Commentary: terror group was poised for bloodbath

The sudden pull-out of diplomatic staff from the embassies of Britain, America and a dozen allies in Sanaa has again put the spotlight on Yemen as a main centre of al Qaeda activity.

The orders to quit came after conversations were intercepted between Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s appointed successor — now believed holed up in northern Pakistan — and Nasser al-Wuhayshi, the commander of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

Zawahiri apparently ordered his new deputy to organise a mass attack on foreign embassies in the Yemeni capital when Islam’s month of fasting, Ramadan, ends from tonight. Alarmed by eye-witness reports of foreign jihadi fighters gathering in the Margalla hills above Sanaa, the western governments told their diplomats to come home.

The story of Yemen and al Qaeda runs deep. The family of Bin Laden’s father hailed from the Yemen/Saudi border area — seen as a sanctuary for al Qaeda fighters virtually since the terrorist group was founded in 1988 in the frontier city of Peshawar, Pakistan. The wild northern terrain of Yemen — one of the poorest countries on earth — is ideal for training terror groups, and good communications from the main cities have helped make it an effective centre for jihadist media and propaganda. The firebrand preacher Ayman al-Awlaki prepared his internet sermons in Yemen, until he was killed by a US drone in 2011.

Awlaki inspired Umar Farouk Abumutallab, the Nigerian who tried to blow up an airliner over Detroit with explosives in his underwear at Christmas in 2009. The bomb was prepared by Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, al Qaeda’s master bomb maker, now based in Yemen. Asiri also made the printer cartridge bombs found in the nick of time in Dubai and at East Midlands airport in 2010.

On Tuesday this week, at least nine Yemeni army troops died when their helicopter was shot down in central Yemen. The country offers the kind of ungoverned space in which the new forms of al Qaeda thrive, operating as groups in their own space, with their own politics, but holding a common devotion to the Bin Laden legacy of global holy war. Such groups are also active in Syria, Iraq, Somalia, the Caucasus, and in the Maghreb, north-west Africa, where the region’s fragility is a major worry for western governments — not least because jihadi extremism from there infects the large Moroccan populations in Belgium and Holland.

The link up between Zawahiri and Nasser al-Wuhayshi has an added significance. Wuhayshi has been appointed by Zawahiri to be the “general manager” of al Qaeda’s “global network activity”. In other words, he is in charge of the franchise.

Yemen seems set to provide the suitable conditions for the pursuit of his deadly ambitions: what counter-terror experts mean by “ungoverned space”. It faces a population surge from 24 million today to a predicted 60 million by 2050. In 2017, it is set to run out of the oil reserves that provide its principal export earnings. Two years before that, natural water supplies to Sanaa and several other towns and cities are expected to run dry. This amounts to an ominous first in Arabian Peninsula geopolitics and looks almost sure to mean a lot more trouble both for and from Yemen.