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 Mesaj Başlığı: The secret war in Yemen
MesajGönderilme zamanı: 13.01.10, 21:04 #mesajın linki (?)
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Kayıt: 17.01.09, 16:49
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The United States’s secret war in Yemen

NEAL UNGERLEIDER

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.


http://trueslant.com/nealungerleider/20 ... -in-yemen/


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 Mesaj Başlığı: U.S., NATO Expand Afghan War To Horn Of Africa And Indian Oc
MesajGönderilme zamanı: 13.01.10, 21:08 #mesajın linki (?)
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U.S., NATO Expand Afghan War To Horn Of Africa And Indian Ocean

Rick Rozoff

In parallel with the escalation of the war in South Asia - counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan and drone missile attacks in Pakistan - the United States and its NATO allies have laid the groundwork for increased naval, air and ground operations in the Horn of Africa and the Gulf of Aden.

During the past month the U.S. has carried out deadly military strikes in Yemen: Bombing raids in the north and cruise missile attacks in the south of the nation. Washington has been accused of killing scores of civilians in the attacks in both parts of the country, executed before the December 25 Northwest Airlines incident that has been used to justify the earlier U.S. actions ex post facto. And, ominously, that has been exploited to pound a steady drumbeat of demands for expanded and even more direct military intervention.


The Pentagon's publicly disclosed military and security program for Yemen grew from $4.6 million in 2006 to $67 million last year. "That figure does not include covert, classified assistance that the United States has provided." [1]

In addition, "Under a new classified cooperation agreement, the U.S. would be able to fly cruise missiles, fighter jets or unmanned armed drones against targets in the country, but would remain publicly silent on its role in the airstrikes." [2]

On January 1 General David Petraeus, the chief of the Pentagon's Central Command, in charge of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as operations in Yemen and Pakistan, was in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad and said of deepening military involvement in Yemen, "We have, it's well known, about $70 million in security assistance last year. That will more than double this coming year." [3]

The following day Petraeus was in the capital of Yemen where he met with the country's president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, to discuss "continued U.S. support in rooting out the terrorist cells." [4]

White House counterterrorism adviser (Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism) John Brennan briefed President Barack Obama on Petraeus' visit to Washington's new war theater and afterward stated "We have made Yemen a priority over the course of this year, and this is the latest in that effort." [5]

The alleged terrorist cells in question are identified by U.S. and other Western governments as being affiliated with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). However, on January 4 CNN reported that "A senior U.S. official cited a rebellion by Huti [Houthi] tribes in the north, and secessionist activity in the southern tribal areas" as of concern to Washington. [6]

The Houthis' confessional background is Shi'a and not Sunni Islam and the opposition forces in the south are led by the Yemeni Socialist Party, so attempts to link either with al-Qaeda are inaccurate, self-serving and dishonest.

In both the north and south the United States, its NATO allies - Britain and France closed their embassies in Yemen earlier this week in unison with the U.S. - and Saudi Arabia are working in tandem to support the Saleh government in what over the past month has become a state of warfare against opposition forces in the country. Saudi Arabia has launched regular bombing raids and infantry and armored attacks in the north of the country and, according to Houthi rebel sources, been aided by U.S. warplanes in deadly attacks on villages. Houthi spokesmen have accused Riyadh of firing over a thousand missiles inside Yemen, and in late December the Saudi Defense Ministry acknowledged that its military casualties over the preceding month included 73 dead, 26 missing and 470 wounded. In short, a cross-border war on the Arabian peninsula.

The West, though, has even larger plans for Yemen, ones which include integrating military operations from Northeast Africa to the Chinese border. Typical of recent statements by U.S. officials and their Western allies, last weekend British Prime Minister Gordon Brown disingenuously claimed that "The weakness of al Qaeda in Pakistan has forced them out of Pakistan and into Yemen and Somalia." [7]

Brown told the BBC on January 3 "Yemen has been recognized, like Somalia, to be one of the areas we have got to not only keep an eye on, but we've got to do more. So it's strengthening counter-terrorism cooperation, it's working harder on intelligence efforts." [8] It is up to Mr. Brown to explain why, if al-Qaeda has been "forced out" of Pakistan, he is adding soldiers to the U.S. and NATO surge that will soon bring combined Western troop numbers to over 150,000 in Afghanistan while intensifying deadly attacks inside Pakistan itself.

The British prime minister has also called for an international meeting on Yemen for later this month and announced that "The UK and the US have agreed to fund a counter-terrorism police unit in Yemen...." [9]

In Western news reports, or rather rumor peddling, Yemeni rebels are accused of supplying weapons to Somali opposite numbers and the second are reported to have offered fighters to the former.

...

Full text:

http://www.opednews.com/articles/1/U-S- ... 1-540.html


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 Mesaj Başlığı: Re: The secret war in Yemen
MesajGönderilme zamanı: 13.01.10, 21:10 #mesajın linki (?)
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Kayıt: 17.01.09, 16:49
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Yemen fertile ground for terror groups

By Brad Lendon, CNN

January 4, 2010


(CNN) -- Yemen, a rugged, poor country on the southern Arabian Peninsula, is emerging as a key theater in the international fight against terrorism.
France on Monday became the latest Western power to close a diplomatic post in Yemen, as al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula threatened attacks on Western interests. Despite concerns over the volatile country, the U.S. embassy in Yemen will reopen on Tuesday, a senior State Department official says. The United States and Britain closed their embassies Sunday over security concerns.
U.S. officials have said that the suspect in the Christmas Day attempt to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight over Detroit got training at a camp in Yemen. And Gen. David Petraeus visited the country on Saturday to offer President Ali Abdullah Saleh continued U.S. support in rooting out the terrorist cells.
"We are very concerned about al Qaeda's continued growth there," White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan said.
Yemen offers fertile territory for terrorists to hide and recruit, and it threatens to take on increasing importance with any success Western powers have in fighting al Qaeda elsewhere, including along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, government officials and analysts say.
"The weakness of al Qaeda in Pakistan has forced them out of Pakistan and into Yemen and Somalia," British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told a BBC interviewer over the weekend.
As they move into Yemen, terrorists find a nation with dwindling economic fortunes -- oil output will drop to zero in seven years, according to one estimate; a rapidly growing population with rampant unemployment; and limited fresh water to support that growing population.
Clinton: Yemen instability threatens global security
"This confluence of political, ideological, economic and environmental forces will render Yemen a fertile ground for the training and recruitment of Islamic militants for the foreseeable future," foreign policy analysts Andrew Exum and Richard Fontaine wrote in a November policy paper for the Center for a New American Security, a Washington think tank that promotes American interests in the area of security.
Concerns about a growing al Qaeda presence have become more acute with the declining security situation in Yemen. A senior U.S. official cited a rebellion by Huti tribes in the north, and secessionist activity in the southern tribal areas.

Analysts agree that Yemen's future is troubled.
"Yemen is a failing state. It's not yet a failed state. You have a collapsed economy. You have multiple political, ideological and tribal fault lines that are pushing the country to all-out war," said Fawaz Gerges, professor of Mideast politics at the London School of Economics.
Yemen's geography doesn't help. Poor infrastructure makes it difficult to get around. The country's long and largely unsecure border with Saudi Arabia eases travel for militants. It's a short water journey from Somalia, another al Qaeda safe haven, and extremist elements in Sudan and Egypt.
And even with U.S. security aid -- Washington will send tens of millions of dollars to Yemen this year -- the government is ill-equipped to wage a long battle with al Qaeda.
"It's a country ideally suited to guerrilla warfare. ... A lot of things are already being done, but the problem is one of capacity. It's not a question necessarily of lack of willingness by the Yemeni government," said CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen.
Yemen-based militants have a decades-long history. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, thousands of Yemenis joined Islamic forces that fought the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s. It was from those forces that al Qaeda drew its first recruits. And Yemenis made up one of the largest groups of prisoners at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Yemeni militants linked to al Qaeda successfully attacked the guided-missile destroyer USS Cole in Aden harbor in 2000, killing 17 U.S. sailors and wounding 39 others. Numerous other incidents in succeeding years were of smaller scale, and the Yemeni government enjoyed some success in arresting militants.
But al Qaeda in Yemen has enjoyed a resurgence in the latter half of the past decade, Exum and Fontaine write, as its operation has become more sophisticated, including using an online journal to distribute strategies and Web-based message boards to recruit members worldwide.
Al Qaeda's "growing information operations capability suggest a rising degree of sophistication, and its rhetoric -- which no longer limits itself to ambitions within Yemen itself -- suggests it will become an increasing threat to the United States and its interests in the Arabian Peninsula," Exum and Fontaine wrote in their November policy paper.
Which is why Petraeus was there on the weekend.
"Gen. Petraeus was in Yemen today as part of our ongoing consultations with and efforts in support of Yemen," a senior U.S. administration official said. "We have made Yemen a priority over the course of this year, and this is the latest in that effort."

CNN's Mohammed Jamjoom contributed to this report.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/meast/01/ ... n.profile/


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