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Oren Dorell and Sarah Lynch
USA Today
August 5, 2013
The U.S. State Department announced that 20 embassies and consulates in the Middle East and Africa will be closed through Saturday, including a small number of additional posts that were not shuttered on Sunday.
The Obama administration’s decision may have disrupted an al-Qaeda terrorist plot but that doesn’t mean the terrorists will abandon their plans for good, a terror expert says.
“These types of plots — they get disrupted and sometimes the hit squads are called up, sometimes they get folded into another operation in the future,” said Thomas Joscelyn, a terrorism analyst at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. But in the long term, “al-Qaeda doesn’t give up on plans.”
The Oct. 12, 2000, suicide bombing of the USS Cole occurred after a failed attempt against the USS Sullivans in January of that year. The destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in 2001 came after a previous attempt to destroy one of the World Trade Center buildings in 1993, with a truck bomb.
“When they have plans on the books, if they think they’re good plans they come back to them,” Joscelyn said.
The State Department said the closures of embassies and consulates were out of an “abundance of caution” and not an “indication of a new threat.”
Rep. Ed Royce, Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has said the threat is linked to al-Qaeda. CBS News reported that U.S. officials say intelligence from terrorists in Yemen under al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) indicated that a possible “significant” attack was in its final stages of preparation.
AQAP has been linked to several terror plots, including the attempted Christmas Day 2009 bombing by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab of a U.S. airliner as it approached Detroit. The bomb, hidden in his underwear, failed to detonate.
Deceased American al-Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki was part of AQAP in Yemen, which was the onetime home of deceased al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden.
The new embassies ordered to shut down through Saturday include facilities in central and east Africa, including the capitals of Burundi and Rwanda. Authorities also closed a third site in Saudi Arabia. Among those closed Sunday but to reopen Monday: posts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Security was beefed up in Cairo and elsewhere as U.S. embassies and consulates closed because of the terror threat. The closures, which the State Department says may be updated, are:
U.S. embassies in Antananarivo, Madagascar; Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; Amman, Jordan; Bujumbura, Burundi; Cairo, Egypt; Djibouti, Djibouti; Dhaka, Bangladesh; Khartoum, Sudan; Kigali, Rwanda; Kuwait City, Kuwait; Manama, Bahrain; Muscat, Oman; Port Louis, Mauritius; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Sanaa, Yemen; Tripoli, Libya; and Doha, Qatar.
Also U.S. consulates in Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; and Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.
A worldwide travel alert remains in effect until Aug. 31. That alert warns U.S. citizens that al-Qaeda and affiliated groups continue to plan terrorist attacks particularly in the Middle East and North Africa.
A global security alert by international police agency Interpol remains in effect and advises increased vigilance after a series of prison breaks with suspected al-Qaeda involvement in countries including Iraq, Pakistan and Libya.
“We may be seeing an effort, a trend, of al-Qaeda trying to announce its relevance, trying to show the world it’s still in the game,” said Frederic Wehrey, a senior associate in the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “And some sort of spectacular attack on a U.S. facility would certainly do that.”
