A general view of the U.S. embassy compound in Sanaa
WASHINGTON: The US said it would reopen all of the embassies it shut this week except the one in Yemen, after re-assessing the Al Qaeda threat.
State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Washington would also keep its consulate in the Pakistani city of Lahore closed, after pulling out staff on Thursday.
The US had closed some two dozen embassies and consulates since August 4 after reported intelligence intercepts from Al Qaeda suggested an attack was imminent. The closures affected virtually all of the Arab world and were eventually extended to include parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Psaki said that 18 of the 19 embassies and consulates subject to the week-long closure would reopen today, a working day in most Muslim-majority countries.
“Our embassy in Sana’a, Yemen, will remain closed because of ongoing concerns about a threat stream indicating the potential for terrorist attacks emanating from Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,” Psaki said.
“Our consulate in Lahore, Pakistan, which closed due to a separate credible threat to that facility, will also remain closed,” she added. Psaki said the US would keep monitoring threats in Sana’a and Lahore.
US President Barack Obama, speaking earlier on Friday at a news conference, said that the US was trying to strengthen countries’ capacity to fight local branches of Al Qaeda.
“This tightly organised and relatively centralised Al Qaeda that attacked us on 9/11 has been broken apart,” Obama said. “And it is very weak and does not have a lot of operational capacity.”
But Obama pointed to dangers of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a unit of the extremist group that effectively controls parts of Yemen.
Regional militants can “drive, potentially, a truck bomb into an embassy wall and can kill some people,” Obama added.
“That requires us, then, to make sure that we have a strategy that is strengthening those partners so that they’ve got their own capacity to deal with what are potentially manageable, regional threats if these countries are a little bit stronger,” he said. AFP
