Sudden Justice: America's Secret Drone Wars by Chris Woods

Author:Chris Woods
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2015-11-19T05:00:00+00:00

THE AL QAEDA FRANCHISE

Paul Wolfowitz’s boast back in 2002, of America’s first Predator assassination beyond the hot battlefield, had helped see Sana’a lock the CIA’s armed drones out of its airspace for nine long years (see chapter 3). For a while at least, their presence would have made little difference. That drone killing of local Al Qaeda leader Qa’id Salim Sinan al-Harithi, coupled with ongoing arrests by Yemen’s security forces, had all but broken the terrorist group in southern Arabia. As former US ambassador to Sana’a Barbara Bodine has written, “I think the general assessment all the way up our government is that by about 2004, we and the Yemenis had the conventional Al Qaeda problem reasonably under control.”17 As the US military focus shifted first to Iraq and then once again to Afghanistan, better uses could be found for the Predator. Back in Yemen and Somalia, the United States was playing a low-key waiting game. The expectation was that under pressure from drone strikes and other counterterrorism operations, the leadership of “Al Qaeda Central” would flee Pakistan’s tribal areas and instead take control of local offshoots. No one anticipated that a new, homegrown terror leadership cadre would instead emerge in places like Yemen. “It was certainly the expectation the Agency had that if we punished Al Qaeda Main enough in the tribal region, they would move. And it was the movement of the leadership that we anticipated. Rather than their just staying there and dying,” one former senior official now admits. “‘Somewhere else’ for us always was Yemen and Somalia. And so we were kind of making preparations, because you know, an organization like that in movement is more vulnerable than when it’s stationary. And so we were trying to anticipate how we would deal with that. And frankly they never moved.”18

Instead, Al Qaeda’s regional revival had its origins just beyond Yemen’s northern border, with a wave of attacks against Saudi and western targets which were in part a response to the US invasion of Iraq. Nine Americans were among 36 people killed in a May 2003 terrorist strike on a housing compound in Riyadh, for example. When the group responsible was finally smashed by Saudi security forces, the remnants slipped into Yemen.19 There, they joined up with local Al Qaeda leaders who had recently escaped in a mass prison breakout, instigating a wave of terror attacks against Yemeni military and security officials and non-Arab targets. Twice in 2008, for example, terrorists struck at the US embassy in Sana’a killing 18 people. One victim was newlywed Susan Elbaneh, an 18-year-old American from Lackawanna, New York (coincidentally the home town of the first US citizen killed in a covert CIA drone strike six years earlier) who was slain with her husband as they waited in line for the embassy to open. One of Elbaneh’s own distant cousins was an affiliate of the local Al Qaeda group which had killed her.20

The Yemen and Saudi terror franchises ultimately merged under the banner

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