A car bomb exploded Wednesday at the front gate of the U.S. embassy in the capital of Yemen, killing at least 16 and injuring a number of others. Among the killed were six terrorists, six embassy guards and four civilians, but so far there have been no reports of casualties among the embassy staff.

 

According to a Yemeni security official, there were two car bombs, confirming a report of two separate explosions from Ryan Gliha, the embassy’s spokesman. Volleys of heavy gunfire were also heard for 10 minutes following the blasts.

It is not clear whether the embassy itself sustained damage, but the Yemeni official said that the blasts damaged several homes nearby. At least seven Yemeni citizens sustained injuries according to local medical officials, who identified them as residents of a housing complex near the embassy.

A Breeding Ground for Terror

The modern Republic of Yemen has a history of political violence and internecine warfare, including a civil war in the 1960’s in which Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser sent tens of thousands of troops to Yemen in an attempted overthrow the government.  The decades following have been marked by a succession of attacks on foreign military and diplomatic targets in the Republic.

In 2000, local Al-Qaeda operatives blasted a hole in the side of an American destroyer in the Yemeni port of Aden, killing 17 crewmen. A year later an Al-Qaeda terrorist cell attacked a French oil tanker, killing one person. In 2003, two people were shot to death when a throng of demonstrators tried to storm the U.S. embassy in protest over the invasion of Iraq.

The Jews of Yemen, possibly the oldest continuous Jewish community outside of Israel, have also felt the violent impact of Muslim extremism. Now numbering a mere 50 families, the community has been the subject of numerous death threats and ultimatums. As result, some Jews have fled their mountain homes, and are now forced to spend their days in a secured compound in Sa’ana, where they are under constant guard by Yemeni armed forces.

It is the role of Yemen as a breeding ground for terrorists that concerns Dr. Mordechai Kedar the most.

“Don’t doubt that those who wish to forge cells of Al-Qaeda or similar organizations can do it in the mountains, far from the eyes of the police, security organizations or intelligence agencies,” warned Kedar.

“Yemen is the biggest arms market in the Middle East,” said the researcher from the Begin-SadatCenter for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University, one of the leading think tanks in the Middle East. “Whatever you want to find, you can find,” he noted, including cannons and other heavy armaments.

“The only thing you need is money,” Kedar said, and for the right sum just about any type of weapon can be purchased and procured instantly in one of the country’s many outdoor bazaars. “Just let them know what you want, and there it is.”

The country's terrain has also contributed to the role of the southwestern Arabian country as an incubator of terror.

“Many areas are not accessible to cars,” continued Kedar, “only to donkeys in the mountains. Terrorists can find refuge in the caves in the mountains, in the villages hanging to rocks in the mountains.”

To make matters worse, the sparsely-populated and mountainous inland regions are inhabited by people with very strong tribal affiliations, who can sense the presence of a foreigner from a distance.  “Anyone who doesn’t belong in the area will be detected within 10 kilometers,” said the researcher. From the standpoint of intelligence as well as physical accessibility the mountainous areas are difficult to monitor. Tribal awareness and loyalty are strong, said Kedar, and members of one tribe will not work for any other group due to fear of retribution.

To illustrate the difficulty of catching terrorists on the ground in Yemen, Dr. Kedar cited the case of an Al-Qaeda “activist” who had run away from his home and had taken refuge in a village in the mountains. Although American intelligence officials knew his location, they were unable to nab the terrorist, and in the end they decided to fly an unmanned aircraft over his location, from which they launched a missile that killed him.

“Don’t doubt that those who wish to forge cells of Al-Qaeda or similar organizations can do it in the mountains, far from the eyes of the police, security organizations or intelligence agencies,” warned Kedar.

Osama's Home Turf

A particularly disturbing prospect comes into focus at Yemen’s northern border with Saudi Arabia. The land there is so barren and rugged that for all intents and purposes the border does not exist at all, as it is largely unmarked and unmanned. This means that weapons from Yemen can easily cross into, and terrorists out of, Saudi Arabia, a kingdom long suspected of tacitly harboring and even nurturing Al-Qaeda terrorists—including Osama Bin Laden.

In fact, it is precisely this region, in the howling deserts and mountainous wastes of the Yemeni hinterland, that the world’s most wanted man should, by all rights, call home. Although a citizen of Saudi Arabia, Bin Laden was born near the Yemeni-Saudi border, and his ancestral roots are traced to the other side of the invisible boundary, to Yemen. Indeed, the caves and mountains of Yemen could very well have served as the classroom where Bin Laden learned how to survive, much as he does now, beyond the reach of the law and hidden from the eyes of the world.

A Troubled - and Troubling - Region

On top of the conditions that make Yemen a marketplace for terror, the republic is plagued by internecine conflicts and competing identities. “Yemen was a battlefield for a long time,” observed Dr. Kedar. Sunnis populate the more developed coastal areas, from which they draw their support as the country’s ruling elite, exercising a much-resented authority over a large Shi’ite minority. Kedar pointed out that in the mountain town of Sa’dah, a local Shiite tribal leader named Al-Houthi recently declared his group's independence from the Sunni-dominated government.  The so-called Sa’dah insurgency has continued for about two years.

Yemen’s rulers succeed in maintaining order only “as long as the government succeeds in recruiting the head of the tribe and paying him in order not to act against the government,” Kedar said. “But in many cases they don’t succeed. It’s a different culture.”

“In Yemen there is always a hidden fire under the ashes.”

Kedar added that American security and intelligence forces collaborate with the Yemeni government, leading Yemeni tribesmen with local grievances to view the Americans and their own government as a common enemy, a pact between equally legitimate targets. However, terrorists of both Shi’ite and Sunni persuasions find their home in Yemen, and Kedar noted that as in the case of the most recent bombing, it is difficult to determine exactly who plans and carries out local terrorist attacks.

 

As civil insurrections continue to flare from remote mountain hideouts, fed by an almost unlimited abundance of cheap arms and a strong aversion to foreign influence, Yemen continues to brim with the dark promise of more attacks like Wednesday’s.

 

As Kedar put it, “In Yemen there is always a hidden fire under the ashes.”