Under expanded authority granted by President Trump shortly after he took office, U.S. commanders have taken the gloves off in the fight against al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula, a terrorist group known by its initials AQAP.
With the Islamic State on the ropes in Iraq and Syria, many U.S. counterterrorism officials now see the al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen as the more immediate threat to the U.S. homeland.
“We strongly believe that AQAP remains intent on attacking the West,” a senior defense official involved in counterterrorism told reporters at the Pentagon recently.
“AQAP is constantly near the top when we rack and stack threats to the homeland from terrorist groups.”
Over five days in March, the U.S. pounded AQAP hideouts with more than 40 airstrikes in the mountainous regions of Yemen. One of Trump’s first decisions as commander in chief was to authorize a long-planned U.S. commando raid on an AQAP safehouse in January.
The mission was aimed at grabbing computers, cellphones and hard drives that could unmask the group’s shadowy profile in a country racked by civil war where the U.S. no longer has a military presence on the ground.
That raid claimed the life of a U.S. Navy SEAL and sparked a debate about whether putting U.S. commandos in the ground in a remote part of Yemen against a well-armed foe was worth the risk when the object was intelligence, not a high-value target.
But Pentagon officials, from Defense Secretary Jim Mattis on down, have insisted the raid produced terabytes of intelligence, including names and contacts that will help mount future operations against the group.
ISIS, with its murderous ideology and its tentacles extending to places such as Libya and Afghanistan, is still seen as the greater long-term threat by U.S. counterterrorism officials. But the AQAP arm of al Qaeda is more singularly focused on attacking America.
“I think ISIS … has the greatest potential to spread into multiple countries and to be a threat to us for many years to come,” said Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman.
“AQAP… doesn’t spread as fast in terms of its ideology, but is very tightly controlled in terms of how it does planning and execution of operations, and very focused on striking the West, very focused on aviation in particular, and large attacks that are spectacular in nature,” he said.
AQAP claimed responsibility for one very-high profile attack in 2015: the massacre at the Paris office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, in which two French brothers armed with assault rifles gunned down 12 people and wounded 11 others. Afterward, the group released a video on Twitter claiming it chose the target and financed the operation.
“Their anti-Western plotting is just part of what they do,” said Thomas Joscelyn, senior fellow with Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “But they are very strategic and patient in that regard and there are multiple indications that they have been laying the groundwork for something in the West.”
“It really becomes a matter of whether or not they decide to have a go of it because they haven’t actually tried to do a big attack in the West in quite some time,” Joscelyn said.
The Pentagon believes the al Qaeda affiliate is relatively small, just a few thousand in Yemen, perhaps as many as 3,500. But it’s also the terrorist group that has been the most diabolical in its tactics in trying to bring down a U.S. airliner, so far unsuccessfully.
In 2009, Nigerian-born Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried and failed to detonate an explosive device concealed in his underwear while aboard a Northwest Airlines flight bound for Detroit on Christmas Day. The attempt earned him the moniker “the underwear bomber,” as well as a life sentence in a U.S. prison.
The next year, in 2010, AQAP tried to bring down two separate cargo planes bound for Chicago by shipping sophisticated explosives disguised as printer cartridges. The plot was only foiled by an informant who tipped off the Saudi government, which in turn warned the U.S.
“They’ve consistently been at the forefront of developing innovative ways to attack, nonmetallic explosives being most notable, especially when you’re talking about airline threats,” said the senior defense official.
While ISIS has been successful in attracting recruits to join it on the battlefield (the Pentagon estimates 120 countries have provided 45,000 foreign fighters to Iraq and Syria), AQAP has proven more adept at propaganda aimed at radicalizing homegrown terrorists, putting out a slick English language magazine called “Inspire.”
“The title really says it all, you know, ‘Inspire Magazine.’ They want to inspire attacks by homegrown violent extremists,” the official said.
Recent issues mix radical jihadist ideology with practical how-to tips on making terror attacks more effective and more deadly. One article that appeared after the Orlando attack that killed 49 and wounded 53 at the Pulse nightclub frequented by gays suggested targeting nonminority groups to attract more attention.
After a truck was driven into a Bastille Day crowd in Nice, France, Inspire recommended that a blade be attached to the front of the truck to increase the carnage in future attacks.
“AQAP propaganda been very effective” admits the Pentagon official, who said the intelligence community still sees many cases in which attackers are motivated by videos made by Anwar al-Awlaki, an AQAP leader with dual U.S.-Yemeni citizenship, who was killed by a U.S. drone strike in 2011.
“He was very persuasive, put out a number of videos,” the official said. “We find those videos all the time now on people that are conducting lone-wolf-type attacks. We find that propaganda all the time on captured [people] that we pull off the battlefield or that we find through law enforcement investigations around the world.”
It’s not like the U.S. hasn’t bombed in Yemen before. A year ago, the U.S. hit an AQAP training camp and killed a reported 50 members, and a U.S. drone strike took out the group’s leader, Nasir al-Wahishi.
But with terrorist groups, there always seems to be a No. 2 waiting in the wings, and after Wahishi’s death, AQAP named its longtime operational commander Qasim al-Rimi as Wahishi’s successor.
Defeating AQAP is not just a matter of bombing it into oblivion; it requires a sustained long-term effort, experts say.
“We’ve certainly seen a number of instances with terrorist groups around the world where we degraded them to a certain point and then are able to bounce back,” the senior Pentagon official said.
“It takes a persistent and focused effort to degrade the group systemically and on a fairly rapid basis to get them below a level,” he said. “You need to take out a deep slice of the organization … really take out all the individuals from top to bottom involved in that line of effort to best do it.”
