Seven years ago this month, al Qaeda in Yemen was on its last legs, worn down by years of U.S. and Yemeni strikes. The group's original leader, Abu Ali al-Harithi, was dead, the target of a November 2002 strike by an unmanned CIA drone.
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His replacement, an amputee named Muhammad Hamdi al-Ahdal, fared little better. One year after the death of his boss, the veteran of the fighting in Bosnia and Chechnya was presiding over an organization in disarray. Like a general without an army, al-Ahdal was out of options. In November 2003, he was tracked down to a safe house on the outskirts of Sanaa, the Yemeni capital. A last-minute mediator from the president's office prevented a shootout in the residential neighborhood, convincing al-Ahdal to surrender. Just like that, the threat had been eliminated. Al Qaeda in Yemen was defeated.
Since then, things have not gone so well. Edmund Hull, the United States' first post-September 11 ambassador to Yemen, left the country in the summer of 2004. His departure marked a turning point for U.S. priorities in Yemen. No longer was al Qaeda a top concern. Now, it was election reforms and anti-corruption campaigns that took center stage, as part of the Bush administration's grand scheme to democratize the Middle East. President Ali Abdullah Salih, who had been part of the solution on al Qaeda, was increasingly seen as part of the problem on reform. U.S. funding dwindled to embarrassingly low levels. Absent a terrorist threat, Yemen was no longer important.
The Yemeni government was just as distracted. Instead of working to secure the victory, it directed its attention and military resources against an armed rebellion in the country's far north that began in June 2004. The on-again, off-again civil war has since gone through six different rounds, draining the country's coffers and exacerbating tribal fault lines.
Both countries were guilty of lapsed vigilance. Years of dithering and distractions left each unprepared for a resurgence. The spark came early one morning in February 2006, when 23 al Qaeda suspects tunneled out of a maximum-security prison on the edge of Sanaa and into a neighboring mosque, where they performed the dawn prayer before walking out the front door to freedom.
Hampered by inattention and the resulting sketchy intelligence reports, U.S. officials focused on what they knew. They concentrated their efforts on Jamal al-Badawi and Jabir al-Banna, the two escapees on the FBI's most wanted list. But as is so often the case, it was what and who the U.S. didn't know that would, in the end, be the most damaging.
Instead of al-Badawi and al-Banna, it was Nasir al-Wihayshi and Qasim al-Raymi who would turn out to be the most dangerous fugitives, resurrecting al Qaeda and taking aim at U.S. interests and even the American homeland. Al-Badawi and al-Banna were yesterday's threats, the last survivors of a fading generation. Al-Wihayshi and al-Raymi were the future.
Both had spent time studying under Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in the late 1990s, supplementing their conversations and lessons with time in al Qaeda training camps. Al-Wihayshi, the tiny, wispy figure, was a bin Laden favorite. The tall Saudi selected the short Yemeni to serve as his understudy and personal secretary. The four-year apprenticeship would serve al-Wihayshi well when he began to build his own branch of al Qaeda in the aftermath of the prison break. Bin Laden's blueprints in Afghanistan served as his model for the new organization in Yemen.
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