US to reopen Mideast embassies except Yemen on Sunday

WASHINGTON DC, USA – The United States said Friday, August 9, it would reopen all of the embassies it shut this week except the one in Yemen, after re-assessing the Al-Qaeda threat.

US State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Washington would also keep its consulate in the Pakistani city of Lahore closed, after pulling out staff on Thursday, August 8.

The United States had closed some two dozen embassies and consulates since Sunday, August 4, after reported intelligence intercepts from Al-Qaeda suggested an attack was imminent.

The closures affected virtually all of the Arab world and were eventually extended to include parts of sub-Saharan Africa.

Psaki said that 18 of the 19 embassies and consulates subject to the week-long closure would reopen on Sunday, August 11, a working day in most Muslim-majority countries.

“Our embassy in Sanaa, Yemen, will remain closed because of ongoing concerns about a threat stream indicating the potential for terrorist attacks emanating from Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,” Psaki said.

“Our consulate in Lahore, Pakistan, which closed due to a separate credible threat to that facility, will also remain closed,” she added.

Psaki said the United States would keep monitoring threats in Sanaa and Lahore as it decides when to reopen the missions.

US President Barack Obama, speaking earlier Friday at a news conference, said that the United States was trying to strengthen countries’ capacity to fight local branches of Al-Qaeda.

“This tightly organized and relatively centralized Al-Qaeda that attacked us on 9/11 has been broken apart,” Obama said. “And it is very weak and does not have a lot of operational capacity.”

But Obama pointed to dangers of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a unit of the extremist group that effectively controls parts of Yemen.

“We still have these regional organizations like AQAP that can pose a threat,” he said.

Regional militants can “drive, potentially, a truck bomb into an embassy wall and can kill some people,” Obama added.

“That requires us, then, to make sure that we have a strategy that is strengthening those partners so that they’ve got their own capacity to deal with what are potentially manageable, regional threats if these countries are a little bit stronger,” he said.

Obama met last week at the White House with Yemeni President Abdrabuh Mansur Hadi and praised him for his cooperation with the United States against Al-Qaeda.

At least 12 suspected AQAP militants were killed in three separate drone strikes in Yemen on Thursday.

The Wall Street Journal cited an anonymous US official as saying the leader of AQAP, Nasser al-Wuhayshi, masterminded a plot that sparked the global alert.

Al-Wuhayshi, one of a number of Al Qaeda suspects who broke out of a jail in Yemen in 2006, has been linked to a 2008 attack on the US embassy in Sanaa.

The Obama administration chose to close the embassies after facing criticism at home over the deaths of four diplomats, including ambassador Chris Stevens, in an attack by Islamist extremists on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

The threat was also reported at a time when many US lawmakers are questioning the need for pervasive government surveillance on its citizens’ communications.

Obama called his news conference Friday to announce reforms to increase the transparency of intelligence operations. – Rappler.com