Yemeni Troops, Backed by United Arab Emirates, Take City From Al Qaeda
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Version 0 of 1. AL MUKALLA, Yemen — Yemeni troops in armored vehicles and backed by airstrikes advanced toward this city of 500,000 people on Sunday, intending to capture it from militants with Al Qaeda who had controlled the major stronghold for more than a year. Thousands of Qaeda fighters were said to be in the city and appeared ready for the battle against the attacking force, which was backed by the United Arab Emirates. In mosques, the militants asked residents to support them as they confronted “the invaders,” and they placed gas tankers in roads to use as defensive booby traps. But in the end, hardly a shot was fired. By nightfall, the Qaeda militants had withdrawn from Al Mukalla in an apparently tactical retreat, residents said. The loss of the city was a blow to the ambitions of Al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch, which is widely considered the militant group’s most dangerous worldwide affiliate, with a particular focus on blowing up commercial airliners. Over the last year, Al Qaeda had used Al Mukalla as a base as the militants stormed through southern Yemen, capitalizing on the power vacuum caused by the country’s 14-month civil war and seizing territory, weapons and money. The militants had faced little resistance. During the war between the Yemeni government and the Houthi rebels, a Saudi Arabia-led military coalition supporting the government with airstrikes rarely, if ever, attacked Al Qaeda. The militants’ expansion became the subject of more intense focus in regional and Western capitals as Yemen’s war reached a stalemate. In a major shift, the United Arab Emirates, a member of the Saudi-led coalition, turned its attention in the last few months from fighting the Houthis to readying thousands of Yemeni tribal fighters for the battle against Al Qaeda, several Yemeni military leaders said. In early February, the top counterterrorism official in the Obama administration, Lisa O. Monaco, met for two and a half hours with Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and a senior Emirati leader. A large part of the discussion focused on how to address the threat from the growing Qaeda strongholds in southern Yemen, two senior American officials said. American military and counterterrorism officials have said the Yemeni affiliate, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, poses the most imminent terrorist threat to the United States. “If we do not deal with AQAP, it is only a matter of time before the group uses its expanded capabilities and safe haven to attempt another attack against the U.S.,” Gen. Joseph L. Votel, the new leader of the military’s Central Command, told the Senate last month, referring to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The Central Command’s area of responsibility includes the Middle East. General Votel added that such an attack could come “with little to no warning.” The United Arab Emirates have several hundred special operations troops in Yemen, helping to assist the Saudi-led campaign against the Houthi rebels and security forces loyal to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen. With that fighting ebbing for the moment and the warring parties meeting in Kuwait to discuss a possible diplomatic solution, the plan is to shift Emirati troops to work with many of the 11,000 Yemeni tribal fighters and other Yemeni forces they have trained in the past year to carry out an air and ground assault on Qaeda positions in the south. Senior American officials have been reluctant to increase the involvement of United States Special Operations forces in Yemen beyond periodic airstrikes against Qaeda targets. An American airstrike last month killed more than 70 Qaeda fighters at a training camp. American officials said they were surprised and impressed that the Emirati military successfully carried out an amphibious assault against Houthi fighters in Aden in July even after the Pentagon refused a request to provide naval landing craft. That success seemed to leave open the possibility that the United States would provide more direct military assistance to the Emiratis in an ambitious campaign against Al Qaeda, a mutual foe. In the last few weeks, Yemeni commanders said they had started receiving orders from their Emirati trainers for an imminent offensive against Al Qaeda. Columns of armored vehicles were spotted heading toward military installations within striking distance of Qaeda-controlled territory. Last week, Yemeni forces attacked Qaeda positions in Lahj Province, west of Al Mukalla, and drove the militants from Huta, the provincial capital. In Al Mukalla early Sunday, warplanes started bombing military facilities and government buildings where Qaeda fighters had gathered, residents said. The militants had been expecting the attack for weeks and had decreased their visibility in the city, patrolling on motorbikes instead of larger vehicles, residents said. The airstrikes killed at least two civilians, local officials said. The militants still control cities in Abyan and Shabwa Provinces, which have long been Qaeda strongholds. Residents of the southern port city of Aden said Sunday that hundreds of soldiers were traveling east from the city, toward the two provinces. Even if the campaign is successful, one of the primary challenges will be preventing Qaeda fighters from returning, given the continuing security and political vacuum in Yemen, analysts said. In Huta, for example, local fighters were left to secure the city after the better-trained Emirati-backed Yemeni soldiers returned to their bases in Aden, said Adel al-Halimi, the chief of security for Lahj Province. “It is possible that the U.A.E. and Yemeni allies can push AQAP out of areas they occupy,” said April Longley Alley, a Yemen analyst at the International Crisis Group. But maintaining control, she said, “will require a political strategy to address local grievances and provide for a minimally effective government, none of which appears to be in place at this point.” |