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

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

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

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.