AQAP The Most Successful al Qaedea Franchise

Yemen has become one of al Qaeda's most secure bases and a hub for its activities on the Arabian Peninsula and on the Horn of Africa. AQAP maintains safe havens in various parts of the country and is also known to operate terror camps in Aden, Marib, and Abyan, and in the Alehimp and Sanhan regions in Sana'a. The terror group has conducted attacks on oil facilities, tourists, the US embassy in Sana'a, and Yemeni security forces.

AQAP's base in Yemen serves as a command and control center, a logistics hub, a transit point from Asia and the Peninsula, and a source of weapons and munitions for the al Qaeda-backed Shabaab in Somalia.

AQAP has also used its Yemeni base as a hub for attacks against the West. The 2009 Fort Hood shootings and the Christmas Day airline plot, as well as an airline parcel bomb plot in 2010, have all been traced back to Yemen.

"Yemen is Pakistan in the heart of the Arab world," a US intelligence official told The Long War Journal in 2009. "You have military and government collusion with al Qaeda, peace agreements, budding terror camps, and the export of jihad to neighboring countries."

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