Al Beidh: Some al Qaeda in Yemen are Officers in the Security Forces
The Republican Guard is headed by President Saleh’s son, Prince Ahmed. Who could al Beidh be referring to as “a leading member of the ruling regime”, certainly not Ali al Ansi, President Saleh’s personal secretary since 1982 and former head of the National Security. The general consensus among the western secure-ocrats is the subversion by al Qaeda doesn’t go that high in the Yemeni adminstration. I really hope they are right because if they’re wrong, its a whole differant ball game. As an aside, sometimes when Yemenis say al Qaeda (real al Qaeda) are members of the security, they mean that the terrorsts receive officer’s pay from a particular branch of the security forces or military.
Some reports spoke of an increasing presence of Al Qaida in the south? How do you see this dangerous trend?
I have already spoken about this issue and said that the Sana’a regime will play this card too to distort the image of the peaceful movement in the south, which has nothing to do with Al Qaida whatsoever. I hereby stress that the south has never been a land that would tolerate an ideology such as Al Qaida’s. On the contrary, this terror network has built a strong alliance with the regime in Sana’a, engineered and supervised by a leading member of the ruling regime. This is known by regional states, Egypt and the United States. I don’t exaggerate when I say that some leaders of Al Qaida are in fact officers in the Republican Guard.
Our movement is a peaceful one; it is an independence struggle that has denounced violence since its inception. We refused to follow the path of violence despite the attempts of the regime to provoke us. But I also want to stress that even the attacks blamed by the Sana’a regime on Al Qaida are fabricated by the regime itself, hoping it will succeed in portraying the southern movement as a terrorist movement. This will not succeed.
Ali Salem Al Beidh was the leader of the former south Yemen republic. He was also former vice-president under president Ali Abdullah Saleh from 1990-1994 after they signed the unity agreement on May 22, 1990.
Al Beidh left the country after he declared secession of south from north in 1994, the main reason behind the 1994 war between south and north. But Al Beidh was defeated and got asylum in Oman.
The rest of al Beidh’s interview is here. I’m not at all impressed.
