Category: AQAP

NOTE: al-Qā’idah (AQ) has been in Yemen since the late 1990s. As is well known AQ operatives struck the USS Cole in October of 2000. Following that attack and 9/11, the United States and Yemen worked together to suppress and eliminate al-Qā’idah in Yemen or al-Qā’idah in Southern Arabia as they were called then. This mission was successful and by November 2003 that generation of al-Qā’idah members was for all intents and purposes eliminated.
Following the above successes, though, the United States, along with Yemen, took their eyes off preventing a rise in a new generation of al-Qā’idah activists in Yemen. Consequently, in February 2006, twenty-three al-Qā’idah terrorists, including the mastermind of the 2000 USS Cole bombing, escaped from a Yemeni prison.  National security experts have claimed this event as the date when al-Qā’idah’s presence in Yemen started to rise again. Within months of the escape al-Qā’idah was responsible for attacks on oil and gas facilities and culminated in September of 2008 with its attempt to bomb the US Embassy.
Along with the prison escape another important factor behind al-Qā’idah’s reemergence in Yemen is due to the successful counterterrorism efforts by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. As a result, many Saudi al-Qā’idah members fled to Yemen. This led in January of 2009 for the two groups, al-Qā’idah in Yemen and al-Qā’idah in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, to merge into what it is now referred to as al-Qā’idah in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). AQAP has shown it is a force to be reckoned with by its attempted assassination of Saudi Arabia’s Prince Muḥammad bin Nāyef as well as attempts to smuggle weapons into KSA dressed as women and assassinating key local leaders in southern Yemen. Furthermore, AQAP has been linked to the failed Christmas Day attack attempted by ‘Umar Fārūk ‘Abd  al-Muṭallab. AQAP claims they went forth with this attack as a response to the US’ cruise missile attacks against AQ assets on December 17 and 24.
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al-Qā’idah in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) released a new statement- “On the killing of women and Destruction of Homes and Mosques in Valley Ubaida”
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