Snapshot of Yemen

I realize that most of Waq al-waq’s long-time and loyal readers (as silent as you usually are) are well aware of the complicated tribal politics in Yemen, but since Waq al-waq’s daily readership has more than tripled over the past week I thought it would be illuminating to highlight this article from al-Tagheer.

The article, in Arabic, mentions that members of the Hamdan tribe in al-Jawf have cut-off a public road to protest the fact that the Yemeni government has not paid salaries to some of its tribesmen who are member of the military.

The salaries were reportedly stopped after tribesmen from Hamdan seized a government truck and plundered it.

The last line of the article says that worth mentioning is the fact that most of the men in al-Jawf work for the military or security services.

Also worth noting, but not in the article is that al-Jawf is one of the places in Yemen in which al-Qaeda is the strongest.

My point? The US does not know nearly enough about the local tribal and political geographies in Yemen to effectively target let alone eradicate al-Qaeda in Yemen. The US has been down this road before – attempting to bomb AQ into submission – and it worked for a few years but now the US is facing the second incarnation of AQ in Yemen.