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Dec 19th, 2009


U.S. Fired on Al-Qaida Targets in Yemen

Warships launched missiles on Obama’s order in joint operation with ally

Tomahawk missile
The Ticonderoga class guided missile cruiser (Aegis) USS Cape St. George (CG 71) launches a Tomahawk sea launch cruise missile (SLCM) during operation Iraqi Freedom on March 23, 2003. (Photo credit: U.S. Navy / Records of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, 1921-2008)

NBC News and The Associated Press via MSNBC.com
December 18, 2009

SAN’A, Yemen — U.S. Navy warships fired missiles at suspected al-Qaida training camps in Yemen, with that government’s support, Pentagon sources tell NBC News.

One U.S. official said President Barack Obama personally ordered the missile strikes in northern Yemen.

Yemen’s government on Thursday said it had launched an attack on al-Qaida camps in the south, killing at least 34 suspected militants.

Witnesses, however, put the number killed at more than 60 in the heaviest strike and said the dead were mostly civilians, including women and children. They denied the target was an al-Qaida stronghold, and one provincial official said only 10 militant suspects died.

The United States has repeatedly called on Yemen to take stronger action against al-Qaida, whose fighters have increasingly found refuge here in the past year. Worries over the growing presence are compounded by fears that Yemen could collapse into turmoil from its multiple conflicts and increasing poverty and become another Afghanistan, giving the militants even freer rein.

If that happens, al-Qaida would have a foothold bordering U.S. ally Saudi Arabia and near other oil-rich states. Already militants in Yemen have crossed into Saudi Arabia to conduct some operations, including an attempt this year to assassinate the deputy interior minister.

Moreover, Yemen is located on a strategic maritime crossroad at the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, the access point to the Suez Canal — and across the Gulf is Somalia, an even more tumultuous nation where the U.S. has said al-Qaida militants have been increasing their activity.

Shiites, separatists also a threat

At the same time, Yemen’s government is facing an escalating war with Shiite rebels in the north and clashes with separatists in the south. The San’a government already has little control in much of the mountainous nation, the poorest in the Arab world, where tribes hold sway.

In Thursday’s biggest assault, warplanes and security forces on the ground attacked what authorities said was an al-Qaida training camp in the area of Mahsad in the southern province of Abyan. Saleh el-Shamsy, a provincial security official, said at least 30 suspected militants were killed. …

Abyan’s deputy governor, Mohammed Hazran, said 10 al-Qaida suspects were killed in the attack, including Mohammed Saleh al-Kazemi, a Saudi who had came to the country after fighting in Afghanistan and was imprisoned in Yemen for two years before being released in 2005. …

Al-Qaida fighters, many of them coming from the war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan, are believed to have found refuge among tribes disgruntled with the central government — particularly in the northeast of the country, a trio of provinces bordering Saudi Arabia known as the “triangle of evil.” The south has seen less al-Qaida activity in the past year.

The country was scene of one of al-Qaida’s most dramatic pre-9/11 attacks, the 2000 suicide bombing of the destroyer USS Cole off the Aden coast that killed 17 American sailors. The government allied itself with Washington in the war on terror, but U.S officials have complained that it often strikes deals with militants. …

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Related reports on this site

War on Terror Covert Surge (Jan. 5, 2011)

Uncertain Ally Against al-Qaida (Jan. 9, 2010)

Battle Lines Are Drawn in Yemen (Jan. 2, 2010)

Obama Opens Third War Front (Dec. 28, 2009)

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6/9/2011 Update

U.S. Is Intensifying a Secret Campaign of Yemen Airstrikes

By Mark Mazzetti

June 8, 2011

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has intensified the American covert war in Yemen, exploiting a growing power vacuum in the country to strike at militant suspects with armed drones and fighter jets, according to American officials.

The acceleration of the American campaign in recent weeks comes amid a violent conflict in Yemen that has left the government in Sana, a United States ally, struggling to cling to power. Yemeni troops that had been battling militants linked to Al Qaeda in the south have been pulled back to the capital, and American officials see the strikes as one of the few options to keep the militants from consolidating power.

On Friday, American jets killed Abu Ali al-Harithi, a midlevel Qaeda operative, and several other militant suspects in a strike in southern Yemen. According to witnesses, four civilians were also killed in the airstrike. Weeks earlier, drone aircraft fired missiles aimed at Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical American-born cleric who the United States government has tried to kill for more than a year. Mr. Awlaki survived. [link added]

The recent operations come after a nearly year-long pause in American airstrikes, which were halted amid concerns that poor intelligence had led to bungled missions and civilian deaths that were undercutting the goals of the secret campaign. …

The American campaign in Yemen is led by the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command, and is closely coordinated with the Central Intelligence Agency. Teams of American military and intelligence operatives have a command post in Sana, the Yemeni capital, to track intelligence about militants in Yemen and plot future strikes.

Concerned that support for the campaign could wane if the government of Yemen’s authoritarian president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, were to fall, the United States ambassador in Yemen has met recently with leaders of the opposition, partly to make the case for continuing American operations. Officials in Washington said that opposition leaders have told the ambassador, Gerald M. Feierstein, that operations against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula should continue regardless of who wins the power struggle in Sana.

The extent of America’s war in Yemen has been among the Obama administration’s most closely guarded secrets, as officials worried that news of unilateral American operations could undermine Mr. Saleh’s tenuous grip on power. …

“We’ve seen the regime move its assets away from counterterrorism and toward its own survival,” said Christopher Boucek, a Yemen expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “But as things get more and more chaotic in Yemen, the space for the Americans to operate in gets bigger,” he said. …

Edmund J. Hull, ambassador to Yemen from 2001 to 2004 and the author of “High-Value Target: Countering Al Qaeda in Yemen,” called airstrikes a “necessary tool” but said that the United States had to “avoid collateral casualties or we will turn the tribes against us.”

Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen is believed by the C.I.A. to pose the greatest immediate threat to the United States, more so than even Qaeda’s senior leadership believed to be hiding in Pakistan. The Yemen group has been linked to the attempt to blow up a transatlantic jetliner on Christmas Day 2009 and last year’s plot to blow up cargo planes with bombs hidden inside printer cartridges. [links added]

Mr. Harithi, the militant killed on Friday, was an important operational figure in Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and was believed to be one of those responsible for the group’s ascendance in recent years. According to people in Yemen close to the militant group, Mr. Harithi travelled to Iraq in 2003 and fought alongside Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian operative who led the Qaeda affiliate in Iraq until he was killed in an American strike in 2006. Mr. Harithi returned to Yemen in 2004, those close to the militants said, where he was captured, tried and imprisoned in 2006 but released three years later. …

Full story

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: One Year Ago — December 19, 2008

Misheck Bunyira carries his wife, Janet in the lat...
Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi / AP

U.S. Envoy: Zimbabwe Has Collapsed

One-year retrospective: One year ago today, I reported that according to U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer, Zimbabwe had collapsed and ran the risk of deteriorating into Somalia-scale chaos. I also featured a personality profile of Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe that I developed in 2002 with Adam Beatty at the Unit for the Study of Personality in Politics and reported that for the sixth consecutive year, Iraq was the deadliest place in the world for journalists in 2008.





17 Responses to “Obama Fires Missiles into Yemen”
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  14. Immelman for Congress » Blog Archive » Awlaki Escapes U.S. Drone Strike Says:

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