Yemen vows to fight terrorism ahead of Brown conference (Roundup)

Jan 2, 2010, 17:13 GMT

Sana'a/Cairo - Yemen will fight terrorist groups on its soil, the country's foreign minister said Saturday, as the government welcomed a planned international conference on growing extremism in the poor Gulf country.

Security forces meanwhile began a clampdown along Yemeni coasts in efforts to prevent infiltration by Islamist militants from neighbouring Somalia.

The previous day, Somalia's al Shabab militia said it would send fighters to aid al-Qaeda in Yemen. Al-Qaeda has claimed responsibility for an attempted Christmas Day bombing of a plane over Detroit, in the United States.

Somalia, located just across the sea, sends tens of thousands of refugees to Yemen each year, as civilians flee raging violence and poverty. Concerns have mounted that militants could take similar routes.

The conference on radicalization, announced Friday by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown for later this month, was on the 'right track to rally international support for development, poverty reduction and counter-terrorism in Yemen,' the official Yemeni SABA news agency said.

Quoting a website allied with the ruling party in Yemen, SABA said 'poverty and soaring unemployment in the developing world (are the) main factors (causing) extremism.'

In his most recent radio address, US President Barack Obama said, in the clearest language to date, that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian man who tried to set off the bomb, was trained in Yemen by al-Qaeda.

Abdulmatallab is the son of a Nigerian banker, and his family said they tried to warn authorities about the radicalization of their son. Obama has ordered an investigation into the intelligence failures surrounding the near-tragedy over Detroit.

Yemen, pushed and aided by Western capitals, has in recent weeks stepped up attacks against al-Qaeda in the country.

'Yemen never accepts terrorists and jihadist militants on its soil and it can deal with the existence of any of them,' Foreign Minister Abu Bakr al-Qirbi said.

He added that the Somalia militia should focus on bringing stability to its own people, rather than exporting 'terror.'

The Elman Peace and Human Rights Centre, in its latest report, said over 1,700 people died in war-torn Somalia in 2009. Observers increasingly view the country as a failed state.

Al-Qaeda established bases in the country's south over the last decade, helped by groups of Arab fighters who took up residence in the country, after their battle against the Soviets in Afghanistan ended in the 1990.

Yemen's attacks against the international Islamist militant network are said to be in collaboration with the US, which has increased its assistance to the resource-poor nation, with estimates that over 70 million dollars in military aid is now reaching Sana'a annually.

Al-Qaeda claimed the Christmas Day attack, in which no one was killed only because the intended bomb malfunctioned, was in response to the US military assistance to Yemen.