The administration of Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh has also cut government funding to religious schools run by the Muslim Brotherhood and shut many of them down, converting the facilities into public institutions. In addition, courts have recently handed down harsh sentences to more than a dozen individuals convicted of planning and carrying out the 2002 attack on the French oil tanker Limburg and the attack on the USS Cole two years before.

These steps have met the U.S. government’s approval. On September 1, Washington dropped its weapons embargo against Yemen, filling orders from the Yemeni air force for fighter jets and C-130 planes to transport troops and weaponry. The White House had made frequent exceptions to the arms embargo over the last two years, as military cooperation between the two governments improved.

“We’re updating our existing alliances and building new relationships based on security realities of this new century, and not the last century,” U.S. defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld said September 10 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. “Countries like Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Yemen, Pakistan, India—to cite but a few examples—are now partners in the fight against extremism in the Middle East and Central Asia.”

In a trial in late August, one defendant was sentenced to death and 14 others to between 3 and 10 years in prison, after being convicted of carrying out the attack on the French tanker Limburg. In September, two men were sentenced to death and two others to up to 10 years in prison after a judge found them guilty of planning the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole which killed 17 U.S. sailors in the port of Aden.

Religious schools, many of which once functioned with government funding, have been stripped of such financial aid. Scientific institutes run by the Muslim Brotherhood, for example, used to get 6 billion Yemeni rials ($32.4 million) from the Ministry of Education. The government cut their funding and converted them into public schools. It has also promised to shut down all schools that do not teach a standardized curriculum.

The Yemen Times estimated that some 35,000 “Islamic extremists” have left the country in face of this crackdown. Hundreds of others have been arrested. The police have regularized spying operations at mosques and religious institutions.

“We are not allies of America or collaborators,” Yemeni president Saleh told a Beirut newspaper August 19, after taking some heat from his opponents for this crackdown. “But we cooperate with the Americans within the framework of the international community in order to combat the world’s evil, terrorism.”

On June 18, an anti-government insurgency broke out in the northern part of the country. Its leader, Hussein Bard Eden al-Mouthy, was a former member of parliament from the pro-monarchist Has Party. He said he modeled his group, Young Believers, after Hezbollah in Lebanon. Al-Mouthy called the Yemeni president “a tyrant… who wants to please America and Israel.” Supporters of al-Mouthy had staged a wave of demonstrations outside mosques in Yemen in the months leading up to the rebellion.

The Yemeni government sent at least 2,000 troops, along with tribesmen it has recruited from other regions, to crush al-Mouthy’s rebellion. More than 600 soldiers and rebels reportedly died in the battles.

On September 10, Yemeni authorities announced that al-Mouthy had been killed by government forces. Eleven days later, the warring parties agreed to a cease-fire.

Washington slapped economic sanctions on Yemen in the early 1990s after the government in Sana’a voted against Washington’s war resolution for the 1990-91 Gulf War in the United Nations Security Council. The U.S. government also imposed a ban on weapons sales to Yemen in 1994, when a 10-week civil war broke out after a failed secession attempt in the southern part of the majority Arab country.

Over the past three years, however, as Washington has carried out two wars in the region in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, assault on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the Saleh administration has increased its military collaboration with the U.S. government. In June, the Yemeni and Jordanian regimes became the first Arab governments to offer to send troops to join the U.S.-led occupation forces in Iraq, on the condition that the UN oversee the troops.

In early 2002, some 100 U.S. Special Forces troops arrived in Yemen to begin “counter-terrorism” operations. In November of that year, an unmanned Predator drone operated by the CIA fired a missile at a car in Yemen killing the six men inside. The CIA claimed the men were high-level al-Qaeda operatives.

In the spring of 2003, Washington established a military command at a former French base on the Gulf of Aden in the east African country of Djibouti, less than 50 miles from Yemen across the Gulf of Aden. The “Combined Joint Task Force—Horn of Africa” includes approximately 1,400 Marines, CIA operatives, and Special Forces soldiers. These troops are responsible for “counterterrorism” operations in Yemen and across the Horn of Africa—including Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya, and Djibouti, as well as the coastal waters of the Red Sea, Gulf of Aden, and Indian Ocean. Since 2003, forces from that base have trained Yemeni government troops and conducted operations in the country.  
 
 
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