Quotes of the Day

The claim of responsibility was a haughty cackle, even if the operation it reveled in had ended in failure. In an Internet post* on Dec. 28, 2009, the group al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula declared that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's alleged attempt to blow up Northwest Flight 253 over Detroit on Christmas had demonstrated the "frailty" of American intelligence, "making all they have spent upon security technologies a waste to them." In an additional shout-out, it praised "the hero mujahid [Major] Nidal Hasan," the accused perpetrator of the Fort Hood, Texas, massacre, as an exemplar of the mission "to kill every crusader with all means that are available."

The letter, posted on the jihadist Shumukh al-Islam Network, really let loose its rage on the American people: "Receive the tidings about what will happen to you. Since we are coming to you with slaughter and we have prepared for you men who love death as much as [you love life], and God willing will come to you with something for which you are not prepared, and as you are killing [so] will you be killed."

The Detroit incident, the group claimed, was retaliation for U.S. military–assisted attacks on "the noble Yemenite tribes in Abyan and Arhab, and finally in Sibwa" in which "scores of Muslim women and children, and families in their entirety" were killed — assaults that took place in the preceding week. Under pressure in Saudi Arabia and Iraq, al-Qaeda began turning the lawless mountain areas of Yemen into a new staging area. That staging area is now sending more and more violent probes out into the world.

Stretched around the southern heel of the Arabian Peninsula and home to 23.8 million people — compared with 28.7 million in geographically much larger Saudi Arabia — Yemen is one of the poorest countries in the Middle East. It came into being when North and South Yemen merged in 1990. Long a source of jihadis, the region sent hundreds of fighters to the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan and — to judge by the number of captured, killed and identified insurgents in Iraq — continues to be one of the biggest suppliers of fighters to regional conflicts. It is common knowledge in the tearooms of the Yemeni capital of Sana'a and in Western embassies that the government of northern Yemen used jihadis to help defeat the south in the civil war that ended in 1994. But the symbiotic relationship between the government and al-Qaeda shifted after 9/11 and the American invasion of Iraq, when the Yemeni government worried that it too might be on the receiving end of U.S. military action. Sana'a helped the U.S. with the assassination of an al-Qaeda leader in 2002 by missile attack from a Predator drone, even as it turned a blind eye to other extremists as long as they didn't cause trouble.

The post-9/11 cooperation between the U.S. and Yemeni governments met with considerable success — so much so that Yemen later fell off the radar to some extent as the Bush Administration shifted its focus back to battling insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. But in the past two years, al-Qaeda in Yemen began to regroup, spurred by the dramatic 2006 prison break of its leader Naser al-Wahishi and 22 other members. Early this year, Wahishi announced a merger between his organization and al-Qaeda's Saudi branch to form al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula — a move that caused the U.S. director of national intelligence to note that Yemen was "re-emerging as a jihadist battleground and potential regional base of operations for al-Qaeda." With a base in Yemen, al-Qaeda could launch attacks on the Red Sea gateway to the Suez Canal as well as stage operations against Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf.

The recent U.S.-assisted attacks on alleged al-Qaeda strongholds in Yemen appear to be a stepped-up attempt to stamp out the threat. However, Gregory Johnsen, a Princeton University expert on Yemen, contends the strategy will ultimately prove counterproductive: "You can't just kill a few individuals and the al-Qaeda problem will go away." Indeed, a primary target in the attacks — Qasim al-Raymi, the al-Qaeda leader who is believed to be behind a 2007 bombing in central Yemen that killed seven Spanish tourists and two Yemenis — is still at large. And reports of a U.S. role, plus mass civilian casualties at the sites of the attacks, have sparked public outcry and added to anti-American sentiment across the country. "They missed that individual," says Johnsen of the targeted al-Qaeda chief. "And at the same time, they ended up killing a number of women and children in the strike on Abyan. So now you have something where there are all these pictures of dead infants and mangled children that are underlined with the caption 'Made in the USA' on all the jihadi forums. Something like this does much more to extend al-Qaeda."

Meanwhile, the Sana'a government is in the middle of another ferocious war, against its Houthi minority, Yemeni followers of the Zaydi sect of Shi'ite Islam. That introduces the shadow — both real and imagined — of the primary Shi'a power in the region, Iran, which is happy to take credit even if its actual influence may still be negligible. When Iran is mentioned, however, both the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, the predominant Sunni power in the region, start quaking. And al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, no friend to any of the parties, is happy to sow destabilization so it can thrive.

It thrives off the ruins of Yemen's economy, which is in tatters; its population complains of neglect and development woes; and 50% of Yemeni children suffer from malnutrition. Observers warn that poverty and unemployment are prime recruitment factors for al-Qaeda, something they say the U.S. and other foreign powers should have done more to address. Yemen also struggles with a severe water shortage, in large part because of the national addiction to khat, a shrub whose young leaves contain a compound with effects similar to those of amphetamines. The top estimate is that no fewer than 90% of men and 25% of women in Yemen chew the leaves, storing a wad in one cheek as it slowly breaks down and enters the bloodstream. Astonishingly, most of the country's arable land is devoted to the plant, which accounts for approximately a third of the country's water usage.

Meanwhile, analysts say Yemen has been slow to confront the al-Qaeda threat with the gusto that the U.S. has been pushing for, in large part because going after the Islamist group hasn't always been in the government's best interests. Indeed, some experts say that al-Qaeda seeks not to overthrow the government but only to establish a base in Yemen — a link between the Horn of Africa and the rest of the Arabian Peninsula — and that so long as Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh leaves al-Qaeda alone, they'll do the same for him.

The Yemeni government insists it is doing its utmost in the war against al-Qaeda. "We have been cooperating closely with the U.S., much more than the Pakistanis, for instance, in the fight against al-Qaeda," says a Yemeni official. "The strike last week [that killed top al-Qaeda commanders in Yemen] was a huge blow to them. With one strike, we cut off their head. We are investigating [Abdulmutallab] according to what the FBI told us. If there was a plot from Yemen, it's possible that it happened before last week's strike. Is al-Qaeda using Yemen as a base to attack the U.S.? That may be their ambition, but first they are attacking Yemen itself, trying to destabilize the country and destroy the government. Our priority is to prevent this, and it also coincides with American interests."

Indeed, one of the jihadi commanders reportedly killed in the pre-Christmas raids in Yemen was al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula founder Naser. But though that head may have been cut off, the claim of responsibility made it clear that the voice and the ambitions of al-Qaeda in Yemen have not.

— Reported by Andrew Lee Butters, Bobby Ghosh and Abigail Hauslohner

*The al-Qaeda claim was translated into English by yhe Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).

• TIME Staff
• The local franchise of al-Qaeda has issued a claim of responsibility for the Detroit terrorism incident. It also boasts greater and more terrifying ambitions