Having suffered setbacks in Saudi Arabia and Iraq, Al Qaeda has turned its attention towards an impoverished Yemen to relaunch the Islamic Jihad against Western targets both in the Arabian peninsula and abroad. Since the september eleventh bombings in the United States, Yemen reluctantly took the side of Washington and now it is bearing the brunt of an Al Qaeda backlash.
Over the past few years, Yemen has become a battlefield for western tourists with suicide attacks and shooting incidents getting frequent. The aim is to destabilise and shatter the tourism industry in the country which acts as the lifeblood for the country’s economy. The attacks on western tourists have become so common that the Yemeni foreign minister Abu Baker Al-Qirbi, in an interview with the Guardian, was quoted as saying that,
The increase in the frequency of attacks by Al Qaeda in Yemen against foreign and governmental targets could be taken as an indication that the radical group has turned its focus on turning Yemen into another Afghanistan or Iraq. Attacks on oil installations and foreign tourists are deliberate ploys to cripple the country’s economy which heavily depends on foreign investment in the oil sector and tourism to feed a desperately impoverished Yemeni population. The more poverty spreads in Yemen, the greater is the chance that Al Qaeda will have new local recruits to carry out a long running struggle against Sana’a’s pro-western government led by President Ali Abdullah Salih.It is alarming. You can never predict when or where the attacks will happen. Al Qaeda’s tactics is to undertake these actions to prove that they are still there.
Al Qaeda is desperately trying to regroup after the massive setback it suffered in neighbouring and more powerful Saudi Arabia. The strategy of this group in Yemen has come to light. Given the bitter experience in Saudi Arabia, the radical Sunni group is not going on an all-out war against the Yemeni government rather it is keeping a low profile concentrating on building its internal structure, recruiting new members and focusing on terror training. Furthermore, the depressed political and economical situation inside Yemen is conducive to Al Qaeda’s resurgence.
Yemen cannot match Saudi Arabia’s financial investment in security to tackle terrorism. As rightly pointed out by Faris Sanabani, an aide to President Ali Abdullah Salih,
The aide to the President has hit the nail on the head. Through his words, the country is surrendering it to the international community and if the US and its allies do not heed to the warning, the world could have a new frontier in the war on terror and we would have a new Afghanistan or Iraq.If the Saudis need to buy $200 million worth of communications and equipments, they can. But if we need to spend $1million we have to sqeeze and save.
Via: Guardian
