Al-Qaeda Leaders Headquarted in Yemen: Pentagon
Another part of the briefings focused on al-Queda, and its own coalition of allied groups that is spread throughout the Middle East and parts of Africa. The briefing talked in terms of “leadership nodes,” “operational cells” and “support nodes”, dotting them all over a densely-packed map that ran from Waziristan to Mogadishu to Algiers. It bears translation from Pentagonese.
Al-Queda has evolved greatly from its early days of personalization in Usama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and a few others. Our military leaders now characterize it as a “franchise” that shares communications, some funding and sometimes coordinates actions. Some terrorism experts now say that al-Queda is less than that, a loosely-knit network of terrorist groups that coordinate only in giving credit to bin Laden for propaganda purposes. It’s impossible to define it with precision, but the map showed al-Queda leaders headquartered in nine places including Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Waziristan (eastern Pakistan), two places in Iraq (Baghdad and northeastern Iraq), northern Uzbekistan and (and here the map is a bit imprecise) two places in Somalia.
Yemen is a central node in that the insurgency in northeastern Iraq has significant support from within Yemen, the links between Yemeni and Saudi al-Qaeda are broad, and many of the Jihaddists in Somalia arrived via Yemen.
