LONDON: Exactly what danger is posed to US, British and French interests in Yemen is not public knowledge. But it comes as no surprise that the poorest country in the Arab world and the home of Al Qaeda’s most active local franchise is the apparent focus of the international terrorist alert that has led to the closure of western embassies across the Middle East.

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (Aqap) emerged in Yemen in 2007 after the organisation’s effective defeat in neighbouring Saudi Arabia. It is the regular target of US drone strikes. Little is known about the links between it and Al Qaeda central in Pakistan. But it is sustained by local factors including wild terrain, economic misery, tribal divisions and the weakness of the Yemeni state, battered by the Arab spring and the threat from secessionist movements.

Aqap is led by Nasser al-Wahayshi, a charismatic Yemeni jihadi who has created “a unified and cohesive militant organisation that has been involved not only in several transnational terrorist attacks but also in fighting an insurgency that has succeeded in capturing and controlling large areas of territory,” according to Stratfor, an international security consultancy.

In recent weeks Wahayshi, 36, has reportedly been appointed to a senior Al Qaeda position by Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s Egyptian successor. Wahayshi, who was Bin Laden’s private secretary in Afghanistan, fled to Iran in 2001 and was extradited to Yemen in 2003. In 2006 he escaped from a prison in Sana’a in a mass breakout that did much to invigorate the country’s violent extremists.

The group has been under heavy pressure over the past 18 months. Its fighters have been pushed back to desert hideouts from much of the territory they captured in southern Yemen. Despite these setbacks, they have continued publishing an English-language online magazine called Inspire, a magnet for jihadists from Pakistan to Mali. Inspire was cited in the case of the two men charged with murdering an off-duty British soldier in Woolwich in May.

Aqap is monitored by Saudi intelligence as well as the CIA and MI6, which both have liaison officers in Sana’a and Riyadh. The Nigerian bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to blow up a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit in 2009, was radicalised in Yemen while claiming to be there studying Arabic. Earlier that year the group tried to assassinate the Saudi security chief, Prince Muhammad Bin Nayef, with a bomb concealed on the attacker’s body.

Aqap regularly attacks Yemeni security and intelligence officers, with more than 60 killed in the past two years, according to the country’s interior ministry.

It was revealed in February that the CIA was secretly using an airbase in Saudi Arabia to conduct its drone assassination campaign in Yemen. Cables released by WikiLeaks had earlier exposed the scale of US covert involvement.

Last week the Yemeni president, Abdel Mansour Hadi, met Barack Obama in Washington. The two leaders “reaffirmed their commitment to a strong counter-terrorism partnership, discussing a range of efforts to counter the threat to both countries posed by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,” the White House said.

By arrangement with the Guardian