Unrest and instability in Yemen are continuing to thwart President Obama’s plans to empty the Guantanamo Bay prison and send terrorism suspects there but that hasn’t stopped the White House from touting it as a model for fighting the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
Middle East experts say Yemen remains a hotbed for al Qaeda despite numerous U.S. drone strikes on the group’s leaders there.
In addition, a Shiite Muslim militant group that controls northern Yemen, known as the Houthis, in recent weeks surrounded the capital, blocking off roads and threatening to topple the government. On Monday, new reports said Sunni al Qaeda militants were now entering the capital to take advantage of the chaos.
The unrest in Yemen is giving Middle East experts new ammunition to argue that the country is not a good place for the U.S. to send Guantanamo Bay detainees and try to rehabilitate them.
“They can’t even control the capital right now — there is no functioning government there,” said Dr. Charles Schmitz, a specialist on the Middle East and Yemen who teaches at Towson University and is affiliated with the Middle East Institute. “… al Qaeda is as strong as ever there — it has not been degraded.”
President Obama first touted the success of his counter-terrorism policies in Yemen and Somalia last week during his speech laying out his plans to fight the Islamic State, a terrorist group that since June has swept across Iraq, gaining control of significant areas in the West and North.
Even after days of withering criticism, the White House stood by the analogy.
Yemen and the African country of Somalia are places “where the American counterterrorism strategy that has been put in place by President Obama has succeeded in degrading the threat that those organizations pose to the United States. And we intend to implement an analogous strategy against [Islamic State],” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Monday.
Obama had hoped to build a terrorism rehabilitation center along with the United Nations in Yemen similar to a facility in Saudi Arabia that functioned as a sort of halfway house to help former detainees integrate back into society.
Most Republicans have long opposed the idea, citing what they consider high recidivism rates.
In 2010, a Saudi official said that 25 of the 120 Guantanamo detainees who had found refuge in the rehabilitation center had returned to the battlefield. The proposal for a new center in Yemen, meanwhile, likely has been stalled by the unrest.
“Why in the heck would anyone think that it’s a good idea to try to set up a rehabilitation center in Yemen?” said Tom Joscelyn, a senior fellow at the conservative-leaning Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who also serves as senior editor of The Long War Journal.
The White House referred questions about plans for the Yemeni-based terrorism center to the United Nations Inter-Regional Crime and Justice Institute, which is based in Italy, and did not immediately respond to an inquiry.
More than 80 of the 149 prisoners who remain at Guantanamo are from Yemen. Twenty-five of those have been deemed low risk and cleared for repatriation, while the U.S. considers 30 others slightly more risky and would agree to transfer them only if Yemen agrees to closely monitor them or somehow ensure they would not return to violence.
In August 2013 Yemeni President Rabby Mansour Hadi visited the White House, and after his visit, the White House touted the plans for the Yemeni-based rehab center as a way to facilitate the transfer of Yemeni detainees from the Gitmo prison.
Just weeks later the State Department shuttered a record number of embassies in the Middle East and Northern Africa in the face of a terrorist threat emanating from Yemen and Pakistan.
The closures prompted Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., the top Republican on the Intelligence Committee, to call on the Obama administration to reinstate a ban on sending Gitmo detainees back to Yemen.
Early in 2013, Obama lifted a ban on repatriating detainees to Yemen that was imposed after learning that a botched Christmas Day plot to blow up an airliner in 2009 was the work of a Nigerian militant with ties to al Qaeda leaders in Yemen.
“Since it is well-known that Yemen-based al Qaeda is actively plotting against us, I don’t see how the president can honestly say any detainee should be transferred to Yemen,” Chambliss said last year. “Sending them to countries where al Qaeda and its affiliates operate and continue to attack our interests is not a solution.”
