Sana#39;a, Yemen — Yemeni forces, backed by the United States, launched an attack Thursday on a Yemeni-American preacher who is linked to the man held in last month’s attack at the Fort Hood, Texas, Army base, U.S. and Yemeni officials said.
The strike on a purported al-Qaida hide-out in southeastern Yemen killed at least 30 suspected militants and was the second such assault in the past week, according to Yemeni security and government sources. One of the targets was Anwar al-Awlaki, the extremist Yemeni-American preacher who exchanged e-mails with the Army psychiatrist suspected of killing 13 people at Fort Hood.
In a statement, the Yemeni Embassy in Washington said al-Awlaki was believed to be attending a meeting of senior al-Qaida leaders, including the network’s regional leader, Naser Abdel-Karim al-Wahishi, and his deputy, Saeed al-Shihri, a Saudi national and former detainee at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Yemeni officials say the airstrike unfolded in Rafd, a remote mountainous area in Shabwa, a province in southeastern Yemen, where al-Awlaki and senior al-Qaida leaders were presumablymeeting. A Yemeni government official and local news reports said al-Awlaki’s house was also targeted, although it’s unclear whether it was from an airstrike or a subsequent raid.
It was unknown whether al-Awlaki was killed or wounded in the strike.
The United States provided intelligence and other support in the strike, a U.S. official said. It wasn’t clear whether U.S. firepower was employed in the attack. A U.S. military spokesman declined to comment about the attack beyond praising Yemen for its strong stand against terrorism.
U.S. government officials said they were aware of the report of the raid, while declining to confirm any details.
“The president supports the government of Yemen and their efforts to take out terrorist elements in their country, and we’ll continue to support those efforts,” White House spokesman Bill Burton told reporters traveling with President Barack Obama and his family to a Christmas vacation in Hawaii.
When asked if the U.S. knew this strike was coming, Burton replied, “I’m not going to comment on those reports.”
The Yemen Observer, a Yemen newspaper with ties to the government, reported that al-Awlaki’s house was “raided and demolished.”
Al-Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico, has said he exchanged e-mails with Maj.Nidal Hasan, who is accused of opening fire on his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood. The radical preacher has also praised Hasan in interviews and on his Web site.
In interviews, al-Awlaki’s distraught relatives said they have had no official word about the cleric. But after speaking with relatives and friends in the province, they said, they do not believe that he was among those killed.
The cleric’s father, former Yemeni minister of agriculture Nasser al-Awlaki, said his son was living in the home of an uncle and, he believed, he had left that residence about two months ago. The uncle’s house is more than 40 miles from Rafd, said the elder al-Awlaki. But he said he did not know whether the uncle’s house was destroyed.
“If the American government helped in attacking one of [its own] citizens, this is illegal,” said al-Awlaki, his voice cracking. “Nidal Hasan killed 13 people, and he’s going to get a trial. My son has killed nobody. He should face trial if he’s done something wrong.”
“If Obama wants to kill my son, this is wrong,” he added.
The elder al-Awlaki said his son, in spite of his ideology, had no links to al-Qaida.“I don’t think he would be meeting with those people,” Nasser al-Awlaki said.
Intelligence agencies last year intercepted e-mails between Hasan and Anwar al-Awlaki. Investigators say there was nothing suspicious in the communications, and they appeared to be related to a research project.
The cleric told The Washington Post that he thought he played a role in transforming Hasan into a devout Muslim, though he said he didn’t pressure the Army psychiatrist to go on a shooting rampage.
After the shootings, al-Awlaki wrote on his Web site that Hasan was a “hero.”
Thursday’s airstrike purportedly targeted a meeting of al-Qaida leaders gathered to discuss retaliatory attacks on Yemeni and foreign sites, including economic facilities, according to reports on the Web site of Yemen’s official state agency Saba and a Website linked to Yemen’s military.
The Web sites, both citing security officials, said al-Qaida’s top leaders in the Arabian Peninsula - al-Wahishi and al-Shihri - were believed to be at the meeting. But a government official cautioned that the leaders’ presence was yet to be confirmed.
Yemen’s deputy defense minister, Rashad al-Alaimy, told parliament Thursday that three important leadership members were killed, but he did not identify them. He said the government’s action was carried out “using intelligence aid from Saudi Arabia and the United States of America in our fight against terrorism.”
Mohamed Al-Maqdeshi, head of security in Shabwa, said a number of leaders were killed, but he could confirm only a midlevel figure: Mohammed Ahmed Saleh Omair.
In a separate operation, 25suspected al-Qaida members were arrested Wednesday in Sana, the capital, the Interior Ministry said. Security forces set up checkpoints in the capital to control traffic flow as part of a campaign to clamp down on terrorism.
Al-Alaimy said Thursday’s operations were carried out after security officials received information about al-Qaida plans to carry out suicide attacks in Sana against the British Embassy and foreign schools.
Last week, warplanes and security forces on the ground attacked what authorities said was an al-Qaida training camp in the area of Mahsad in the southern province of Abyan - the largest assault on al-Qaida in Yemen in years.
Al-Alaimy told parliament that 23 militants were killed in those strikes, including Yemenis, Saudis, Egyptians and Pakistanis. Witnesses, however, put the number killed at more than 60 in the heaviest strike and said the dead were mostly civilians.
Yemen’s government, with assistance from the United States, has been intensifying its crackdown on purportedhide-outs of al-Qaida, whose presence in recent years has expanded in the poor yet strategic Middle East nation where Osama bin Laden’s father was born.
The Pentagon recently confirmed that it has poured nearly $70 million in military aid into Yemen this year - compared with none in 2008. The U.S. military has boosted its counterterrorism training for Yemeni forces and is providing more intelligence, which probably includes surveillance by unmanned drones, according to U.S. officials and analysts.
The United States has been pressing Yemen for well over a year to take tougher action against al-Qaida, which has steadily been building up its presence in the country. Fighters have been arriving from Iraq and Afghanistan, finding safe haven with tribes angry at the Yemeni government and carrying out attacks in Yemen and across the border in Saudi Arabia.
Information for this article was contributed by Sudarsan Raghavan and Greg Jaffe of The Washington Post, by Tony Capaccio, Greg Stohr and Nicholas Johnston of Bloomberg News and by Ahmed al-Haj of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 12/25/2009