Yemen Welcomes U.S. Transfer of Guantanamo Inmate, Expects More

By Henry Meyer

Sept. 27 (Bloomberg) -- Yemen, which has about 100 citizens detained at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, welcomed the U.S. decision to send one of them home.

Mohammed al-Basha, a spokesman at Yemen’s embassy in Washington, praised the release of Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed, whose return to Yemen was announced by the U.S. Justice Department yesterday, the official Saba news service said today.

President Ali Abdullah Saleh has urged the U.S. to hand over all the detainees from Yemen, promising to prosecute any of them proven to have plotted attacks against U.S. interests, Saba said. Yemen earlier this year rejected a U.S. proposal to send some or all of the inmates to Saudi Arabia ahead of Guantanamo’s closure.

Yemen, the poorest Arab nation and the ancestral homeland of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, has become a safe haven for al-Qaeda members from Saudi Arabia, which launched a crackdown on the terrorist organization after a series of attacks in 2004.

U.S. officials doubt that Yemen can keep the Guantanamo prisoners from returning to terrorism, said Christopher Boucek, a regional security expert from the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Ahmed, 27, who was released after intensive negotiations with top U.S. officials, was ruled an enemy combatant by a military tribunal in 2004. His lawyers said he was an Islamic studies student with no connection to terror groups when he was abducted in Pakistan in 2002.

Al-Qaeda Bases

Yemen has a largely desert and mountainous landscape that government forces control only partially. Al-Qaeda has bases concentrated in the northeast of the country close to the border with Saudi Arabia, according to Saeed Obaid al-Jemni, a Yemeni expert on al-Qaeda and author of the 2007 book, “The Al-Qaeda Organization.”

Al-Qaeda twice targeted the U.S. embassy in Yemen’s capital Sana’a last year. The latest attack was a twin suicide car bombing in September 2008 that left 17 people dead, including six security guards and seven assailants.

Al-Qaeda’s Yemen-based organization threatened last week to launch more attacks inside Saudi Arabia, after attempting last month to kill the kingdom’s top anti-terrorist official, according to SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors militant Web sites.

President Barack Obama promised this month to provide U.S. support to Yemen’s government to bolster security. In a letter to President Saleh, Obama said the U.S. will soon present an initiative to provide more aid for Yemen through the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and Gulf countries, the Yemeni presidency said.

Yemeni forces urgently need helicopters and all-terrain armored personnel carriers for counter-terrorism operations, and high-tech surveillance equipment to monitor the 1,500-kilometer (930-mile) border with Saudi Arabia, al-Basha said in a phone interview Sept. 25.

Yemen is also battling a Shiite Muslim insurgency in the northwest on the Saudi border and a secessionist movement in the south.