Yemen army takes control of al-Qaida bastion Azzan

Yemeni troops took control on Saturday of the southeastern town of Azzan, a known al-Qaida bastion, after the group's fighters left it a week ago, an official said.

Yemeni jet bomb plotters may have done 'dry run'

American intelligence officials in September intercepted several packages containing books, papers, CDs and other household items shipped to Chicago from Yemen and considered the possibility that the parcels might be a test run for a terrorist attack, two officials said.

Yemen hunts parcel bombers, al-Qaida suspected

Yemeni forces searched on Saturday for suspected al-Qaida militants behind a plot to bomb Jewish targets in Chicago, uncovered by the interception in Britain and Dubai of parcels with explosives sent from Yemen.

Al-Qaida forms army of 12,000 fighters in Yemen

The Yemen-based wing of militant outfit al-Qaida has threatened to "cleanse the land" with a new army of 12,000 fighters.

Yemen offers to strike a deal with al-Qaeda fighters

The President of Yemen said yesterday that he was willing to strike a deal with al-Qaeda if militants laid down their weapons, amid warnings that dozens of foreign fighters were streaming into the country.

Ali Abdullah Saleh’s offer to negotiate with members of the terror network came as officials said that several al-Qaeda operatives, including Saudis and Egyptians, were travelling from Afghanistan to join fighters in the lawless tribal lands in central and southern Yemen.

Among those said to be in hiding in the area is Anwar al-Awlaki, the influential Yemeni preacher. The US-born imam preached to two of the 9/11 bombers in California and had links to the US army psychiatrist charged with the Fort Hood shootings and the Nigerian man who allegedly tried to blow up a Christmas Day flight to Detroit.

Ali Hasan al-Ahmadi, the governor of the southern Shabwa province, said: “There are dozens of Saudi and Egyptian al-Qaeda militants who came. This is in addition to Yemenis who came from Maarib and Abyan [provinces] and a number of militants from Shabwa itself.”
Some Yemeni officials believe that Mr al-Awlaki, a member of a powerful clan who claims not to be a direct member of al-Qaeda, may be willing to enter talks after he leapt from relative obscurity to international infamy as the “bin Laden of the internet”.

Authorities claimed that he was among the dead in a pre-Christmas airstrike in the south of the country, but he later spoke to a Yemeni journalist who confirmed that the radical was still alive.

A Western diplomat told The Times that intelligence agencies had long been too focused on another wanted Yemeni Islamist, Abdul Majid al-Zindani, who is now seen as an older and less influential figure, and had only recently woken up to the danger of the energetic younger imam.

A slim, bearded and bespectacled 38-year-old former civil engineer who was born in New Mexico to a Yemeni father, Mr al-Awlaki is an imam whose fluency in English and command of internet communications have made him a top recruiter for disenfranchised young Muslims in the West. Experts on jihad believe that the internet has now become a key tool for enlisting jihadists, reaching impressionable young Muslims in their homes and extending the reach of radical preachers far beyond the traditional recruiting ground of the mosque.

Dozens of Mr al-Awlaki’s speeches can be found on the Youtube website, referring to everything from Koranic parables to the rapper Snoop Dogg and zombies.

Mr al-Awlaki spans the traditional and the new media for disseminating the message of jihad. While serving as a preacher in San Diego in 2000, his sermons were attended by two of the men who participated in the 9/11 attacks — Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar — and he became a spiritual adviser to the hijackers. He later exchanged e-mails with Nidal Hasan Malik, the US Army major accused of killing 13 soldiers in a shooting spree on the military base of Fort Hood in November last year. Yemeni officials believe that he met Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab, the Nigerian accused of trying to bring down a flight with explosives hidden in his underwear last month.

Mr Saleh told an Arabic television news channel that he was willing to offer al-Qaeda militants a last chance to put down their weapons and come to an accommodation, even as US special forces instructors put troops through intensive anti-terrorist training.

“If al-Qaeda lay down their arms, renounce terrorism and return to wisdom, we are prepared to deal with them,” the President said. “They are a threat not only to Yemen but also to international peace and security.”

Analysts warn that unless authorities get to grips with the growing threat of insurgency, the country risks spiralling into further chaos.

Yemen's child soldiers go to war

Yemen, Jan. 6 -- As Yemen's beleaguered government launches a new offensive against al-Qaida, the other conflict in the troubled Arabian peninsula state takes a shocking twist: The regime and tribal rebels in the north are both using child soldiers, according to aid officials.

Child soldiers have been a feature of warfare throughout history, although these days there are international laws that prohibit the use of children under 18 in conflicts. But they are difficult to enforce and are widely ignored, even though persistent failure to prevent children taking part in combat is considered a war crime by the International Criminal Court.

In Yemen, one of the most impoverished states in the Arab world, there are three times as many guns as there people, and young boys learn to carry an AK-47s from an early age.

But as the country descends into chaos with the government fighting a stubborn rebellion by Shiite tribes in the north, an increasingly violent secessionist movement in the south and a resurgent al-Qaida, the use of children by the various combatant forces is increasing, rights groups report.

As many as 500-600 children are killed or wounded through direct involvement in tribal combat in Yemen every year, according to Abdul-Rahman al-Marwani, chairman of a local non-governmental organization working to prevent the use of child soldiers.

Radhika Coomaraswamy, the U.N. secretary-general's special representative for children and armed conflict, said "large numbers" of teenage boys are being recruited for the fighting.

The northern Houthi rebels in particular do this, said Ahmad al-Qurashi, director of the Sanaa-based Seyaj Organization for Childhood Protection.

He noted other tribes fighting alongside government forces do the same. "We know that among these tribes, on a regular basis, more than 50 percent of the combatants are under the legal age," he said.

Fatin Abbas of Harvard University, who has written extensively on African affairs, says Africa, with its seeming endless cycle of wars, revolutions and insurgencies, is "the epicenter of the child soldier phenomenon."

He noted in a 2007 analysis that "never before in the history of warfare have children been exploited on such a vast scale."

Statistics compiled by the U.N. Children's Fund, or UNICEF, indicate that 300,000 children under 18 serve as regular soldiers, guerrilla fighters, porters, spies, sex slaves and even suicide bombers in conflicts under way in more than 50 countries.

Most of these children serve with warlords or non-state armed groups, but around 50 states actively recruit hundreds of thousands of children into their armed forces in contravention of international law.

UNICEF estimated that 33,000 boys and girls had been involved in combat in the decade-old Congolese war, largely fought by armed groups seeking control of the country's vast mineral resources.

Some 5.5 million people, mainly civilians, have perished in the conflict that has raged in a country the size of Western Europe.

According to Abbas, in the 1991-2001 civil war in Sierra Leone between the government and the Revolutionary United Front, "as many as 80 percent of all fighters were between the ages of 7 and 14."

"In the two waves of civil war than engulfed Liberia between 1989 and 2003, up to 70 percent of government and rebel combatants were children."

UNICEF reported in September 2009 that more children have been used and recruited by armed groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo than anywhere else in the world.

In Somalia, thousands of youngsters, some as young as 8, have been recruited and trained by the Islamist al-Shebab movement fighting the Western-backed Transitional Federal Government.

Before the 25-year Tamil insurgency in Sri Lanka was finally crushed in July 2009, UNICEF recorded more than 6,000 cases of recruitment by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam between 2003 and late 2008.

The total was believed to have soared in the final months of the conflict.

The Tamil Tigers were notorious for maintaining a "baby brigade" that recruited, trained and sent into combat children as young as 11.

In Pakistan, the Islamist Taliban brainwashes young boys into becoming suicide bombers, according to government officials in Islamabad.

In July 2009 the Pakistani army claimed the Taliban has kidnapped around 100 children to be trained as kamikazes.

Research carried out in El Salvador, Ethiopia and Uganda show that almost one-third of the child soldiers surveyed were girls.