Al-Qaeda veterans ‘are flooding into Yemen’

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Richard Spencer
The Daily Telegraph
January 11, 2010

Editor’s note: This recruitment process began with the CIA in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

[efoods]In the gloomiest internal assessment of Yemen’s security yet, he said jihadis from across the Arab world are hiding in the lawless hills of Shabwa province where the so-called Christmas Day “underwear bomber” is thought to have been trained, its governor, Ali Hasan al-Ahmadi, said.

“There are dozens of Saudi and Egyptian al-Qaeda militants who came to the province,” said Shabwa’s governor, Ali Hasan al-Ahmadi.

He told the al-Sharq al-Awsat newspaper the militants had joined homegrown Yemeni radicals both from Shabwa and other regions of the country.

The province, in the south-east of the country, was one of the targets of a series of air raids against al-Qaeda targets conducted by the Yemeni authorities with American military support shortly before Christmas.