The End Of al-Qaeda?

“May Allah curse those who did this.” “May the criminals be condemned to hellfire.” “They are not Muslims.” “We must avenge our martyrs.” The visitors’ log at the site of Yemen’s deadliest terrorist attack screams out with expressions of rage and calls for revenge. Yemenis arrive daily at Saba’een Square in the capital of Sana’a, the spot where over 100 cadets from the country’s Central Security Force (CSF) were killed on May 21 when a suicide bomber from the group known as al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, blew himself up in the middle of a military parade. Posters bearing portraits of the dead, as well as of the over 300 who were injured, line enormous billboards erected at the scene. There are images, too, of the explosion’s aftermath, photos of body parts strewn on the blood-spattered asphalt. A few meters away, visitors crowd into a geodesic tent to watch video of the explosion and TV footage of injured CSF cadets screaming and dying.

In most countries, the scene of a suicide bombing is quickly cleaned up, not least because a physical reminder of the attack could demoralize civilians while giving terrorists the propaganda victory they crave. The U.S. observes the 11th anniversary of 9/11 this week, but in the Middle East, commemorations of that nature are rare. The CSF, though, plans to replace the makeshift memorial in Saba’een Square with a permanent monument. Any concern that it could give AQAP free publicity is outweighed by the need to show Yemenis that the local franchise of Osama bin Laden’s terrorist organization is a mortal threat not just to the West but to their country as well. Mahdi al-Jarbani, the drill major who trained the brigade singled out by the bomber, says the display is a wake-up call for his countrymen. “This is not something to hide away in shame,” says al-Jarbani, who was standing just meters from his cadets and suffered shrapnel wounds from the explosion. “Let people recognize our enemy.”

Yemenis have been slow to recognize the enemy in their midst. On my previous visit, in the fall of 2010, it seemed much of the country was in a state of denial about AQAP. Many Yemenis I met claimed the group was a figment of the paranoid American imagination. Others allowed that AQAP existed but insisted it was dangerous only to the U.S., not to Yemen, a Muslim nation of 25 million.

Over the past year, that delusion has been dashed. First, the terrorist group took control of towns and villages in the southern province of Abyan, holding on to them until driven off early this summer after a major offensive by the Yemeni armed forces. Then came a pair of deadly bomb blasts in the capital. On July 11, just seven weeks after the carnage on Saba’een Square, nine people were killed in an explosion outside the police academy. During my visit in July, I heard no talk of about make-believe terrorists, no sniggering about U.S. credulity. “Now it’s become a national issue, no longer some kind of conspiracy,” says political analyst Abdul Ghani al-Iryani. “There’s a national consensus building against al-Qaeda.”

The turnabout in Yemeni popular opinion comes at a welcome moment for the Obama Administration, which has ramped up its own clandestine offensive against AQAP. Missile strikes from CIA and military Predator and Reaper drones have increased this year: according to the Long War Journal, a website that tabulates such strikes, there have been more than 29 since January, compared with 10 in all of 2011 and just four the previous year. A small contingent of U.S. special-operations troops is on the ground in the country, and, along with the CIA and regular U.S. military, it played a crucial, if officially unacknowledged, role in the Yemeni operation that reclaimed territory from AQAP in Abyan. U.S. aid to Yemen, one of the world’s poorest nations, is expected to top $215 million this year, nearly double the sum in 2011. Counterterrorism and military aid will top $100 million.

The intensified focus on Yemen is an acknowledgment by the Obama Administration that AQAP may be the last remaining terrorist group that clings to bin Laden’s dream of striking on U.S. soil. This makes it perhaps more dangerous than the greatly depleted al-Qaeda Prime, as counterterrorism experts call bin Laden’s original group. In May, FBI director Robert Mueller told a congressional hearing that AQAP represented the “top [terrorist] threat to the nation.” But the most telling indicator of the White House’s concern about the Yemeni threat is that John Brennan, President Barack Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, has traveled there more than to any other country–so frequently that Yemenis joke that he should be granted citizenship.

With Yemenis now acknowledging the AQAP threat to their own country, there is hope for the first time that the group’s threat to the West can be extinguished; it might be possible to remove it as a thorn in Yemen’s side. But delivering the knockout blow will require political resolve, smart counterterrorism strategy and, most difficult of all, helping an impoverished, badly governed nation to its feet. Sound familiar? The fight against AQAP is poised where the war on bin Laden’s own al-Qaeda stood at the end of 2001: the enemy has been soundly defeated on the battlefield and scattered. Now, as we learned in Afghanistan, comes the hard part.

The Holdover Holy Warriors

Bin Laden’s vision of a “global jihad,” in which militant Muslims would rise against the West, had faded long before his death at the hands of SEAL Team 6. His group and the many copycats it inspired across the Islamic world now tend to focus on local issues, usually confined to one country like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Mali or Nigeria. At most, some will occasionally foray across their borders: al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia mainly bombs Iraqi civilians or government targets but has recently exported fighters to Syria; al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb confines itself to southern Algeria and northern Mali. Although these groups still threaten the West in rhetoric and pay lip service to bin Laden’s vision of global jihad, they have shown neither the appetite nor the ability to mount a major attack on the U.S. mainland or in Europe.

AQAP has both. “There’s been no diminishing of their desire to attack the West,” says Brennan. The Yemeni franchise is led by jihadists who fought alongside bin Laden in Afghanistan in the 1990s and who remain true to his vision of global holy war against the West. “These are pure al-Qaeda, the old-fashioned kind,” says Ahmed Dahan, who heads Yemen’s special forces. “They are the last of their breed.” Some AQAP members trace their jihadi roots back to the first successful bomb plot attributed to bin Laden, a 1992 blast at a hotel in the Yemeni city of Aden that killed two Austrian tourists. Others came on board after 2000, when al-Qaeda earned local prestige by bombing the U.S.S. Cole in the harbor of Aden, killing 17 American sailors.

But if the politics of AQAP’s fighters is frozen in time, their tactics are not. Their plots to strike on U.S. soil reveal a growing sophistication as well as a steadfast resolve. The first AQAP-trained underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was prevented from detonating the device on a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009; the following year, several bombs concealed in printer cartridges shipped from Yemen were found on cargo planes bound for the U.S.; this year, an Arab-British double agent helped break up a planned AQAP attack involving a new, harder-to-detect underwear bomb.

More insidiously, AQAP has used the Internet to reach out to malcontented Muslims in the U.S., urging them to take up the cause of holy war from inside the West. Before his death in September 2011 in a missile strike launched from a CIA drone, the Yemen-based preacher Anwar al-Awlaki had proved an especially effective online propagandist and recruiter: he is alleged to have influenced both the 2009 Fort Hood shooter, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, who is alleged to have killed 13 people during a rampage, and the 2010 would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad.

The U.S. increased military and counterterrorism aid to Yemen after an attack on the U.S. embassy in Sana’a in September 2008: six policemen and seven Yemeni civilians were killed, along with six attackers from the terrorist group Islamic Jihad in Yemen, a precursor to AQAP. Aid grew again after the first underwear-bomb plot in 2009. But just because the Americans were spending more money in Yemen, it doesn’t mean they were making progress against al-Qaeda. The country’s long-standing ruler, President Ali Abdullah Saleh, channeled the funds chiefly to military units controlled by his son and nephew and did little to stamp out the terrorists. “Saleh worked out that as long as the Americans were worried about al-Qaeda, they would keep giving him free money,” says political analyst al-Iryani. “This meant he had no incentive to do anything about [the jihadists].” Saleh turned down TIME’s requests for an interview.

In turn, AQAP kept a low profile in Yemen and concentrated on attacking the U.S. Its fighters steered clear of urban centers, instead hiding out in the eastern desert, often under the protection of local tribesmen. They might abduct a foreign tourist, but their campaigns had little impact on the lives of ordinary Yemenis. This fed into local complacency about AQAP’s motives. The U.S. war on terrorism wasn’t Yemen’s war.

The Battle Comes Home

That all changed early last year in the southern province of Abyan. As Saleh tried to fend off a strong challenge to his 33-year rule from a combination of peaceful demonstrators and entire military brigades defecting, AQAP saw its chance to stake a claim for Yemeni soil. Jihadists stormed military camps and arsenals and made off with huge quantities of ammunition and military hardware, including several tanks.

These were used to seize control of towns like Zinjibar, Jaar, Shaqra and their surrounding villages. The pretext for the attacks was that Abyan was being overrun by criminal gangs that were taking advantage of lax law enforcement while Yemeni forces were caught in a standoff between pro- and anti-Saleh loyalists in Sana’a. AQAP’s fighters advertised themselves as saviors, and by the summer of 2011 they were in control of much of the province.

If the jihadists were expecting a joyous welcome from the locals in Abyan, they were quickly proved wrong. While some townsfolk did embrace them–especially in the traditionally conservative bastion of Jaar–most fled for Aden, the nearest city still controlled by the government. The exodus accelerated as AQAP and its offshoot, Ansar al-Sharia, set up Taliban-style rule. “They showed themselves to be ignorant yahoos,” says Gerald Feierstein, the U.S. ambassador to Yemen.

It was worse than that. Mosque attendance was made mandatory, with laggards facing a whipping. Thieves had their right hands sawed off as punishment. Those who dared to oppose the jihadists were hanged or garroted, their bodies placed on crucifixes for public display. “They started to behave like the criminal gangs themselves,” says Quraish Ahmed Zakat, a schoolteacher from Zinjibar now living in Aden. “If they wanted your house, you had to leave. If you questioned them, you could be declared an enemy of Islam and killed.” By the end of 2011, Zinjibar had become a ghost town, with most of its residents crowded into makeshift refugee camps in Aden.

It wasn’t until Saleh–who had been badly injured in an assassination attempt in June 2011 even as jihadists were infiltrating Abyan–finally gave up power after protracted negotiations that Yemen began to get serious about AQAP. Saleh was replaced by his longtime Vice President, Abdel Rabbo Mansour Hadi, who was elected in February for a two-year transitional period after the anti-Saleh parties agreed to let him stand unopposed. The new President made the liberation of Abyan, his home province, his top priority.

By early May, Hadi, a former Soviet-trained military commander himself, had mustered a combination of regular army troops, Republican Guards and tank brigades–forces that had been at one another’s throats for much of 2011–to mount an attack on AQAP. The Obama Administration played its part with drone surveillance, intelligence sharing and missile strikes. At the same time, the citizens of Lawdar, an Abyan town targeted by AQAP, decided to stand their ground, forming Popular Committees of armed men willing to fight the jihadists. The combination worked. With support from government troops, the civilian militias drove AQAP away from Lawdar, inspiring residents of other towns. Men stuck in Aden’s refugee camps began to form their own Popular Committees. “If we wanted to go back home, we had to do it by ourselves,” says Rafat Ali Ahmed, who returned to his hometown of Zinjibar to join a militia.

Once Hadi’s 20,000-man force began advancing into Abyan, AQAP began to lose what local support it had in more conservative towns like Jaar. Some jihadists fled to the camps; others quietly put aside their weapons and returned home. The more astute simply switched sides and joined up with the militias. On a recent visit to Jaar, soldiers told me many of the town’s Popular Committee members were “al-Qaeda without beards.” Says analyst al-Iryani: “When the war began, AQAP found out that people weren’t willing to die for them.”

The fighting was fiercest in Zinjibar, where many of the jihadists chose to make their last stand. Their stolen tanks were easily eliminated from the air, but it took a heavy artillery barrage followed by bloody street-by-street battles to drive them out. As a result, this once bustling town of 20,000 is now in ruins. The retreating jihadists planted booby traps in the wreckage, which means clearing the debris will likely take months; civilians as well as military patrols continue to be killed by land mines. My colleague Yuri Kozyrev, a veteran war photographer, says Zinjibar reminds him of Grozny, the bombed-out capital of Chechnya, after Russian troops flattened it in the mid-1990s.

The Yemeni military is reluctant to disclose how many soldiers it lost in the campaign, although unofficial estimates run as high as 1,000. AQAP’s losses were substantial as well: Major General Nasser al-Taheri, the new commander of Yemen’s southern forces, estimates at least 600 jihadists out of a force of 3,000 were killed, including many from the core leadership. The general says that in recent skirmishes, “we’ve noticed their fighters seem to be mostly untrained recruits,” suggesting that experienced fighters have been killed. Brennan is more cautious in his assessment, saying “a number of important players were taken off the battlefield.”

The rest of the leadership have scattered across the country, where they now represent a diffuse but still deadly threat. Al-Taheri’s predecessor Salem Ali Qatan, the architect of the victory against AQAP, was killed shortly thereafter by a suicide bomber. The May 21 suicide attack on the military parade in Sana’a was followed by a July 11 bombing at a police academy that killed nine. There have been several smaller attacks in Abyan since then. But it’s not quite business as usual for AQAP. U.S. and Yemeni intelligence suggests the jihadists are finding that the tribesmen who once protected them are now less hospitable. With Hadi focusing far more on AQAP than Saleh ever did, “the tribal sheiks know that sheltering these people carries a higher price than before,” says Dahan, head of the Yemeni special forces. The ruins of Zinjibar are a cautionary tale for any community that shelters the jihadists, whether out of sympathy or under duress. It also takes the gloss off the prestige the AQAP leadership had gained from its defeat of the Soviet military in Afghanistan: it’s hard to boast of your exploits in the Panjshir Valley when you’ve been soundly thrashed in your own backyard.

Endless Endgame

For all the blood spilled, though, Hadi’s offensive may have been the easy part of the longer battle against AQAP. “It’s not a purely military challenge anymore–it’s much more complex,” says al-Taheri. “The time of fighting with tanks is over.” It will take significant coordination among Yemen’s multiple military bodies, plus the help of foreign agencies like the CIA and Saudi intelligence, to track down and eliminate individual jihadist leaders.

Such cooperation doesn’t come naturally to Yemeni forces, who have recently been more likely to shoot at one another. Even Yemenis find it hard to keep track of the loyalties of different military units. The elite Republican Guard and CSF are led by the son and nephew, respectively, of Saleh, the ousted dictator. The northwestern forces, including the powerful 1st Armored Division, are led by General Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, once Saleh’s closest ally before he threw his lot in with the protesters last year. Of more concern: al-Ahmar has long ties with the Yemeni mujahedin who fought in Afghanistan and was in charge of reintegrating them into society when they returned from their victory over the Soviet Union. Although President Hadi was able to get all three men to contribute to the Abyan campaign, their rivalry is far from settled. Hadi, with U.S. backing, is trying to reconfigure the armed forces under a central command and has had some success weakening the hold of the Salehs and al-Ahmar, but the old regime’s loyalists continue to sporadically attack government forces and offices.

It doesn’t help that AQAP is far from Hadi’s only concern. The province of Abyan requires major rebuilding, well beyond Yemen’s modest resources. (The country’s per capita GDP is $2,300.) AQAP was not the only rebel group emboldened by last year’s instability–a long-simmering separatist movement in the south has also gained strength. There were two Yemens until unification in 1990, and many southerners want independence again. Aden’s walls are painted with the old South Yemen flag and slogans calling for its return. In the north, a Shi’ite insurgent group known as the Houthis has consolidated its control over large areas north of Sana’a. Each of these groups is too large–and, unlike AQAP, enjoys too much local popularity–to be easily pacified by military means.

And then there’s Yemen’s corruption-ravaged economy, with unemployment estimated at some 40% and inflation anywhere from 10% to 20%. A group of international donors known collectively as Friends of Yemen has pledged $4 billion in aid–the largest portion of it from Saudi Arabia–but a crucial meeting was postponed from June to September, leaving Yemenis doubting the money will materialize. For all its focus on Yemen, a White House consumed with re-election and in the process of withdrawing from Afghanistan is in no position to lead another nation-building exercise.

As if that were not enough, Hadi must also bind the wounds from the 2011 protests and craft a new constitution before elections are held in 2014. “The Americans want him to keep focusing on AQAP, but that is not a reasonable expectation when Yemen has so much else to worry about,” says Mohammed Abulohom, a tribal sheik and politician. “He delivered Abyan, and the terrorists are on the run. Who can blame him if he now decides to give some attention to creating jobs or dealing with the electricity shortage?”

For now, Hadi remains determined to press home his military advantage over the retreating AQAP. Unlike Saleh, he has shown no inclination to use the jihadist bogeyman to extract more money from the U.S. “[Hadi] has moral conviction on this, and he’s never tried to exploit it for political gain,” says Brennan. Since the successes in Abyan, Hadi’s troops have moved east, flushing out long-standing jihadist hideouts in the province of Shabwa, the ancestral home of the al-Qaeda preacher al-Awlaki. Many AQAP leaders are now believed to have fled even farther eastward, into the province of Hadramout, where bin Laden’s family originated. The dream of global jihad could die where it was born.

Hadi has also proved a far more reliable source of intelligence for U.S. counterterrorism officials than Saleh ever was. “The cooperation has been more consistent, more reliable and with a more committed and determined focus,” says Brennan. That information has vastly improved the efficiency of the drone campaign, helping avoid catastrophic mistakes like the 2010 strike that killed a provincial deputy governor or the 2009 strike in the town of al-Majala that killed 14 women and 21 children, among others.

While drone attacks have generated outrage in Pakistan, another U.S. ally with a serious terrorism problem, in Abyan I hear little complaint about the U.S. role in the military campaign. Ahmed, who joined the citizens’ militia in Zinjibar, laughs off suggestions that American participation is an affront to Yemeni sovereignty. “Al-Qaeda brought Saudi, Somali and Afghan fighters into my town,” he says. “If the American drones help to kill them, we won’t mind.”

Najib Ghallab, a Sana’a University political-science researcher, has another explanation for why complaints about the drone campaign have quieted: in Abyan, there was no doubt that the Yemeni forces were leading. “If Yemenis think we’re helping the U.S., they won’t support it,” he says. “If they think the U.S. is helping us, they will.”

Back in Sana’a’s Saba’een Square, al-Jarbani, the drill major, doesn’t care about drones or missiles or politics. “This is our fight now. Whether the Americans help or not, that doesn’t bother me,” he says. When he has fully recovered from his injuries, he doesn’t want to go back to his job drilling cadets for parades. “For me, the time for marching is over. It’s time to take revenge. They talk about jihad? This is mine.”