Security agencies focus on local links to Yemen

May 03, 2011

AUSTRALIAN security and counter-terrorism agencies are sharpening their focus on local militants with connections to Yemen.

It's where the terrorist group al-Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula is seen as the most likely perpetrator of future terror strikes against the West after the death of Osama bin Laden.

Between 20 and 40 Australians known to have travelled to Yemen in recent years are being monitored by the authorities, a senior security official said yesterday.

Some are believed to have had direct contacts with al-Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and its leader, the dual US-Yemeni citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, or to have trained in AQAP's terrorist camps.

Authorities have monitored telephone and email communications between some of the Australians and Yemeni militants, while others have been monitored actively participating on jihadist internet forums.

One Australian who travelled to Yemen to study in an Islamic school was later found to have made a propaganda video featuring footage of bin Laden and posted it on a pro-al-Qa'ida website.

Australian officials share the view of their foreign counterparts that bin Laden's killing is likely to prompt reprisals.

"I think what it may do is radicalise a proportion of people who otherwise would not become radical," an intelligence source said yesterday on condition of anonymity.

"It may mean a couple of operations that are in the pipeline will be brought forward and that others which were not previously being planned will now be planned."

The source added that any retaliatory attacks were far more likely to occur abroad than in Australia.

Bin Laden's death has provoked mixed reactions within the Australian Muslim community. Most Islamic groups and leaders welcomed his death and the prospect for a phasing down of the decade-long war on terror, which many viewed as a war on Islam.

Sydney cleric Sheik Khalil Chami said yesterday he had encountered little sympathy for the al-Qa'ida chief.

"No one can offer any argument that this person (has) done anything good for us. The people who've been hurt most of all (by terrorism) is Muslims," he said.

However, the Sydney branch of the Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir lashed out at the US and Western governments, which it described as "the real terrorists".

"The reality is that Osama bin Laden was fighting in resistance to Western aggression against, and subjugation of, the Muslim world," said a Hizb ut-Tahrir statement.

The group's Sydney spokesman, Uthman Badar, told The Australian most Muslims did not believe bin Laden was behind the September 11 attacks on the US, and felt a sense of grief and sadness over his death.

Asked whether he believed there would be retaliatory attacks, Mr Badar said: "Maybe. There are always people who will respond emotionally." However, he said he did not believe any such reprisals would occur in Australia.

Counter-terrorism analyst Lydia Khalil, a visiting fellow at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said Australia must adjust its domestic counter-terrorism focus as the al-Qa'ida threat migrated from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen and Somalia.

"AQAP in Yemen and al-Shabaab in Somalia are seeking to transform their narrow national conflicts into part of the global jihad and have welcomed foreign fighters, particularly from the US, Europe and Australia," Ms Khalil wrote in an ASPI paper in March.

Even before bin Laden's death, US intelligence officials had assessed that al-Qa'ida's Yemeni offshoot was more of a threat than the core organisation in Afghanistan and Pakistan, describing AQAP as "more agile and aggressive" and the more potent threat to Western interests.

Ms Khalil wrote that AQAP had been responsible for all of the major terrorist plots against Western targets in the past two years, such as the attempt to blow up a US airliner over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, and the plot to put parcel bombs on two flights bound for the US in October last year.

News Analysis: Bin Laden's death not to influence al-Qaida in Yemen

by Fuad Rajeh, Wang Qiuyun

SANAA, May 2 (Xinhua) -- As Yemeni officials hailed the U.S. operation that killed the al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, local analysts said that bin Laden's death will not influence his groups, including the al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

"We heard on Monday the U.S. president's announcement of bin Laden's death. This is a victory for the whole world, especially for those countries, including Yemen, which have been waging wars on terrorism inside their lands," an Interior Ministry official told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

However, local analysts said the death of bin Laden will not affect the activity of AQAP and other terrorist groups in the world.

"In recent years, bin Laden was not the real and field commander of al-Qaida groups, instead he was the inspirer of terrorists to attack local and foreign interests, especially the U. S. interests," said Faris al-Saqqaf, head of the Future Studies Center.

But his death would add to the continuous blows to the terrorist organization of al-Qaida, making it clear that al-Qaida was being hunted and surrounded, "the news of bin Laden's death will be a big shock to al-Qaida groups," said al-Saqqaf.

In recent years, the AQAP, which claimed responsibility for most of the recent terrorist plots in Yemen and abroad, has drawn the world's attention to Yemen. The United States, as well as other Western countries, deemed the AQAP as more dangerous than the main al-Qaida group of bin Laden in Afghanistan.

In response to the serious threat posed by the group, Yemen, with support from the West, waged a relentless war and launched a massive hunt for AQAP members across its territory. Many suspects were killed, injured and arrested and some went on trials, receiving sentences ranging from jail terms to death.

"Lately, we have seen the U.S. and other Western countries focus on Yemen, saying it is more dangerous than Pakistan and Afghanistan, due to the existence of AQAP," said al-Saqqaf.

Meanwhile, al-Saqqaf said the operation in which bin Laden was killed exposed the deep relationship between the intelligence agencies of the U.S. and its allies.

"Though bin Laden's death paved the way for the U.S. to control other governments as it had succeeded in using the card of anti- terrorism, it will really help to establish better ties between the Muslim world and the West," he said.

Nabil al-Bukairy, a researcher specialized in Islamic groups, agreed with this, saying al-Qaida's second-in-command Ayman al- Zawahri has replaced bin Laden in recent years to instruct al- Qaida groups in the world.

"Bin Laden was seen just as an inspirer while al-Zawahri actually led al-Qaida. I think the death of bin Laden will only influence the morale of al-Qaida groups, not their ideology and organizational structure," al-Bukairy said, "the impact of Laden's death will be inevitable, but on morale not on ideology."

Al-Qaida would definitely take revenge attacks, although how big or where the attacks would take place are unpredictable, said al-Bukairy.

Russian Delegation Attempts Intervention in Yemen Crisis

Sana'a, May 3, 2011- (VOA) A Russian delegation is in the Yemeni capital, Sana'a, trying to salvage a political deal that would ease Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh out of power.

Yemeni media reported on Tuesday that the delegation is meeting with government officials and the main opposition group after a Gulf Arab plan to end Yemen's political stalemate stalled.

The plan called for President Saleh to hand over power to a deputy and resign within 30 days of signing the initiative. It would have established a unity government that would have included opposition members. A presidential election would take place two months after Saleh leaves office.

Both the opposition and Saleh said last week that they agreed to the deal. But Saleh said over the weekend that he would sign the deal only as leader of the ruling General People's Congress party but not in his capacity as president - as required by the plan.

Officials with the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council, which sponsored the accord, said the deal's signing ceremony has been indefinitely postponed.

Gulf officials said a top official is due back in Yemen on Tuesday to try to get the deal moving again.

At least 140 people have died in anti-government unrest since January. Protesters are demanding Saleh's immediate removal.

Officials say the army opened fire on protesters in the port city of Aden Monday, killing one demonstrator. Activists and medics say at least two protesters were killed in Aden on Saturday as security forces moved in to clear a square they had occupied.

Yemen Jews rally in support of Saleh

SANAA, May 03, 2011 (AFP) - Dozens of Yemeni Jews rallied in the capital Sanaa in support of embattled President Ali Abdullah Saleh on Tuesday, witnesses said.

"The sons of the Jewish sect in Yemen support Ali Abdullah Saleh and the constitutional legitimacy," read one of the banners written in Hebrew.

"The people want Ali Abdullah Saleh," they chanted.

The demonstrators gathered outside the US embassy and handed over a letter demanding that Saleh remain in office until his latest term ends in 2013.

Yemen has been rocked by nationwide protests for more than three months demanding that Saleh, who has been in power since 1978, quit immediately.

More than 145 people have been killed in the unrest.

The impoverished country's oil-rich Gulf Arab neighbours have been trying to broker an end to the three-month-old bloodshed through a plan that would see the veteran ruler quit within 30 days.

However, a defiant Saleh has publicly insisted on sticking to the constitution in any transfer of power, even though his ruling General People's Congress party has said it accepts the Gulf Cooperation Council plan.

The bloc's secretary general, Abdullatif al-Zayani, is to head back to Sanaa this week to renew the mediation efforts, his office announced on Sunday.

Most of Yemen's remaining Jewish community of barely 400 people live in the Amran area, north of the capital.

In 1948, the country's Jewish community numbered some 60,000. But in the three years following the creation of the Jewish state that year, more than 48,000 emigrated to Israel.

The community continued to dwindle in subsequent decades and by the early 1990s it numbered only around 1,000 people. The lifting of a longstanding travel ban in 1993 sparked a fresh exodus.

Al-Qaeda havens

By FT reporters

May 2 2011 21:29

Yemen: home of “the most dangerous man in the world”

Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the Yemeni branch of al-Qaeda, may only consist of a few hundred people, but it has caused the US more headaches than larger terrorist organisations recent years, claiming responsibility for both the attempted airliner bombing on Christmas Day 2009 and a foiled plot to send parcel bombs to the US in October of the same year.

Anwar al-Awlaki, the American citizen who is the group’s chief propagandist, was declared the most dangerous man in the world by a US security official last year after being linked to numerous terrorist plots, including the Fort Hood shooting in which a US army major was charged with killing 13 people at a US army base.

Yemen’s branch of al-Qaeda first caught the world’s attention with the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, and appeared to have been fatally weakened when a US drone assassinated its then leader in 2002. In 2006, however, 23 suspected militants escaped from a Yemeni prison and in 2009 the group merged with jihadis fleeing Saudi Arabia to form al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP.

Osama bin Laden, whose family originated in Yemen, once described it as one of the best Muslim countries, where one could “breathe clean air unblemished by humiliation,” and the leader of AQAP, Nasser al Wahayshi, is said to have been one of bin Laden’s assistants in Afghanistan in the 1990s.

Little is known about the organization beyond what can be gleaned from the attacks attributed to it, the occasional surrender of one of its members to the authorities, and its prolific media output. Opinion is divided over whether the last few years, which have seen both a weakening of the central government’s authority in Yemen and an increase in US counterterrorism efforts there, have left the group stronger or weaker.

Analysts say that although al-Qaeda’s central leadership were key in determining the Yemeni branch’s ideology, bin Laden’s death is unlikely to significantly affect the organisation.

“They’re more likely to be affected by stuff that’s happening in Yemen now,” said Bernard Haykel, an expert in radical Islam at Princeton University. According to Mr Haykel, whilst the anti-regime protests which have swept Yemen may seem to benefit al-Qaeda by creating instability, such popular movements could leave a vanguardist organisation like al Qaeda looking isolated.

“I would imagine (AQAP) are pretty confused, like everyone else in the Middle East,” said Mr Haykel.

Abigail Fielding-Smith in Amman

East Africa: opportunity in instability

For over a decade, the spectre of al-Qaeda has hung over east Africa. More than 200 people were killed on August 7 1998, when a truck bomb was detonated outside the US embassy in downtown Nairobi to horrific effect. An almost simultaneous attack on the American embassy in Dar es Salaam killed at least 11 people.

These were the first major attacks to be blamed on al-Qaeda and they shot Osama bin Laden to international notoriety.

Yet while many Kenyans may welcome the news of bin Laden’s death, concerns remain that neighbouring Somalia is a haven for terrorism following the rise of al-Shabab, an al-Qaeda-affiliated group that controls much of the nation’s south and claimed responsibility for suicide attacks in Uganda last year that killed 79 people.

“Osama’s death can only be positive for Kenya, but we need to have a stable government in Somalia,” Raila Odinga, Kenya’s prime minister, told Reuters. “The loss of [al-Qaeda’s] leader may first upset the movement but then it will regroup and continue.”

The embassy bombing investigations unveiled an east African trail that stretched back to 1991 when bin Laden and many of his followers were welcomed to Sudan, one of the few countries willing to accept the Saudi militant who had been ostracised by his home country. Once settled into an affluent Khartoum neighbourhood with the blessings of Sudan’s Islamist government, bin Laden set up businesses, including a tannery and agricultural and construction projects.

He is also said to have established training camps for his fighters, while alleged al-Qaeda members were dispatched to Somalia in 1993 to help train Somali fighters battling US troops in that country, according to Federal Bureau of Investigation statements into the embassy bombings.

After Somalis shot down two Black Hawk helicopters and killed 18 US soldiers in the October 1993 “battle of Mogadishu” – sparking the hasty withdrawal of American troops – the al-Qaeda members slipped across the border into Kenya.

Bin Laden was quoted as saying it was the battle of Mogadishu that led led him to believe that Americans lacked the stomach for war. More deadly attacks in east Africa followed as the al-Qaeda cells that moved to Kenya plotted the 1998 embassy bombings, according to the FBI statements.

Mohammed Sadiq Odeh, a fellow al-Qaeda militant who was convicted for his role in the embassy bombings, told the FBI that most of the group’s members left Kenya shortly before the attacks. But in fact Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, a Comorian wanted in connection with the attacks and listed on the FBI’s most wanted terrorist list, remained and emerged to be the leader of al-Qaeda’s east Africa cell.

He is alleged to have masterminded a 2002 attack on an Israeli-owned hotel on the Kenyan coast and simultaneous failed attempt to shoot down an Israeli-chartered aircraft as it took off from Mombasa airport.

He and his operatives are alleged to have used Somalia – a lawless Muslim nation which has been without an effective central government since 1991 – to plot the 2002 attack and use it as an escape route. Worryingly for east African officials, his current whereabouts are unknown.

The US has launched a number of airstrikes against suspected al-Qaeda operatives in Somalia in recent years with mixed success. It claims to have in 2009 killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nahban, a Kenyan alleged to be involved in the 2002 hotel bombing, and Aden Hashi Ayro, an Afghan-trained Shabaab leader, a year earlier.

But it has also been accused of killing innocent civilians. Ethiopia’s 2006 invasion of Somalia – with the tacit backing of Washington – helped the Somali Islamists draw on nationalist support and attract foreign fighters to their cause.

Andrew England in Johannesburg

North Africa: remnants of civil war

Al-Qaeda’s North African offshoot, al-Qaeda in the Maghreb, grew out of the civil war that gripped Algeria for most of the nineties after the Algerian army aborted elections to stop an Islamist party from winning in1991.

Largely comprised of Algerians, AQIM’s main area of operation is the vast borderless Saharan territories of southern Algeria, Mauritania, Mali and Niger, where it exploits smugglers’ routes and the absence of state control.

The group regularly kidnaps foreign tourists for ransom and periodically stages attacks against western targets mainly in Sahel countries. It also operates in the Kabylie region of northern Algeria, where it carries out occasional ambushes against the police and army, and kidnaps local businessmen for ransom. Most recently, a roadside bomb that last Wednesday killed two police officers near Boumerdes, just 50 kilometres east of the Algerian capital, was attributed to AQIM.

Said to number a few hundred fighters, it is headed by Abdel Malek Droukdel, an Algerian who also goes under the name of Abou Mossab Abdel Wadoud and is a reincarnation of the Salafi Group for Predication and Combat, an Algerian militant organisation formed by radical Islamists who took up arms against the state in the 1990s.

The Islamist movement fragmented, and was largely defeated militarily but remnants of the GSPC held out in eastern Algeria and in 2007, the GSPC rebranded itself as an al-Qaeda affiliate in an effort to boost its fortunes after its ranks had been severely depleted by government amnesties and strikes by the Algerian army.

Following the merger, AQIM staged a series of high-profile operations such as the bombing of a UN headquarters and the prime minister’s office in Algiers. Under pressure from the authorities, however, its ability to carry out major attacks in the Algerian capital appeared to have fizzled out.

Although AQIM has been able to recruit members from the Sahel countries where it operates, it has failed to incorporate Islamist movements from Libya, Tunisia and Morocco.

Analysts say that its failure against the Algerian authorities and its inability to turn itself into a serious hub for al-Qaeda in north Africa pushed it south to the Sahara.

AQIM has claimed responsibility for the abduction of two Frenchmen found dead after a failed rescue attempt in Niger in January and is currently holding other French nationals kidnapped in Niger in September 2010. A tape, released on Islamist forums late last month showed pictures of each of the hostages. An Italian woman kidnapped in Algeria in early February is also being held by the Islamists.

The increased risk of kidnappings, either by Islamists or local gunmen cooperating with them, has made large tracts of Mauritania, Mali and Niger no-go areas for westerners.

The bomb that killed 16 people in the Moroccan city of Marrakesh this week bears the hallmarks of al-Qaeda, according to Moroccan officials, but so far there has been no claim of responsibility from AQIM or any other group.

The ongoing conflict in Libya has heightened concerns that AQIM will exploit the unrest to smuggle weapons out of the country. Algeria’s military last week announced that it is seeking increased regional co-operation with Mali and other neighbouring countries over reported cross-border activity by the group in the Sahara.

Heba Saleh in Cairo and Eileen Byrne in Algiers