AQAP...WTF

First of all, apologies for the radio silence. I have been busy getting my head around a new job so rather lost momentum with blog posts. Last month was a great month for Arabian Peninsula Focus, with our best ever day of hits (87 in one day!). Thanks to all those who have a read every now and then.

So what is today's post about? Well, it is inspired by a France24 news article entitled "Drone kills top Qaeda cleric in Yemen". The article details a drone attack which killed Sheikh Adel al-Abab, al-Qaeda's top cleric in the Arabian Peninsula. The drone attack almost failed, with a second shot required to dispose of the cleric as he escaped from his burning car.   

A while back I wrote about the increasing role of US-controlled drones in Yemen. It seems that the frequency of these attacks remains high. What can we read into this? At a high level it suggests the following:

- President Hadi, despite his successes in certain areas of Yemeni administration, is struggling to dampen the influence of al-Qaeda in Yemen. 

- The USA remains increasingly concerned about the lack of internal ministry control in Yemen and the free-ride this provides to al-Qaeda network members to grow in strength. 

I cannot see Hadi winning the flight against the terrorist network on his own and therefore predict continued swarms of US-controlled drone attacks in the almost failed state. 

As a brief closing note, I have to say that I found myself chuckling at an acronym which cropped up throughout the France 24 article: AQAP (al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula). Although this may sound catchy, it is in fact completely superfluous as an acronym - one might say an acronym for acronym's sake! 

If Bin Laden is seen as the founder of Al-Qaeda and we accept that Bin Laden was Yemeni/Saudi then hasn't it always been an Arabian Peninsula-based network that then spread further afield? I guess that we are now in the Acronym era of uncontrolled abbreviations. TLAs (which stands for three letter acronym for those unfamiliar with this acronymous acronym) have clearly been exhausted. Bring on the FLA era! 

In the spirit of fighting fire with fire, there is only one correct response to AQAP: WTF!