Tuesday Papers (or Fighting in Ja’ar)

I love Arab summits. This one featured a great deal that we won’t cover, but we will tell you that President Salih has taken his idea and gone home.

One Yemeni has been cleared for release from Guantanamo, although it is far from clear exactly where he will be going.

The fighting continues in Ja’ar, although the military is denying that any of its soldiers were killed, saying instead that 8 have been wounded. The government is also moving away from one terminology and is now starting to refer to the men it is pursuing as criminal gangs. News Yemen has this good report, which also brings everyone’s favorite ex-jihadi, Tariq al-Fadhli, back into the mix. The governor of Abyan, Ahmad Maysiri, criticized the shaykh in a local paper. We’ll see if al-Fadhli has a response.

Also, I’m waiting to post on yesterday’s audio tape from ‘Adil al-‘Abab, who is also known by the kunya Abu Zubayr, until I have had a chance to read the whole thing. According to my notes, he first started writing for Sada al-Malahim in November 2008, in issue 6. As, I was reading and listening to the first part of the tape yesterday, I started to think about the different ways that AQAP and the Yemei government handled the media.

AQAP seems to take advantage of the media, using it to further spread its message, while the Yemeni government and particularly the Ministry of the Interior under al-Masri continues to treat the media as an enemy, and is tight-lipped and close-fisted with information. Not the way to win a war.