Al-Qaeda in Yemen, Obama’s Counterterror Success Story, Officially Claims Credit for Paris Attack

In a video released over night, an al-Qaeda group publicly claimed credit for directing, organizing, and financing last week’s deadly attack on a Paris magazine. According to a rough translation from Gulf cable-news correspondent Jenan Moussa, the video says, “The one who chose the target, laid plan & financed the operation is leadership of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.”

AQAP had already sent out unofficial claims of credit for the attack, and one of Charlie Hebdo’s top cartoonists had been featured in a “most wanted” feature in the terror group’s magazine. The group is not claiming credit for the attack on a Paris kosher supermarket later last week, although it has expressed support for the perpetrator and that attack appeared to be coordinated with a hostage situation involving the Charlie Hebdo killers.

The level of coordination and support between that al-Qaeda group, other al-Qaeda branches, and the attackers in Paris isn’t clear, but it is notable that the video apparently says the attack was ordered by an even higher authority than AQAP: Ayman al-Zawahiri, the head of the global al-Qaeda network and the center of the “al-Qaeda core” in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

There had already been reports that one or more of the people involved in last week’s attacks had trained with AQAP, which is based in Yemen and has produced some of the more viable threats against Western targets over the last few years. The failed 2009 Christmas Day bomber, for instance, was Nigerian but reportedly received bombmaking training in Yemen.

The U.S. has been fighting AQAP for years now, running counterterrorism operations there and backing a fragile Yemeni government that’s struggled to control the country and even its capital. In laying out his strategy against the Islamic State, President Obama even mentioned that the operation would in some ways resemble the U.S.’s anti-al-Qaeda strategy in Yemen and Somalia: a combination of air strikes, limited raids by Western forces, and support for the local government. That’s been a relatively low cost strategy in Yemen and Somalia, but as AQAP’s reach suggests, it’s not bringing victory anytime soon.