity, Genny Hill said. She added that the American policy was driving a wedge between Saleh and his support base in a country where there is an enormous amount of hostility towards the U.S. The think tank argued that too much emphasis was being given to security-related issues to the detriment of more important issues such as the failing economy.

Poor state

Yemen is among the poorest states in the region. The rising poverty graph coupled with rampant corruption and mismanagement of the Saleh government has already alienated most Yemenis from their government. The country is facing multiple threats. The south Yemenis, who were independent until 1990, seem to have once again decided to part ways with the north. There was a civil war in the mid-1990s between the north and the south. The Saleh government, taking the help of the Islamist parties and militias, defeated the formerly socialist south. This time, the leaders of secessionist movement allege that Saleh is using the bogey of Al Qaeda to suppress them militarily with the help of the U.S.

In fact, the AQAP has been carefully keeping out of local Yemeni politics and concentrating on the far enemies a code word for the West. The near enemies in Al Qaeda lingo are the regimes having close security ties with Washington.

Interestingly, the two Chicago-bound parcel bombs from Yemen were addressed to Diego Deza and Reynald Krak, the names of two historical figures from Europe who were notorious for their anti-Islamic fervour. Deza was a Grand Inquisitor during the Spanish Inquisition, which targeted Muslims and Jews, while Krak was a Crusader who specialised in beheading the Muslim soldiers he captured on the battlefield. (Krak was beheaded by Saladin the Great, who defeated the Crusaders and expelled them from Arab soil in the 12th century.)

The U.S. game plan, at this juncture, seems to be to get Yemen into the security structures that already exist in the Gulf. When the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) was established in 1981, Yemen was excluded from the grouping. Saleh was seen at the time as being too close to Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

The attempts to include Yemen in an anti-Iran security grouping have become more urgent as Yemen straddles the Bab-el-Mandeb, an important shipping route connecting the Gulf to Europe. Currently, much of the oil-bearing marine traffic goes through the Strait of Hormuz on which Iran can easily exert control if there is a military flare-up. Besides, Yemen's neighbours in the Gulf fear that instability in Yemen has the potential to spread rapidly beyond its borders.