The United States’s secret war in Yemen

Captured Yemeni rebels. Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife

Journalists everywhere were given a rude break from their vacations when Umar Farouk Abdulmatallab attempted his Christmas Day airplane bombing. Al-Qaeda in Arabia is claiming responsibility for the bombing, and mounting evidence shows that he made contact with them in Yemen. This site has writen extensively about why Yemen would likely cause severe problems for the United States in the coming years, and it’s a damn shame to be right on that count.

In the week before Abdulmatallab’s airplane bombing, the United States quietly made two cruise missile attacks on Yemen. The missiles were aimed at a suspected al-Qaeda in Arabia training camp near the capital of Sanaa and a location where “an imminent attack against a US asset was being planned” — despite the fact that an attack on the United States took place less than 8 days after the cruise missile attack.

According to ABC News:

A Yemeni official at the country’s embassy in Washington insisted to ABC News Friday that the Thursday attacks were “planned and executed” by the Yemen government and police. Along with the two U.S. cruise missile attacks, Yemen security forces carried out raids in three separate locations. As many as 120 people were killed in the three raids, according to reports from Yemen, and opposition leaders said many of the dead were innocent civilians. American officials said the missile strikes were intended to disrupt a growing threat from the al Qaeda branch in Yemen, which claims to coordinate terror attacks against neighboring Saudi Arabia.

The fact that they were “planned and executed” with the Yemeni government is likely to do with the fact that the United States has been leaning on Sanaa. Right now, the government of president Ali Abdullah Saleh is incapable of exerting authority in much of the country:

There is a rebellion by Huti tribes in the north and secessionists in the southern tribal areas. There also has been declining oil production, which has led to budget cuts in Yemen’s security apparatus. Other factors that have made Yemen a concern include a growing youth population, hundreds of thousands of Somali refugees and an increasing water shortage that is exacerbated by the growing production of the drug khat, which contains an amphetamine-like substance and requires more water than many other crops.
There is also a substantial arms and drug smuggling network, with intelligence indicating some arms shipments to Hamas via Sudan and then Egypt.

Meanwhile, Iranian television is alleging that additional attacks against Yemen have took place as well. Iran is reputed to be in a proxy war against the Yemeni government through their financial and logistical support of the Houthi rebels.

Al-Jazeera has a profile of al-Qaeda in Arabia that is worth reading.