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The rise of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula inside of Yemen comes at a time when the central government is threatened by a failing economy, a water shortage, a growing population, high unemployment, and civil war.
The Saudi Arabian program to rehabilitate former Guantanamo Bay detainees and al-Qaeda militants has seen high success rates, but it has also allowed a considerable number to slip through the cracks and return to militancy.
As the security situation in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan has improved, al-Qaeda has been forced to seek out new safe havens in places like the ungoverned parts of the Yemeni countryside.
The Saudi and Yemeni affiliates of al-Qaeda have merged into a single regional group and undertaken a series of attacks on U.S. interests from Yemen, taking advantage of the increasing instability of the Yemeni government and making the situation in Yemen a much higher priority for U.S. policy makers than it was a few months ago.
Airstrikes launched against al-Qaeda militants in Yemen were an attempt by an increasingly weak Yemeni government to fight the growing population of violent extremists using the Yemeni countryside as a staging ground for terrorism.
Cyberspace is at the heart of the fight against terrorism, as terrorists increasingly use the Internet to keep in touch with other cells and spread propaganda, and governments use it to convince potential terrorist recruits to leave before committing violence against civilians.
Yemen’s stability and security situation is rapidly deteriorating, threatening the entire region, and without the help of Yemen’s neighbors and international partners, the situation will only continue to worsen, with potentially catastrophic results.
Given the prominent role of the internet in propagating and perpetuating violent Islamist ideology, identifying methods to short-circuit internet radicalization has become an urgent goal for numerous countries, including Saudi Arabia.
As the war in Afghanistan begins to enter a new phase, it is important to reexamine some of the premises of U.S. policy in the Central Asian region and to consider whether the conditions in the region have changed in the last decade.
The North Caucasus looks and feels more and more like Russia’s neighbor than a constituent part of the state. As the people in the region have become disappointed in local leaders and the Kremlin, many of them turn to Islam as their last hope to achieve structure and peace.
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