Inside al Qaeda's Yemen operations

Times:

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... earlier this year a group calling itself Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) emerged in Yemen. It combined jihadists from Saudi Arabia with homegrown activists and has been responsible for, or has influenced, multiple attacks in the Middle East and further afield.

Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the US army officer who killed more than a dozen people while running amok in Texas last month, was said to have corresponded with Anwar al-Awlaki. The radical cleric was born in the United States but moved in 2002 to Yemen, where he is said to be hiding with AQAP.

Last week the Yemeni government said an airstrike by its planes had killed 30 AQAP fighters, possibly including Awlaki and two of the group’s leaders, Naser Abdel-Karim al-Wahishi and his Saudi Arabian-born deputy Saeed al-Shehri. Relatives of Awlaki said this weekend he had been unhurt in the strike.

Shehri is a former inmate of Guantanamo Bay who was transferred to a jail in his home state in 2007 but escaped and organised a recruitment drive for Al-Qaeda in Yemen.

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Colonel Richard Kemp is a former counterterrorism official who has advised the government’s joint intelligence committee. He said if the Detroit operation had been even partly planned in Yemen, it would indicate that UK and US military operations in Afghanistan were helping to displace and disrupt Al-Qaeda planning.

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I think Kemp has swerved into a good point. It has become too hot for al Qaeda in both Afghanistan and Pakistan and it has had to move its overseas operation to places like Yemen to train its terrorist.

Judging by the failure of the Underwear Bomber, they are still having some training problems and the bombing by the Yemen government with the help of the US suggest that Yemen too has become a hostile environment for them.