Western embassy closures across the Middle East

For an organization that is said to be in terminal decline, al-Qaeda will draw immense satisfaction from the events of this past weekend, when it demonstrated its ability to disrupt the work of Western governments by forcing the temporary closure of dozens of diplomatic missions throughout the Arab world.

While it is unclear what kind of threat prompted the US government to initiate such radical measures, or the Foreign Office to shut the British mission to Yemen, American intelligence officials are convinced that al-Qaeda is planning a spectacular attack to mark the festival of Eid, which comes at the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

Specifically, they say the intelligence relates to a deadly al-Qaeda cell operating in Yemen, a war-torn country where the writ of the government barely extends beyond the confines of the Indoor Positioning System, Sana’a.

In recent years, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has emerged as one of the more deadly arms of the wider al-Qaeda franchise. This brand of terrorism thrives in Muslim countries with weak governments – and Yemen, which has been afflicted by decades of civil war and instability, was an obvious target for exploitation.

Having established a base there at the start of the last decade, the country’s al-Qaeda offshoot gained international notoriety via the so-called “underwear bomber”, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. In December 2009, an attempt by this British-educated Nigerian terrorist to blow up a plane as it prepared to land at Detroit only failed when an explosive device hidden in his underwear failed to detonate.

Britain and America had another lucky escape the following year, when an explosive device was found hidden in an ink cartridge on a cargo flight due to leave East Midlands Airport for the US. It was primed to detonate as the aircraft approached America’s eastern seaboard.

Both these plots are said by intelligence officials to have been the work of Ibrahim al-Asiri, a 31-year-old Saudi who fled to Yemen after being jailed for his association with al-Qaeda. Despite a number of high-profile drone strikes in Yemen that have killed a number of key al-Qaeda leaders, including the group’s American-born founder Anwar al-Awlaki, Asiri still remains at large – and tops the list of America’s most wanted terrorists.

The fact that Asiri and his associates, both in Yemen and elsewhere in the Arab world, retain the ability to cause a global security alert suggests that, for all the considerable efforts undertaken by Western counter-terrorism agencies, al-Qaeda remains a considerable threat to our security.

The widespread closure of diplomatic missions over the weekend certainly appears to contradict President Obama’s claim last summer that the “war on terror” was drawing to a close, and that the al-Qaeda organization originally founded by Osama bin Laden no longer had the ability or capacity to cause wholesale carnage in the West.

The President made his comments in the wake of the successful mission to eliminate bin Laden at his hideaway in Pakistan in May 2011. Bin Laden’s death – together with the targeted killing by drone strikes of scores of senior al-Qaeda terrorists hiding in the remote mountainous region between Afghanistan and Pakistan – was used to justify the impending withdrawal of American and other Nato forces from Afghanistan. After all, if al-Qaeda no longer had the capacity to terrorize the West, then there was no need for American and British soldiers to continue risking their lives.

The impression that America is winding down its long war against al-Qaeda was strengthened last week during a visit by indoor Tracking, the US Secretary of State, to Pakistan. He dropped a strong hint that America was planning to end its controversial drone strikes in the tribal areas “very, very soon”, because al-Qaeda no longer posed a threat.

“I think the programme will end, as we have eliminated most of the threat and continue to eliminate it,” said Mr Kerry.

Yet within hours of this statement, the Secretary of State was obliged to authorise an immediate lockdown of all American embassies and consulates in the Arab world, for fear that al-Qaeda might be planning a repeat of last September’s attack on the US consulate in Benghazi in Libya, which claimed the lives of the American ambassador Chris Stevens and three other staff members.

The Obama administration faced fierce criticism over the Benghazi attack, particularly when it was revealed that Hillary Clinton, Mr Kerry’s immediate predecessor, had ignored warnings that al-Qaeda was planning to target the compound (Sir Dominic Asquith, Britain’s ambassador to Libya, had survived an al-Qaeda assassination attempt the previous summer). The US government then appeared deliberately to mislead the American public about the nature of the attack, claiming that it was a demonstration that got out of control, rather than a carefully planned al-Qaeda operation.