Neighbors: Saudi Arabia in the North and Oman to East-NE, Gulf of Aden and Somalia to the south. Somalia is another hot bed of Qaeda.
Wiki: Yemen has a weak economy compared to other Arab states mainly due to Yemen having very little oil. Yemen's oil reserves are expected to be depleted within a few years. The drop in oil prices has also hurt Yemen and slowed development. Yemen's reserves have been depleting rapidly year by year bringing many fears of a economic collapse. Yemen's first liquified natural gas (LNG) plant has been completed and launched its first shipment to South Korea. LNG may help Yemen from having its economy collapse. ==========================================
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U.S. Widens the Terror War to Yemen, a Qaeda Bastion
Yemeni protesters staged a demonstration in the southern part of the country on Thursday after a raid against Qaeda militants.
WASHINGTON — In the midst of two unfinished major wars, the United States has quietly opened a third, largely covert front against Al Qaeda in Yemen.
A year ago, the Central Intelligence Agency sent many field operatives with counterterrorism experience to the country, according a former top agency official. At the same time, some of the most secretive Special Operations commandos have begun training Yemeni security forces in counterterrorism tactics, senior military officers said.
The Pentagon is spending more than $70 million over the next 18 months, and using teams of Special Forces, to train and equip Yemeni military, Interior Ministry and coast guard forces, more than doubling previous military aid levels.
As American investigators sought to corroborate the claims of a 23-year-old Nigerian man that Qaeda leaders in Yemen had trained and equipped him to blow up a Detroit-bound Northwest Airlines jet on Christmas Day, the plot casts a spotlight on the Obama administration’s complicated relationship with Yemen.
The country has long been a refuge for jihadists, in part because Yemen’s government welcomed returning Islamist fighters who had fought in Afghanistan during the 1980s. The Yemen port of Aden was the site of the audacious bombing of the American destroyer Cole in October 2000 by Qaeda militants, which killed 17 sailors.
But Qaeda militants have made much more focused efforts to build a base in Yemen in recent years, drawing recruits from throughout the region and mounting more frequent attacks on foreign embassies and other targets. The White House is seeking to nurture enduring ties with the government of President Ali Abdullah Saleh and prod him to combat the local Qaeda affiliate, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, even as his impoverished country grapples with seemingly intractable internal turmoil.
With fears also growing of a resurgent Islamist extremism in nearby Somalia and East Africa, administration officials and American lawmakers said Yemen could become Al Qaeda’s next operational and training hub, rivaling the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan where the organization’s top leaders operate.
“Yemen now becomes one of the centers of that fight,” said Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut and chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, who visited the country in August. “We have a growing presence there, and we have to, of Special Operations, Green Berets, intelligence,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.”
American and Yemeni officials said that a pivotal point in the relationship was reached in late summer after separate secret visits to Yemen by Gen. David H. Petraeus, the American regional commander, and John O. Brennan, President Obama’s counterterrorism adviser.
President Saleh agreed to expanded overt and covert assistance in response to growing pressure from the United States and Yemen’s neighbors, notably Saudi Arabia, from which many Qaeda operatives had fled to Yemen, as well as a rising threat against the country’s political inner circle, the officials said.
“Yemen’s security problems won’t just stay in Yemen,” said Christopher Boucek, who studies Yemen as an associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. “They’re regional problems and they affect Western interests.”
Al Qaeda’s profile in Yemen rose sharply a year ago, when a former Guantánamo Bay detainee from Saudi Arabia, Said Ali al-Shihri, fled to Yemen to join Al Qaeda and appeared in a video posted online. Several other former Guantánamo detainees have also joined the group.
Yemen’s remote areas are notoriously lawless, but the country’s chaos has worsened in the past two years, as the government struggles with an armed rebellion in the northwest and a rising secessionist movement in the south. Yemen is running out of oil, and the government’s dwindling finances have affected its ability to strike Al Qaeda.
Meanwhile, there have been increasing Yemeni ties to plots against the United States. A Muslim man charged in the June 1 killing of a soldier at a recruiting center in a mall in Little Rock, Ark., had traveled to Yemen, prompting a review by the F.B.I. of other domestic extremists who had visited the country.
A radical cleric in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki, has been linked to numerous terrorism suspects, including Nidal Malik Hasan, the American Army major who faces murder charges in the shooting deaths of 13 people at Fort Hood, Tex., in November.
In the latest issue of Sada al-Malahim, the Internet magazine of the Qaeda affiliate in Yemen, the group’s leader, Nasser al-Wuhayshi, praised the use of small bombs — not just big ones — to attack an enemy, in an eerie foreshadowing of Friday’s episode on the plane to Detroit.
Yemen escalated its campaign against Al Qaeda with major airstrikes on Dec. 17 and last Thursday that killed more than 60 militants.
American officials have been coy about the role of the United States in the strikes, saying that they have provided intelligence and “firepower” for the efforts.
Yemen’s foreign minister, Abu Bakr al-Qirbi, said Sunday that Yemeni military cooperation with the United States and Saudi Arabia had increased in recent months as fresh intelligence confirmed Al Qaeda’s greater assertiveness in the country.
The claim by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab that he was trained, armed and tasked with blowing up an American airliner over US soil by al-Qaida operatives based in Yemen is the western intelligence community's worst nightmare come true.
Since the September 11 attacks, the US and allied security services hunting Osama bin Laden and his associates have focused their attention on the mountains of eastern Afghanistan and the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan.
In recent years, concern has grown about the activities of al-Qaida affiliates in North Africa's Maghreb region, notably Algeria, and in a few sub-Saharan countries such as Nigeria, birthplace of the would-be bomber of Northwest Airlines flight 253.
But in all these cases – even Afghanistan, once its Taliban rulers were deposed – the US could count on the collaboration of established, friendly governments that felt equally threatened by the spectre of Islamist terrorism.
Yemen, and Somalia, its terrible twin situated just across the Gulf of Aden, are a different matter altogether.
Both countries lack effective central government. Both, having suffered a long history of colonial intervention, are currently prey to warring factions that have no love of the west.
And both contain vast, so-called "ungoverned spaces" that offer ideal hideouts and training centres for "non-state actors", the intelligence community's polite euphemism for terrorists.
Large tracts of sparsely populated Yemen are, in effect, "no-go" areas for the forces of global counter-terrorism. These safe havens remain mostly out of sight and, despite a trailblazing CIA Predator drone attack against al-Qaida in 2002, mostly out of range.
In short, Yemen has become the international jihadi's destination of choice from which to prepare, plot and launch future terror attacks. "Only Pakistan's tribal regions rival Yemen as a terrorist Shangri-La", the Wall Street Journal said this year, citing American estimates that up to 1,500 al-Qaida-linked fighters are based there.
Now Abdulmutallab, the well-to-do, well-educated Nigerian recruit, has demonstrated what the Yemeni terrorist melting pot is capable of producing – and just how far its malice can reach.
The signs have been there for those who wished to read them. In an under-reported incident in August, a suicide bomber crossed from Yemen into pro-western Saudi Arabia, passed two security checks, and blew himself up only yards from Prince Mohammad bin Nayef, the Saudi counter-terrorism chief.
The same military explosive, pentaerythritol, that Abdulmutallab attached to his leg was used by the bomber in the Saudi attack, though the latter concealed it in his rectum. Like the Northwest passengers, Nayef escaped serious injury.
Another grim message of intent came in October when al-Qaida's Yemen-based "emir of the Arabian peninsula", Nasir al-Wahayshi, urged supporters to use any means to kill western unbelievers. He identified preferred targets. They were "airports in the western crusade countries that participated in the war against Muslims; or on their planes".
Abdulmutallab's statement to the FBI that he went to Yemen this year and received instructions from al-Qaida there is now under investigation by the government in Sana'a, which said it was co-operating fully with the US.
"The whereabouts and exact details of what he did in Yemen are still unknown, but the investigation will clear up these things in the coming days," a Yemeni official said.
Despite their Af-Pak focus, the US and allies such as Britain have not ignored the Yemen threat. In September, John Brennan, the White House counter-terrorism chief, travelled to Sana'a, and in an unusually strong statement, Barack Obama declared the security of Yemen to be "vital for the security of the United States".
Accused Northwest Bomber Says More Bombers On the Way; Al Qaeda Promises to Hit Americans
By BRIAN ROSS and RICHARD ESPOSITO Dec. 28, 2009
American officials have cause to worry there may be more al Qaeda-trained young men in Yemen planning to bring down American jets.
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, charged with the attempted Christmas Day bombing of Northwest Airlines flight 253, told FBI agents there were more just like him in Yemen who would strike soon.
And in a tape released four days before the attempted destruction of the Detroit-bound Northwest plane, the leader of al Qaeda in Yemen boasted of what was planned for Americans, saying, "We are carrying a bomb to hit the enemies of God."
Yemen has become a principal al Qaeda training ground and the accused suicide bomber told the FBI he was trained for more than a month in Yemen, given 80 grams of a high explosive cleverly sewn into his underpants, undetected by standard security screening.