Qasim Al-Raimi Shows Up At a Funeral
“Al-Qaeda in Yemen” leader Qasim al-Raimi openly went to a funeral in Yemen’s capital, Sana’a. He stayed. He socialized. Then he left. He escaped from jail in February 2006 and since has been blamed for two deadly attacks that targeted tourists.
So we here have yet another terrorist, Qasim al-Raimi , bopping around Sana’a, with no worries. FBI Most Wanted, Lackawanna dude #7, Jaber Elbaneh came to court twice and left again. He promised to come back. (He was sentenced to ten years in November.) Convicted USS Cole bomber Jamal al-Badawi went home after his surrender to Yemeni President Saleh, despite his 15 year sentence for murdering 17 US sailors. (He was just visiting his family the regime claimed.) Limburgh bomber Fawaz al-Reibi while on the lam visited his dad in the hospital, several times. His brother, Abu Bkr al-Reibi never spent a day in jail despite a ten year sentence in the Limburgh bombing. And Riyahd bomber Abdullah al-Raimi was preaching jihad in a big mosque somewhere in Yemen, I could look it up.
What conclusion can we draw? Yemen has reached the tipping point where the extremists have co-opted the state instead of visa versa? (There’s only so many thousand radical Salafis the state can employ before the state institutions themselves start functioning – at least in part – as tools of the extremists, especially in the complete absence of a counter-terror environment at any level, even socially.)
Maybe there is a new deal between President Saleh and bin Laden, following the 1999 deal and the 2003 deal? (And yes I do mean bin Laden, not the poor old tired retired supposedly passive Afghan Arabs so completely discounted as a threat by current Western analysis.)
Maybe the correct conclusion is the “new generation” (if one exists, it was fostered by the old generation including those within the administration) has reached an agreement with the regime, indicating that there is not much of a schism after all between the terrorists who perpetrated murderous attacks from 1992-2002 and this so called “Zarchawi generation,” 2004-2008?
The greater the internal civil pressure on Saleh, the more he is coming to rely on al-Qaeda affiliated actors, philosophy and networks. Socialists’ protests in the South, Shiite rebels in the North, Saleh is stuck in the middle with Al-Qaeda. If there is a generational schism, Saleh is breaching it himself by making them all his allies, but thats nothing new.
Furthermore, it is entirely foolhardy to discount the broad international connections of the old generation. These are people who a few years ago were plugged in to bin Laden’s allies at the highest levels all over the world. But now we are to believe that they are all going to be peaceful qat farmers because thats what they promised Ali Abdullah Saleh, who treated them so well if you overlook that little jail thing. And now there’s some little rat pack of Iraq returnees who are disloyal to Saleh, the Afghan Arabs and bin Laden himself and one day they got a whim to spray a tourist caravan with bullets. mmmmkay
/end of rant
