Al-Qaeda is losing ground in Yemen. Yet is far from defeated

SAFE behind multiple walls of sandbags at his airbase on Yemen’s coast, a United Arab Emirates army commander points at a map of southern Yemen liberally covered in red. It indicates, he says, the reach of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in March 2016. A second map, dated six months after his men marched ashore that month, has just a few red blotches left.

In a four-pronged attack, Emirati forces managed in a single day, without loss, to evict AQAP from Mukalla, one of Yemen’s main ports and the capital of its largest province, Hadramawt. Soon after, the Emiratis took Zinjibar, a provincial capital 500km (300 miles) west of Mukalla, and Mansoura, its stronghold in Aden, the main southern port. Security at Yemen’s gas terminal at Balhaf has been reinforced. “If we had not gone in, al-Qaeda would have held the south, and [Shia militias] the north, and Yemen would have been forever off the rails,” says the commander, who is responsible for the UAE’s 5,000-odd soldiers in Yemen. If only beating jihadists everywhere was as easy.

Though AQAP is still seen by some as al-Qaeda’s most potent affiliate, its long arm looks shrivelled today. Its leaders still release videos appealing for lone wolves to strike America and its allies worldwide. But the last foreign attack it claimed, the massacre at Charlie Hebdo, a...Continue reading