US Ex-Cons and Converts Terror Training in Yemen
The full report from the Senate Foreign Relations committee is here, pdf. From the Gulf Times: Kuwaiti Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohamed al-Sabah noted “members of Al Qaeda (in Yemen) already hail from 36 nationalities.” And Fox News reports there are 55,000 Americans in Yemen. The following news story from ABC:
As many as three dozen criminals who converted to Islam in American prisons have moved to Yemen where they could pose a “significant threat” to attack the U.S., according to a report on al Qaeda from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to be released Wednesday.
“The group seeks to recruit American citizens to carry out terrorist attacks in the United States,” said Sen. John Kerry, D.-Mass., the committee chairman.
The Senate report said that while the ex-convicts “ostensibly” moved to Yemen to study Arabic, U.S. diplomats and law enforcement officials in Yemen “feared that these Americans were radicalized in prison and traveled to Yemen for training.”
An American official said the prison converts were believed to be primarily from the New York state prison system.
Members of the Senate staff were told by U.S. law enforcement officials that FBI agents in Yemen did not have the resources to track the ex-cons and that several “have dropped off the radar” for weeks at a time.
U.S. law enforcement officials in Yemen are on “heightened alert because of the potential threat from extremists carrying American passports,” the report said.
Also of concern to U.S. officials, the Senate staff found, is a group of “nearly 10 non-Yemeni Americans who traveled to Yemen, converted to Islam, became fundamentalists and married Yemeni women so they could remain in the country.”
An American official described them as “blond-haired, blue eyed-types” who fit the profile of Americans who al Qaeda has sought to recruit for terror missions.
The report found that the al Qaeda group in Yemen, which calls itself al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, makes its own “operational decisions,” independent of al Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri.
“The prospect that U.S. citizens are being trained at al Qaeda camps” in Yemen and Somalia represents what the report called an “evolving danger.”
