This is a weird thing. When I left, I was worried about political unrest, I never really worried about anti-American violence. Since I left, the government has started to crack down on a group that supposedly has ties to Queda. I figured that there would be retaliation against the government, after all, that’s what you get for shaking the hornet’s nest.
But they went and bombed the American embassy. 16 people have died. All but two of them were Yemeni. There was an Indian nurse and an American newlywed (she was trying to get some paperwork for her husband to come to the US) killed in the atack. The American embassy is probably 100 yards from the wall, so a car bomb will never have any effect on it. I’m not sure how close the car could have come to the wall even, there is a large perimeter set up outside. All of the people working the gate and the all of the security people on the outside of the embassy are all Yemenis. It seems strange to me that someone would try this kind of attack when the victims are going to overwhelmingly be locals. On the other hand, maybe the bombing types hate Yemenis that work with Americans more than the Americans…
I dunno, like all of the other attacks on the embassies there, it seems more symbolic than anything else. The chances of them doing anything to the embassy without an airplane being involved is zero. There seems to be general outrage in Yemen over this attack. Both because most people don’t think it’s a good thing and also because this happened during Ramadan.
The “terrorist” element in Yemen continues to show signs of incompetence and impotence. The good news is if they keep trying things like this, they’ll all be dead pretty soon. I don’t understand their tactics. They are pursuing things that do no damage to the target and kill Yemenis. All they seem to be doing is making everyone angry, so what’s the point? Maybe they really do just have death wishes, that seems to be the only thing that is regularly accomplished by these sorts of things.
UPDATE:
As usual, there is a bit of a disagreement over what happened between the Arab press and the western press. Well, they’re all reporting the same events, but they are using very different headlines. Every single western news outlet is reporting that the embassy was carbombed. Flip over to an Arab news agency and what do you see? “Embassy attack foiled!” I think this is closer to the truth, the attackers didn’t get close to the embassy and the (Yemeni) security forces prevented the attackers from getting into and past the outer wall. What a difference a few words makes…
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al-queda, cole, middle east, terrorism, violence, yemen