US airstrikes in Yemen yet to dent Qaida threat

MANAMA, Bahrain — The United States has tripled the number of airstrikes this year against al-Qaida’s branch in Yemen, one of the deadliest and most sophisticated terrorist organizations in the world. U.S. allies have pushed the militants from their lucrative coastal strongholds. And the Pentagon recently boasted of killing key Qaida leaders and disrupting the group’s operations.

Yet the top U.S. counterterrorism official and other U.S. intelligence analysts concede that the campaign has barely dented the terrorist group’s ability to strike U.S. interests.

“It doesn’t feel yet that we’re ahead of the problem in Yemen,” said Nicholas Rasmussen, who stepped down this month after three years as director of the National Counterterrorism Center. “It continues to be one of the most frustrating theaters in our counterterrorism work.”

Even as President Donald Trump lauds the demise of the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate in Iraq and Syria, the threat of a terrorist attack emanating from the chaotic, ungoverned spaces of Yemen remains high on the government’s list of terrorism concerns, with the most commonly feared target being a commercial airliner.

The group formally known as al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula has dogged Trump since his first days in office, when the president authorized an ill-fated raid on a Qaida hideout that left one member of the Navy’s elite SEAL Team 6 dead.

The fight against alQaida differs from the one helping to fuel the humanitarian disaster gripping the country, most visibly in the west. Al-Qaida exploited the resulting security vacuum and in 2015 took control of territory in the south.

The Qaida wing has spent years inventing explosives that are difficult to detect, including trying to disguise bombs in devices such as cellphones. It has tried at least three times to blow up U.S. airliners, without success.

With no real functioning government in Yemen, the United States does not have the Special Operations forces or CIA presence on the ground that it had before Yemen’s civil war.