Al-Qaeda targets Yemen as haven

The growth of the al-Qaeda movement in Yemen is a prime example of the dilem­ma governments face in confronting global Islamic extremism: one country’s crack down can drive the militants next door.

In a phenomenon that echoes the fluid movement of fighters across the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, diplomats say Saudi militants fled security forces in their own country to join like-minded Yemenis, bolstering the strength of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the group blamed for the foiled Christmas day attack on a transatlantic passenger jet in the US.

Experts say Yemen’s militants gained a new lease of life after a jailbreak in 2006 in which 23 al-Qaeda suspects, including Nasir Wah­ay­shi, AQAP’s leader, escaped from a high-security prison in Sana’a, the capital.

But Saudi extremists, under pressure from more aggressive pursuit by intelligence services in their country, have strengthened the group’s ranks in the past year, experts say.

The prospect of a generation of nomadic militants migrating in large numbers across an arc of instability stretching from Afghanistan and Pakistan, through Yemen and into the Horn of Africa and the Sahel has long been a concern for intelligence agencies. That was an important element of the strategy of Osama bin Laden in the years when he had sanctuary in Afghanistan before the overthrow of the Taliban in late 2001. But the scope of the phenomenon is hard to assess.

A Pakistani security official and an Arab diplomat in Islamabad said they had heard reports that al-Qaeda’s leaders in the Afghan­istan-Pakistan border region had ordered some of their Arab followers to head to Yemen in the past year. Western diplomats in Sana’a, however, say there is little hard evidence to suggest such a trend has yet emerged, with AQAP mainly made up of Yemenis and Saudis. There are fears, however, that Yemen could attract more extremists.

“The concern is that if the efforts against al-Qaeda militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan are effective, al-Qaeda is likely to look to relocate and Yemen will be attractive,” says a western diplomat in Sana’a. “You push down in one area and they pop up somewhere else.”

Saudis made up the bulk of the September 11 2001 hijackers, but the government initially went into denial about the threat its domestic militants posed. However, a series of attacks in 2003 and 2004 that killed dozens of westerners highlighted the threat the extremists posed to the ruling regime, forcing the authorities into action. Since then, thousands of suspects have been detained in the world’s top oil-producing region.

“After the Saudis became successful, that’s when things began to surge in Yemen,” says a western ­diplomat.

General Mansour al-Turki, a Saudi interior ministry official, told the Financial Times last year that al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia could no longer organise in the kingdom. But he said the threat had shifted to Yemen, raising concerns that militants based in its poorer neighbour would launch attacks across the 1,800km border.

Saudi concern intensified after al-Qaeda in Yemen rebranded itself al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula early in 2009, with the threat of strikes against the kingdom. The decision was meant to draw Yemeni and Saudi extremists under one umbrella, while also broadening the group’s dynamics beyond Yemen’s borders.

The Saudi interior ministry published a list of 83 Saudi al-Qaeda suspects living overseas. Two Yemenis were on the list, including Mr Wahayshi, who trained in Afghanistan. He is believed to be a former aide to Mr bin Laden, the founder of al-Qaeda, who was born in Saudi Arabia to a father who had migrated from Yemen.

Fears that militants would use ungoverned swaths of Yemen to organise were realised when a Saudi crossed back into his homeland in August and tried to assassinate Prince Mohammed bin Naif, Saudi deputy interior minister.

In further evidence of cross-border links, AQAP’s second-in-command is thought to be Saeed al-Shehri, a Saudi who was released from Guantánamo Bay and who moved to Yemen early last year.

Gregory Johnsen, a Yemen expert at Princeton University, said Mr Shehri brought his wife and children from Saudi Arabia last year, as if to illustrate his “comfort level” in Yemen. He says failures in Yemen are the crucial factors in al-Qaeda’s reorganisation.

“The Saudis didn’t really come south to Yemen until al-Qaeda had established themselves to a certain degree,” he says. “It’s not a case of successes elsewhere that caused the problems in Yemen; it is a case of failures within the Yemen.”

Publicity AQAP has garnered since the foiled airline attack might lure ext­rem­ists to the country, experts say.

“If you have an organisation in al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula that has had some success  ... these successes attract recruits,” Mr Johnsen says. “If the Yemeni context had been dealt with, then there wouldn't even be this option of a safe haven.”

Nowhere is the phenomenon of a safe haven more marked than on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, where the US intervention in Afghanistan in 2001 pushed the leaders of the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda into Pakistan.

Nine years later, US commanders fear sanctuaries used by Afghanistan’s Taliban in Pakistan will blunt the impact of their troop surge.

Additional reporting by Abeer Allam in Riyadh and Farhan Bokhari in Peshawar