Yemen Rejects Some U.S. Requests on Extremists

SANAA, Yemen -- A growing number of attacks attributed to Islamist fighters, including last week's assault on the U.S. Embassy here, appear to have ended Yemen's immunity from such violence, but the country's leaders say they have no intention of adopting some of the tougher security measures, as U.S. officials have urged.

Foreign Minister Abou Bakr al-Qurbi said his government will continue to reject demands to arrest many of the suspects identified by the United States or United Nations as al-Qaeda financiers and organizers, who walk freely in the capital, Sanaa.

"These issues should be left to every country," Qurbi said at his home in Sanaa after the attack on the U.S. Embassy, which killed 13 people, including an American standing in line outside the building. "Other countries should keep in mind the country's laws and constitution," he added, as well as whether "the country has the resources to take the actions that are wanted."

The U.S. approach to Islamist extremists was based on "cracking down," Qurbi said. Yemeni officials, he said, believe in "cracking down on terrorism, but also in dialogue and converting many of the terrorists to become normal citizens."

Seven years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Yemen and the United States "need really to sit down and evaluate our methods of dealing with terrorists -- after the billions of dollars spent fighting terrorism, whether we have achieved our goals," he said.

Yemen's approach increasingly seems not to be working, however. The attack on the U.S. Embassy occurred in the heart of the capital, which the government has ringed with checkpoints and troops to protect against the increasing Islamist violence and recent armed uprisings in the north and south.

U.S. and Yemeni officials said they suspect that al-Qaeda was behind the embassy assault, in which six attackers also died. Other strikes in Yemen blamed on al-Qaeda since 2006 have targeted Western diplomatic facilities, domestic security installations, oil facilities and foreign tourists.

Analysts and some al-Qaeda members and supporters here said they think the attacks are being staged by cells that claim allegiance to al-Qaeda but do not feel bound by a reported non-aggression pact between the old guard of al-Qaeda and the Yemeni government.

In 1999, according to witnesses cited by the U.S. commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden negotiated a deal with unidentified Yemeni officials: Al-Qaeda would leave Yemen alone, if Yemen left al-Qaeda alone.

Most Arab governments, including those of Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia, have banned or officially curtailed Islamist movements that espouse violence. Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen's president since 1978, has not.

Saleh's government has acknowledged enlisting Islamist fighters to help the military quell Yemen's rebellious south in 1994. The government sought al-Qaeda's help this year against Shiite rebels in the north, Yemeni news media quoted Saleh's spokesman as saying.

Saleh has refused U.S. demands to arrest Abdul Majid al-Zindani, who recruited and financed Yemeni and other Arab fighters for the Islamist guerrilla war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.