YEMEN OPERATES LARGELY under the radar as a supporter of the global jihad. Both Yemeni and U.S. officials publicly tout Yemen's partnership with the United States in the war on terror. The U.S. embassy in Sana'a described the February 2006 escape of 23 al Qaeda operatives from a maximum security jail as "understandable in a way," considering Yemen's rampant corruption, weak institutions, and bureaucratic incompetence. (The escapees included several Cole bombers and an American associated with the Lackawanna, New York terror cell.) Presidential assistant Frances Townsend has described the Yemeni regime as an "inconsistent" partner in the war on terror, but Yemen has been quite consistent in its appeasement and facilitation of al Qaeda and related jihadi groups, and, as a result, has played a significant role in the destabilization of Iraq.

Yemeni jihadists are found in Somalia, Chechnya, Afghanistan, and Lebanon. Yemenis also comprise one of the largest contingents of foreign fighters in Iraq. 1,289 Yemeni men had traveled to Iraq for jihad by mid-2006, and 153 of them had been killed, according to the Yemeni weekly Al Tajamo. Other reports place the figure as high as 1800. Most were teenagers, the paper found, and were swayed by extremist religious rhetoric. The majority went to Iraq during 2006, indicating an uptick in the flow.

Yemenis and North Africans perpetrate the bulk of suicide bombings in Iraq, a U.S. official reported. Yemenis Khaldoun al-Hukaimi and Saleh Mana escaped from an Aden prison in 2003 where they were held in connection with the bombing of the USS Cole. They committed suicide attacks in Baghdad in July 2005. A Yemeni thought complicit in the beheading of two Russian diplomats in Iraq was arrested in Aden with the assistance of Russian intelligence, and members of the Yemeni military have facilitated the training of many of the terrorists who later find their way to Iraq.

The collusion between Yemen's military and its Salafi jihadists is well documented. President Saleh utilized Afghan Arab Jihadists as a paramilitary force in the 1994 civil war against the Socialist forces of the former South Yemen, and Saleh is currently deploying Salafi Jihaddists (including members of the Aden Abyan Islamic Army) against a band of Shiite rebels in Yemen's northern Sa'ada region. In February 2007, the Yemeni Defense Ministry publicized a fatwa legitimizing the killing of the rebels and their supporters as an Islamic obligation.

It's a two way street: Yemeni terrorists fight on behalf of the military; the military trains the terrorists. Families of suicide bombers reported that their sons and brothers were trained with the knowledge of security officials and the logistical support of high ranking members of the Yemeni military, al-Tajamo reported. Other sources noted that safe houses were established in the capital to house the newly minted jihadists until their travel arrangements could be finalized (These arrangements regularly include forged documents and transit via airplane to Syria.).

In May 2005, a Yemeni government official stated that elements of the Yemeni secret services had established training camps for exiled Iraqi Ba'athists who wished to fight U.S. forces in Iraq. A number of sources reported that Yemen was using chlorine gas against the Shiite rebels in 2005, a full year before foreign fighters in Iraq adopted the same tactic.