Massive crowds were gathered in Yemen’s capital, Sana’a, when word broke that Osama bin Laden had been killed by U.S. forces in Pakistan. But the al-Qaeda leader’s fate was not the issue that had brought thousands into the streets of his ancestral homeland. “We’re not interested in Osama bin Laden,” said Ibrahim al-Qahlani, an opposition protester at Sana’a’s Change Square. “This is just one man, with little connection to our country. Our fight is against Ali Abdullah Saleh.”
Indeed, reactions to the al-Qaeda leader’s death have been muted if not ambivalent in Yemen, where antigovernment protests have held the country in political deadlock for more than three months. While the Yemeni government officially labeled bin Laden’s elimination a “monumental milestone in the ongoing war on terror,” responses on the street have been much more subdued.
AQAP operates separately from al-Qaeda’s central command in Afghanistan and Pakistan. With little interaction between cells, the death of Osama bin Laden is unlikely to affect operational capabilities in Yemen, analysts say.
“The local al-Qaeda franchise is more influenced by factions of the regime than it is by association with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda leadership in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” says Abdul Ghani al-Iryani, a Sana’a-based political analyst. And that’s precisely what demonstrators in the capital are afraid of. Protesters calling for the resignation of the 32-year President say that bin Laden’s death could be a lifeline for the Saleh regime.
In what many saw as a characteristic reversal for Yemen’s mercurial leader, Saleh on Saturday refused to sign an agreement brokered by his Gulf Arab neighbors under which he would leave office in 30 days in exchange for a guarantee of immunity from prosecution — despite having publicly embraced the deal just days earlier.
