The next chapter in Yemen’s military offensive

Gunmen opened fire on the Yemeni Defense Minister’s convoy while he, along with senior security officials, toured through Shabwah governorate. All survived the attack. Defense Minister Major General Mohammed Nasser Ahmed arrived in Azzan, Shabwah, yesterday to celebrate the Yemeni military’s victory (again) over the al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) militants there.

The Yemeni military has taken the fight to AQAP over the past few weeks—the long-awaited sequel to its sweep through south Yemen in June 2012—but this time around, AQAP has taken the fight to the capital and has been slow to retreat from its sanctuary that straddles the Abyan-Shabwah provincial border. Multiple attacks in Sana’a, the capital, this past Monday forced U.S. Embassy Sana’a to close through at least May 10 due to the threat against Western interests.

Yemen’s government has kept a running list of AQAP militants killed, some of them certainly key to operations planning, and continues to announce the military’s progress against the group in the south and counterterrorism raids targeting AQAP in Sana’a. The fight has certainly not been easy and credit is due to the Yemeni units fighting on the Abyan and Shabwah fronts.

But have we seen this before? To some degree, yes.

The 2012 “victory” over AQAP’s insurgent arm, Ansar al Sharia, was supposed to have pushed AQAP out of the same sanctuaries contested today. That’s a sign that a counter-insurgency strategy is failing. We’ve learned it the hard way in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it applies just as well to Yemen. The Yemeni military is once again fighting hard for ground it had already won in 2012—and then lost again. When Sana’a announces once more that it has driven AQAP from its stronghold, the U.S. should not applaud. We should, instead, think about what we need to do differently to help the Yemenis hold and expand the ground they’ve taken.

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