As in other Muslim countries, militant Islamic movements became evident in Yemen at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century. In December, 1998, sixteen European tourists were kidnapped in southern Yemen by a group that called itself the Aden-Abyan Islamic Army. Although kidnappings of tourists had been fairly common in Yemen, this incident was different. In earlier cases, tourists had been treated well; in this incident, the kidnappers murdered four of their captives. In addition, the explicitly Islamic identification of the group was notable.
On October 12,2000, a U. S. naval destroyer, the USS Cole, was in the harbor at Aden when it was struck by a small boat loaded with bombs and manned by suicide bombers. The attack killed seventeen U. S. sailors and injured thirty-nine others. The government of Yemen cooperated with the U. S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in investigating the attack and several Yemenis were arrested.
The suicide bombers in the Cole attack were apparently linked to the al-Qaeda international terrorist network that destroyed the World Trade Center towers in New York in September, 2001. In late October, 2001, authorities in Pakistan arrested a Yemeni student named Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed, who was wanted in connection with the attacks on the Cole, and who was an active member of al-Qaeda. Although the government of Yemen assisted the United States in attempting to find al-Qaeda terrorists in Yemen, experts on the society of the country reported that the radical Islamic group had fairly deep roots and wide influence in many areas of Yemeni society. Osama bin Laden, the leader and public face of al-Qaeda, was the son of an immigrant from Yemen to Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden retained some familial ties to his father's country of birth.
In August, 2002, Yemeni authorities arrested two militants thought to be connected to the al-Qaeda network. The two had been preparing a bomb in the capital city of Sanaa, but it exploded prematurely, killing two of the bomb makers. In the apartment where the bomb exploded, police found rocket launchers and plastic explosives. Although Yemen had made strides toward internal stability, it had also become drawn into the web of radical Islam that had spread throughout the Middle East.
As elsewhere in the Middle East and Asia, advocates of radical Islam in Yemen were not merely anti-America but opposed to all Western involvement in Muslim regions. In October, 2002, a boat loaded with explosives rammed a French oil tanker off the coast of Yemen, causing the spillage of ninety thousand barrels of crude oil. The following month, the British embassy in Yemen closed, and the British foreign secretary recommended that all British subjects in Yemen should consider leaving because of the threats of al-Qaeda terrorists operating within the country. The Yemeni government cooperated closely with the United States to fight these forces, and in November a U. S. missile attack on a car in northwestern Yemen killed six reported al-Qaeda members, including a high-level deputy of Osama bin Laden.
Margaret A. Dodson Updated by the Editors
World History
