Thursday and Friday, April 16-17, two branches of Al Qaeda took the lead in violent conflicts, catapulting key areas of the Middle East into greater peril than ever. In Yemen, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and in Iraq, the Islamist State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), launched new offensives 3.050 kilometer apart.
DEBKAfile’s military sources report that both branches of the Islamist terror movement used the absence of professional adversarial troops on the ground – American and Saudi – to push forward in the two arenas. Washington and Riyadh alike had decided to trust local forces to carry the battle – Iran-backed Shiite militias alongside Iraqi troops against ISIS in Iraq, and the Yemeni army against Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen.
This gave Al Qaeda a free passage to carry on, especially when offered the further benefit of contradictions in the Obama administration’s attitude toward its foe, Tehran: On the one hand, Iran was offered lead role in the region for the sake of a nuclear deal; on the other, it faced US opposition for its support of rebel forces in Yemen.
The conflict in Yemen is no longer a straight sectarian proxy war between Sunni-ruled Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran (that also stretches to Iraq and Syria.), as a result of what happened Thursday, April 16.
