AQAP’s Global Threat

by Max Boot


Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula doesn’t get the kind of publicity that al-Qaeda central, based in Pakistan, receives but it has emerged as one of the deadliest terrorist groups on the planet–and one that is a direct threat to the United States.

If you want to know how bad AQAP is, all you have to do is look at the horrifying video footage of its attack on a military hospital in Sanaa, the capital of Yemen. The Wall Street Journal summarizes some of the atrocities the terrorists committed:

A gunman walks toward more than a dozen men and women clustered in the hospital corridor. He raises his assault rifle in his left hand as if to shoot them, but then puts his right hand up and tosses a grenade into the crowd a few feet away. It lands at the feet of a frail-looking man stooped over an IV pole. He stares down at it for a moment, then a woman lunges to try to clear the grenade, her black robe whirling around her in the seconds before it explodes.

Some 63 people died in this ruthless and merciless mass murder spree.

If you want to know why this [is] of concern beyond Yemen’s borders, consider the little-noticed arrest over the weekend of an airport technician in Wichita, Kansas, named Terry Lee Loewen. (Why do assassins and would-be assassins always seem to have three names?) He was arrested for plotting to set off a car bomb at the Wichita airport. Luckily the FBI was onto his plot and the man who he thought was helping him turned out to be an FBI agent. Easy to overlook in the perfunctory news reports on Loewen’s arrest was the fact that he was a jihadist with a devotion to AQAP whose act of would-be violence was inspired by AQAP’s late propagandist, the American-born Anwar al-Awlaki.

Of course the threat from jihadist terrorists is hardly confined to AQAP. The Iraq and Syria chapters of al-Qaeda, among others, remain particularly active and particularly deadly. Al-Qaeda bombings in Iraq, in particular, have become so commonplace that they barely make the news anymore. (See, e.g., the latest, little-noticed report of an attack that killed 23 Shiite religious pilgrims who were walking from Baghdad to Karbala.)

Keep all this in mind as you read of proposals to “reform” or rein in the NSA. What is it in the international scene that makes so many people so confident we don’t need the kind of wide-ranging surveillance NSA has undertaken since 9/11? We’re lucky not to have seen “another 9/11″ on American soil, but our success in stopping terrorist plots has been due in part to the very measures which are now deemed “controversial” and likely to be tapered off.


Max Boot

Source: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2013/12/16/aqaps-global-threat/

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