Attack on U.S. Embassy in Yemen Applies Taliban Tactic

Bombings in Yemen are virtually a monthly or weekly event, their targets as indiscriminate as their victims.

In July 2007, a suicide bomber killed two Yemenis and six Spanish tourists when he rammed his car into the 3,000-year-old Queen of Sheba temple in northeastern Yemen. Last March, a mortar attack targeting the American Embassy in Sanaa hit a girls' school instead, wounding several students and killing one adult. Last May a motorcycle bomb exploded amid worshipers leaving Bin Salman mosque in central Saada, in northern Yemen, after Friday prayers, killing at least 18 people and wounding about 45. At the end of July, a car bomb went off at a Yemeni Interior Ministry building in the southern city of Sayoun, killing four and wounding 12. It was, of course, in Yemen's port of Aden that two al-Qaeda operatives in a skiff eight years ago in October rammed the USS Cole, which was refueling there, killing 17 American sailors.

Depending on the day and the perspective, Yemen can be a spectacularly beautiful place or a ridiculously lawless and absurd and dangerous one. That's why the U.S. State Department has recommended for years that "U.S. citizens defer non-essential travel to Yemen at this time. The security threat level remains high due to terrorist activities in Yemen."

What was different about this morning's attack on the U.S. Embassy was its brazen nature. Not a remotely detonated car bomb. Not a long-distance mortar shelling. But heavily armed militants mounting an assault and attempting to penetrate the embassy compound by combining ground forces with car bombs aimed at breaching embassy ramparts. Sounds familiar? That was the tactic used in the Taliban assault on a prison in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in June, that freed 1,000 prisoners, including an estimated 400 Taliban militants. The aim in Sanaa, it seems to me, was not just to rattle the Embassy but to penetrate it. Had the militants succeeded, they'd have pulled off a blow as symbolically stunning (and deadly) as the attack on the Cole.

As it was, the death tally is a close match to that of the Cole bombing. AFP had this account, which confirms the nature of the attack:

Briton Trev Mason told CNN television from Sanaa that he heard at least three big explosions around the US embassy from his nearby residential compound. "We heard the sounds of a heavy gunbattle going on. I looked out of my window and we saw the first explosion going off, a massive fireball very close to the US embassy," he said. "The gunbattle went on for a further 10 to 15 minutes followed by two further loud explosions," he said, adding: "We've heard there's lots of casualties."

Australia's ABC was reporting 16 people killed, "including six soldiers, six militants and four bystanders," in what it described as a twin car bombing. The Times had put the death toll at four before amending it to ABC's tally. I'll update as the story warrants.