The crucible of terrorism in Yemen

Washington Post:

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An investigative report scheduled for release Wednesday by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee cites U.S. concern over as many as three dozen American citizens who converted to Islam in prison and moved to Yemen after their release in the past year. Some of them have "dropped off the radar" of U.S. and Yemeni law enforcement and may be receiving al-Qaeda training there, the report says.

The report cautions that U.S. officials said they had no specific evidence of such training, but a committee staffer said that "everything related to Yemen is now being ratcheted up." As U.S. citizens, these people do not come under the purview of the CIA but are "being watched," the staffer said, by the FBI and State Department security officials attached to the U.S. Embassy in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital.

"U.S. officials said they are on heightened alert because of the potential threat from extremists carrying American passports and the related challenges involved in detecting and stopping homegrown operatives," the report says.

An additional concern, it says, "is a group of nearly 10 non-Yemeni Americans who traveled to Yemen, converted to Islam, became fundamentalists, and married Yemeni women so they could remain in the country." One U.S. official, it reports, described them as "blond-haired, blue-eyed types" who "fit a profile of Americans whom al-Qaeda has sought to recruit over the past several years."

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Yemen may not be the graduate school of terrorism yet, but it is certainly a place where people go for their undergraduate work in that major. I think the concern is justified and we need resources in Yemen to find these potential threats.