Latest News | Breaking News | Hot Current news /Hot waves

President Obama said he has “no intention of sending U.S. boots on the ground” to Yemen and Somalia amid mounting concern about terrorist cells in those countries.
Skip to next paragraph
Related


In excerpts of an interview with People magazine released on Sunday, Mr. Obama said that the “border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan remains the epicenter of Al Qaeda,” though he acknowledged that the group’s branch in Yemen has become “a more serious problem.”

But his administration is seeking to emphasize international cooperation, rather than military action, to confront the problem in Yemen.

“I never rule out any possibility in a world that is this complex,” said Mr. Obama. But, he added, “in countries like Yemen, in countries like Somalia, I think working with international partners is most effective at this point.”

In November, the president announced he would send 30,000 more American troops to Afghanistan to fight terrorists. But less than a month later, the group Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula suddenly came into focus when a Nigerian man who unsuccessfully tried to blow up a plane near Detroit on Christmas Day said he had received help from Islamists in Yemen.

As with the situation in Pakistan, fighting extremist strongholds in Yemen puts the United States government in a difficult position. Yemeni leaders have made it clear over they past week that they do not want American forces on their soil. However, security experts say that the government might be too weak to effectively fight the terrorist elements. Instead, the U.S. has sent $70 million in military aid to the country – a figure it plans to double this year – and Yemen has stepped up raids against militant outposts in recent months.

Mr. Obama’s remarks echoed those of his top military commanders in recent days. In an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria earlier this week, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said sending U.S. troops to Yemen is “not a possibility.”

And in an interview that aired Sunday with the network’s Christiane Amanpour, General David H. Petreaus said he also does not want to send American forces to Yemen. “We would always want a host nation to deal with a problem itself,” he said.

In playing down any talk of American military intervention in Yemen, the Obama administration is apparently trying to strike a conciliatory tone to people in the region.

“One of the things that we have to understand is that unlike a traditional war, the threats that we face and our allies face are not always going to be centered or localized in a particular geographic area, but are rather networks that are connecting over cyberspace,” Mr. Obama said. “And how we project ourselves to the world, the message we send to Muslim communities around the world, the overwhelming majority of which reject Al Qaeda but where a handful of individuals may be moved by a jihadist ideology, what counter-messaging we have to them -- all those things — continue to be extraordinarily important.”

He added, “We can’t return to sort of a garrison-state notion that we’re just going to hunker down and this is only an issue of firepower and boots on the ground.”

The full interview with the president and Michelle Obama will be in Friday’s issue of People.
source-nytimes.com