WASHINGTON — U.S. officials believe that as many as three dozen Americans who converted to Islam while in prison in the United States have traveled to Yemen over the past year, possibly to be trained by al-Qaida, according to a Senate report.
The arrivals have alarmed U.S. counterterrorism officials, who believe that al-Qaida in Yemen has expanded its recruitment efforts “to attract nontraditional followers” capable of carrying out more ambitious operations.
The report by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee underscores the growing anxiety in the United States about the al-Qaida off-shoot, which is accused of orchestrating the attempted suicide bombing of a U.S. jetliner bound for Detroit on Christmas Day.
“The Christmas Day plot was a nearly
catastrophic illustration of a significant new threat from a network
previously regarded as a regional danger, rather than an international
one,” the report concluded. It warns of “growing evidence of attempts
by al-Qaida to recruit American residents and citizens in Yemen, Somalia and within the United States.”
The report was released in advance of a hearing that the committee is scheduled to conduct Wednesday on al Qaida’s resurgence in Yemen and internal problems undermining that nation’s ability to address the matter.
“As many as 36 American ex-convicts arrived in Yemen
in the past year, ostensibly to study Arabic,” the document said. Some
of those Americans “had disappeared and are suspected of having gone to
al-Qaida training camps in ungoverned portions of the impoverished country.”
The estimate was attributed to interviews that
committee staff conducted with U.S. intelligence and law enforcement
officials in Yemen and other countries in the Middle East in December.
The fears about Americans in Yemen is portrayed as part of a larger pattern of U.S. citizens or residents being drawn overseas to organizations with ties to al-Qaida, raising concerns that they may be able to re-enter the United States after undergoing terrorist training.
The document refers to “two dozen Americans of Somali origin who disappeared in recent months from St. Paul, Minnesota” and are widely suspected of fighting alongside al-Shabab, a militant group in Somalia linked to al-Qaida.
In addition to ex-convicts, the report warns that as many as a dozen other U.S. citizens have traveled to Yemen after marrying Muslim women and converting to Islam.
U.S. intelligence officials declined to comment on the report, which did not identify its sources by name or agency. The CIA, FBI and Defense Department have all expanded their operations and personnel in the region in recent months.
CIA-operated Predator aircraft have carried out strikes on al-Qaida targets in Yemen in recent weeks.
The Senate panel conducted the interviews before al-Qaida carried out the Christmas Day plot, which was thwarted only when passengers on the Detroit-bound flight subdued the suspect after a bomb he had smuggled on-board in his underwear failed to ignite.
The 23-year-old suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, has been indicted by a federal grand jury in Michigan on charges of attempted murder and the attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction.
U.S. counterterrorism officials have expressed
concern that Abdulmutallab, who is the son of a prominent Nigerian
banker and had a visa to enter the United States, represents the vanguard of an evolving threat.
Abdulmutallab’s ability to penetrate U.S. defenses
and nearly pull off a devastating attack exposed serious failures in
the U.S. intelligence community’s ability to assemble clues about the
plot.
Among them were a warning that Abdulmutallab’s father delivered to CIA officials in Nigeria about his son’s growing radicalism, as well as the interception of al-Qaida communications in Yemen indicating that a Nigerian was being employed in a terrorist plot.
The White House released a report on the intelligence breakdowns last week. John Brennan, President Barack Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, acknowledged that until the attempted Christmas Day attack, U.S. analysts did not see al-Qaida’s franchise in Yemen as an organization capable of carrying out an overseas plot.
The Senate report makes clear that al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula,
as the off-shoot is known, has recovered from being on the verge of
collapse several years ago to represent a potent new threat.
AQAP, as the group is known, “has evolved into an
ambitious organization capable of using nontraditional recruits to
launch attacks against American targets within the Middle East and beyond,” the report said.
The network in Yemen is led by Nasir al-Wahayshi, a former aide to al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden who was among a group of 23 al-Qaida fighters who escaped from a Yemeni prison in February, 2006.
The deputy of the organization is Said al-Shihri, a Saudi citizen who was released from the U.S.-run Guantanamo Bay prison in November 2007.
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(c) 2010, Tribune Co.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
