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Arabia

Yemen president admits growing Al Qaida threat

2010-08-30

[Gulf News] Yemen's President Ali Abdullah Saleh has called on Yemenis to join forces to fight terror admitting that increasing Al Qaida attacks are his government's biggest challenge.

It used to be not nearly enough water for a rapidly growing population... in the wild, internecine fighting goes a long way toward killing off excess population beyond the ability of the environment to support.

Saleh said that by targeting security forces Al Qaida is trying to repeat its Afghanistan and Iraq strategy in Yemen.

It seems to me that Al Qaeda has lost in Iraq, and General Petraeus recently claimed they are on the way to losing in Afghanistan. This, my dears, is a neat demonstration of how the quality of thinking is reduced when an organization loses too many of its Number Threes in a short period of time.

They went to Afghanistan to plot. They went to Iraq to get revenge. They went to Yemen to escape the drone-zaps. When the American military gets organized in Yemen (as 'advisors' of course) and we start killing number 3's there, al-Qaeda will move to Somalia. Then Chad. Then Mauritania. Eventually they'll run out of places to go.

"Now these terrorists are targeting the security forces in the same way as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq, but they will not succeed," he stated. "The drug traders here come from terrorist groups and the politicians, who are members of the terrorist Al Qaida organisation, allow them to make drug deals, exporting drugs from Afghanistan all over the world."

Speaking at a gathering of scholars and Quran students in Sana'a's Al Saleh grand mosque on Saturday, Saleh said: "These terrorists have nothing to do with Islam and its tolerant values, so we all must fight them. They fight Allah, religion, the nation and development."

Meanwhile, Yemeni military officials on Sunday rejected reports that foreign troops are involved in fighting terrorists.

"We are surprised at groundless allegations in several media reports lately on the presence of British soldiers and on the arrival of US forces to aid the fight against terror in Yemen," the defence ministry's website quoted a Yemeni official as saying.

The official said that Yemen's cooperation with the "US or other countries" in fighting terrorism is "restricted to the exchange of information which facilitates its hunt [for] terrorist elements and handing them over to justice."

Hours earlier, Al Qaida gunmen struck a security patrol in the southern city of Ja'ar, killing eight soldiers and setting their bodies on fire, Deputy Governor Ahmad Galib Al Rawi said on Sunday.

Posted by:Fred

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