Car Bomb, Ambush at US Yemen Embassy Kills 16 (Update)

 Update:  Here's a link to a more recent New York Times report "16 Are Killed in Attack on U.S. Embassy in Yemen "

 Excerpt AP report "16 dead in car bomb, ambush at US Embassy in Yemen "

Suspected militants armed with automatic weapons, rocket-propelled grenades and at least one suicide car bomb assaulted the U.S. Embassy in the Yemeni capital on Wednesday. The coordinated attack killed 16 people, including six assailaints, officials said.

The U.S. said no Americans were hurt.

Multiple explosions rang out outside the heavily-guarded facility, and gunfire raged for at least 10 minutes at the concrete checkpoints that ring the compound. The dead included six attackers, six Yemeni guards and four civilians, the state news agency SABA reported.

It was the deadliest attack on a compound that has been targeted four times in recent years by bombings, mortars and shootings. Yemen, the ancestral homeland of Osama bin Laden, has struggled to put down al-Qaida-linked Islamic militants, often to the frustration of U.S. counterterrorism officials.

...

Washington considers Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh an ally against terrorism, ever since al-Qaida's 2000 bombing of the USS Cole destroyer in the port of Aden, which killed 17 American sailors. A similar attack on a French oil tanker two years later killed one person.

But the relationship has frequently been rocky, with American officials grumbling over lax Yemeni detention policies for militants.

A group of 23 al-Qaida militants escaped from a high-security San'a prison in 2006, amid reports of collusion between security officials and the militants. The U.S. security think-tank Stratfor said in a statement Wednesday that Yemen's security and intelligence services are deepy infiltrated by militants.

Geez.  It seems like a decade has passed and nothing has changed at all really.

It makes you wonder what all that war was about.  Another terror attack and specifically in bin Laden's original home, one of the nations where al Qaeda is still the strongest certainly sends a message that they are still here and still dangerous.  Maybe those experts who said  we should go after the core of al Qaeda instead of using the GWOT to invade nations for resources for businesses were right after all.

tags: yemen  us embassy bombing  terrorism  car bombing  

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