Al-Qaeda is moving more quickly than the new government in Yemen, notes Nasser Arrabyee Al-Qaeda in Yemen has been trying to be steps ahead of the newly elected president and his confused and weak new government in terms of controlling and expanding. Since 25 February, when the new President Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi took the constitutional oath as a new elected president, Al-Qaeda has implemented more than 10 operations against government military and security forces in many different provinces especially in the southern province of Abyan, Al-Baida and Hudrmout where its presence is higher and more overt. In the main southern city of Aden, earlier this week, intelligence arrested an activist protesting in the streets demanding the separation of the south from the north. After being arrested, the man tried to shoot the officers with a pistol he was hiding with him. The officers shot him dead immediately and put his dead body in their car and drove away. The man was wanted as Al-Qaeda operative, security sources confirmed to Al-Ahram Weekly later in the day. Tens of angry young people of the area, Al-Mualla in Aden, immediately started to block the roads and set fire to tyres demanding the dead body of their "brother". It became very difficult for us as reporters that day to go from place to place through Mualla area inside the city of Aden. The incident showed clearly that Al-Qaeda is inside Aden with supporters and sympathisers who are exploiting the chaos because of the separatist sentiment on one hand, and general political crisis in the whole country on the other. Al-Qaeda tried many times before to take control over Aden, and threatened many other times but always failed because the coastal city is considered as a "red line" by the Yemeni government and its Western friends. If Aden falls under the control of Al-Qaeda, the whole south and the Gulf of Aden will be under its control. This may mean the control of the maritime routes through which about two million barrels of oil pass every day. "Al-Qaeda is everywhere here in Aden also, but it is not as overt as Abyan. Here it is working secretly," said Hussein Othman, a tribal leader from Abyan who is based in Aden. "You can find them also among those who fled the war," said Othman. About 130,000 people from Zinjubar, the capital of Abyan, and neighbouring areas are still displaced from their houses, the majority of them residing in Aden, since May 2011, when Al-Qaeda declared their areas a Taliban-style Islamic Emirate. The 32-year old Raidan Anwar Kahtan, along with his 10-member family have been living in a secondary school in the coastal city of Aden, with about 1,000 people (known as internally displaced persons, IDPs) for nine months. Like most of the IDPs, Raidan said he is fed up and very eager to return home in Zinjubar. Last month, Raidan Kahtan decided to go to Zinjubar to see if he could return with his family. Zinjubar is only 45 km from Aden where the majority of the IDPs are living in schools and some other government buildings with aid from UN and local agencies and charities. Raidan Kahtan told the Weekly reporter who visited the IDPs centres in Aden on 17 March that two guards, Pakistani and Somali, prevented him from entering his house. The partly destroyed house has become a weapons store for Al-Qaeda, and the two non-Yemeni guards were safeguarding the weapons which were looted from the military camps in the areas under the control of Al-Qaeda in various battles over the last few months. "'This is my house', I said, and they said 'No, this is a weapon store, and we are assigned to safeguard it,'" said Raidan sadly and angrily. The top leader of Al-Qaeda in Zinjubar, Jalal Beleidi, was Raidan's neighbour and they know each other very well. "When I went to him, he immediately ordered the guards to let me go inside my house," said Raidan. "I was shocked to see my house full of weapons, and to see our city full of foreigners," he said. Raidan decided to return to Aden and leave his city for Al-Qaeda, which call themselves Ansar Al-Sharia, supporters of Islamic Sharia, in an attempt to attract more young people and more support from people inside and outside Yemen. "I took some of my stuff, which we need here, and returned to this depressing place again," said Raidan. Umm Mohamed is a mother of four children in this "depressing" IDPs centre in Crater area of Aden. The 38-year-old woman said she tried four times to return to her house in Zinjubar after she had become extremely fed up and depressed. The last time she went back was last February. "Getting killed in my house is much better than staying here this long," said Umm Mohamed, who has spent nine months in the IDPs centre, which is a high school filled with people like her who escaped the war at the beginning. Now there is almost no war, but they cannot live with Al-Qaeda. The zealous Taliban-style actions of Al-Qaeda people in her city Zinjubar made Umm Mohamed change her mind about staying in her house with these strange people preventing her to live her life as she wants. Every time she goes out, they ask her about her mahram (a male relative who should be always with her). Umm Mohamed is a widow, her husband died nine years ago. She has been earning money by doing some work to support her four children. She is used to doing everything to raise and send her children to school. "The last time I was there in February, Al-Qaeda people prevented me from going out in my red shoes," she said. Al-Qaeda people said the coloured shoes would attract the attention of the men and this violates their interpretation of Islam. She went back to the house and took an old brown pair of shoes, but they stopped her and forced her to return home again. "Then I decided to go bare-footed, because my children were very hungry and I needed to bring some food from the market," she said. While walking in the street of the war-destroyed city with her body completely covered in black, one Al-Qaeda saw a toe of her foot and he started to yell at her to go home or she will be beaten. "Then I decided to return here, to this camp. However bad it is, it will not be worse than my treatment by these strange people," she told the Weekly. On Sunday, Al-Qaeda operatives killed an American English teacher in the southern central city of Taiz. Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility saying the American man was a missionary. On Friday, tribesmen from the southeastern province of Shabwa, mostly controlled by Al-Qaeda, kidnapped a Swiss woman from the western coastal city of Hodeidah. "The Swiss hostage is safe somewhere here, and the kidnappers are waiting for negotiations for her release," Sheikh Ali Abdel-Salam, a tribal leader close to kidnappers, said on Tuesday. The Ministry of Interior said six Somalis who were fighting with Al-Qaeda in Abyan were arrested.
