There is a new generation of Al-Qaeda coming of age, reports Nasser Arrabyee from Sanaa The terrorist attack on the US Embassy in Yemen last Wednesday which killed 19 Yemenis including six attackers shows the confrontation between Al-Qaeda militants and the Yemeni government continues. The attack, in which no Americans were harmed, came weeks after threats from armed groups to take revenge for the killing of Hamza Al-Quaiti, a self- proclaimed Al-Qaeda leader, and four other operatives by Yemen security forces in Tareem, Hudhrmout, in the east of the country 11 August. Early Wednesday 17 September, two car bombs and six suicide bombers exploded nearby the gate of the heavily fortified American Embassy killing themselves, eight Yemeni guards and five people who were waiting to enter the embassy. Two women were among the dead, an Indian and a Yemeni American. In addition to the explosives, the car had gas cylinders which also exploded. Despite the fact that an unknown group calling itself the Organisation of Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility hours after the attack, investigations in which FBI investigators are taking part did not directly accuse anybody or reveal any further details about the attack, the biggest in Yemen since the suicide bombing on the American USS Cole in the harbour of Aden in 2000 in which 17 American sailors were killed. The government arrested about 30 men suspected to have links with terrorist groups and six others accused of releasing Internet statements claiming responsibility for the US Embassy attack and threatening more attacks against the British, Saudi Arabia and Emirates embassies in Yemen. The British Embassy closed after the threat. Government officials considered the attack a retaliatory act for its "continuous crackdown" on Al-Qaeda militants. However, Abdul- Elah Haidar, an analyst specialising in terrorism affairs, said the attack on the American Embassy was evidence that the Al-Qaeda presence was getting stronger and stronger. "Al-Qaeda is no longer in the remote and isolated areas only, as it was in the past. It is everywhere now including the capital Sanaa," Haidar told Al-Ahram Weekly. "The attackers of the embassy came from Sanaa, and they were not known to the security agencies, they were new faces." Haidar attributed the increasing activity of Al-Qaeda and its recruitment of the new elements to the support of the tribesmen who provide haven for the Al-Qaeda operatives and fugitives. "The tribesmen believe in what Al-Qaeda people say more than what the government says. Al-Qaeda speaks about the issues on the mind of the people like Palestine and Iraq," said Haidar. The extremist religious discourse was behind the recent violent attacks in Yemen including the last one against the US Embassy, says Ahmed Al-Sufee, director of the Yemeni Institute for Development of Democracy, a local NGO. "We should think of removing the sources of terrorism which are related to our system of education, mosques, schools and curriculums," Al-Sufee told the Weekly. The so-called new generation of Al-Qaeda in Yemen was blamed for the attack on the US Embassy by Nasser Al-Bahri, alias Abu Jandal, who worked as the body guard of Osama bin Laden for about three years in Afghanistan before he came back to Yemen and was arrested immediately after the USS Cole bombing in October 2000. "It's the act of the new generation who do not understand what Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda wants," Abu Jandal told the Weekly. "This is not the action of the Al-Qaeda I know. The strike of the embassy had no strategic goals; it was random and childish act," he said in an interview in Sanaa three days after the attack. "Any action carried out so far by the real Al-Qaeda always had strategic goals," said Al-Bahri who has been under house arrest since he was released from prison in 2002.
