As Melanie Phillips says in her article for this week’s issue of the magazine, the case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab highlights the role of other, less frequently discussed, countries in Islamist terror. One such country is Yemen, where Abdulmutallab is thought to have trained at an Al Qaeda camp. The US believes there may be a few hundred al Qaeda fighters in Yemen, centered on a group of key network leaders who are operating a number of camps.
Yemen has slowly been getting more international attention. A few weeks ago I was meant to go on Al Jazeera, but my appearance was cancelled at the last minute because, I was told, of other “breaking news”. Curious, I turned on BBC and searched the internet to find out what the headline-grabbing story could be. Could it be the death of civilians in Helmand and Kandahar? Or a terrorist attack somewhere? No, the Doha-based news channel was leading on clashes between government troops and Shia fighters in northern Yemen, which have reportedly left dozens of people dead.
In Britain, the story received no coverage at all.
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