245 Javier Jordán Drone attacks campaign in Yemen The transnational threat of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula On November 3, 2002, a Predator drone ended the life of the Al Qaeda member, Abu Ali Al Harizi, and of his five escorts, while his vehicle was travelling along a road in Marib, in eastern Yemen. This was the first and only action of this type that was undertaken in the country for a long time period. In the same way as happened in the Afghanistan theatre of operations, the Iraq invasion in 2003 required military and intelligence resources to be diverted. At the start of that decade, according to the calculations of the CIA Counter-terrorism Centre, some twenty commanding officers were operating in Yemen and there were roughly a hundred militants from the terrorist organisation. The United States did not pay attention to Yemen until six years later. At the start of 2008, a small CIA station issued an alert about the regeneration of the Yemeni arm of Al Qaeda. In March of that year, its militants unsuccessfully attacked the United States embassy. Six months later, in September, several Al Qaeda operatives in the Arabian Peninsula, disguised as police officers, again fired shots against the main door of the diplomatic facility. Six attackers died along with six Yemeni police officers and seven civilians who were there.5 But the most worrying thing was that AQAP was becoming a transnational threat. This assessment was effectively confirmed by the following acts in the years after that: • On November 5, 2009, a psychiatrist from the US Army, Nidal Malik Hasan, killed three people and wounded a further twenty-nine with his standard-issue weapon in Fort Hood (Texas). Since December of the previous year, Hasan had exchanged twenty e-mails with Anwar Al Awlaki, one of the chief instigators of contemporary Jihadism associated with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. In those messages, Hasan had consulted Awlaki about the legitimacy of killing United States soldiers. A few days after the attack, Awlaki publicly praised the Fort Hood episode.6 • On December 25, 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a young Nigerian who was equipped and trained by AQAP, unsuccessfully attempted to detonate an explosive concealed in his underwear on a plane coming from Amsterdam, when it was about to land in Detroit. There were 290 people travelling on the plane. • In October 2010, two explosive devices were found in two civilian freight aircraft, hidden in printers being sent to Jewish institutions in Chicago. The bombs were discovered in time, thanks to the information obtained by Saudi intelli- 5 Aid, Mathew M., Intel Wars. The Secret History of the Fight Against Terror, (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2012), pp. 143-144 6 Heffelfinger, Christopher, “Anwar al-`Awlaqi: Profile of a Jihadi Radicalizer”, CTC Sentinel, Vol. 3, Issue 3, 2010, pp. 1-4.
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