Woman Who Fell From the Sky - Jennifer Steil [55]
But I don’t need encouragement to vary my route; boredom keeps me from ever walking the same streets two days in a row. This means that I often end up lost and add an extra half hour to my travel time just trying to get back to a major road. But at least I’m not predictable.
“Faris,” I say as we stand to go, “are you worried al-Qaeda will come for me when they find out a New Yorker is editing the paper?”
He hesitates. “I don’t think so.”
BUT AL-QAEDA HAS APPARENTLY set its sights on targets more strategic than me. It’s a Friday, our only day off, when it next makes the news. Several oil installations have just been attacked by al-Qaeda operatives, and Faris wants the story on the website immediately. In the South, two terrorists drove car bombs at high speed toward oil storage tanks at al-Dhaba plant, Yemen’s main export terminal on the Gulf of Aden. Guards managed to detonate the bombs before they reached their targets, but one security officer was killed in the explosions. Less than an hour later, two other cars loaded with explosives headed toward the oil-gathering and gas-oil separation plant in Ma’rib Governorate. Guards shot at the men, and only the attackers were killed when the car bombs exploded. Neither attack damaged facilities, but they are dramatic evidence that al-Qaeda has been resurrected.
Al-Qaeda in Yemen grew out of militant Islamic campaigns overseas. Yemenis flooded to Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight the Soviets, and many stayed through the 1990s to train. Others returned to Yemen to fight in the 1994 civil war against the “godless Socialists” in the South. Osama bin Laden, whose father was born in Yemen, recruited Yemenis to train in al-Qaeda’s camps in Afghanistan. After the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, large numbers of Yemenis traveled there to fight U.S. forces.
Until the late 1990s, Yemeni terrorists stuck to a deal they had made with the government: they would be allowed sanctuary and freedom of movement in Yemen in return for not staging attacks within Yemen’s borders. But by the end of the decade, militant groups, frustrated with government negotiations with the United States for military basing rights in Yemen, opened training camps in the South and launched a campaign of attacks on government offices. And in October 2000, a group of al-Qaeda veterans launched a suicide attack on the USS Cole in Aden harbor, killing seventeen American seamen. The MV Limburg, a French ship, was hit two years later. These attacks prompted the government, with U.S. support, to crack down on terrorists. Nearly a hundred were arrested by 2003.
But al-Qaeda continued to grow, inside and outside Yemen. The September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States vaulted al-Qaeda into public consciousness. Before then, the terrorist organization was relatively obscure. But the massive publicity it received in the wake of the attacks suddenly made it a global brand. Afterward, any self-respecting terrorist group with Islamic credentials and aspirations to bring the West to its knees began claiming to be part of al-Qaeda.
In the Central Prison of the Political Security Organization (one of Yemen’s domestic intelligence services), in Sana’a, several key al-Qaeda leaders continued to plot. On February 3, 2006, twenty-three prisoners, some of whom had participated in the Cole and Limburg attacks, escaped the maximum-security prison through a tunnel to the al-Awqaf Mosque. Since the prison break, al-Qaeda in Yemen has organized a series of terrorist attacks on Western and Yemeni government targets—the latest of which is today’s assault on the oil installations. Al-Asaadi reports the story, and we get it online that evening.
It’s only my second week at the paper, and already we’ve had kidnappings, stampedes, and suicide bombings. This is a news junkie’s paradise.
NINE
the front lines of democracy
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