WASHINGTON — US officials suspect that Yemen fed them false intelligence for a 2010 strike against Al Qaeda suspects that killed a local leader locked in a dispute with the president’s family, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
The disclosure of such an incident would complicate relations between the two allies at a time when Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh is seeking to visit the United States amid months of popular protests demanding his ouster.
The May 25, 2010 US missile strike, launched on intelligence supplied by the Yemeni government, killed Jabir Shabwani, 31, deputy governor of the central Mareb province, whose long-standing relations with Saleh’s family had soured.
“We think we got played,” the Journal quoted an official as saying, adding that other officials do not believe there was a Yemeni plan to kill Shabwani.
Saleh has been a key ally in the covert US war on Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), a group increasingly seen as a threat to the United States comparable to the global network’s core leadership in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
NOTE BY THE EDITOR: Nothing new here. This has happened again and again in Afghanistan and Iraq, where local war lords wanted to ‘get the upper edge’ over some rivals.
Categories: Asia, Crime, United States, War, Yemen