WASHINGTON—The Obama administration, anxious to deny al-Qaeda’s most dangerous offshoot more space in which to flourish, urged Yemen’s wounded President on Monday to immediately step aside and clear the way for a transfer of power aimed at averting all-out civil war.
The administration’s call came as US diplomats worked with Saudi Arabian and European officials to revive a plan to replace Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh with a national unity government and end violence that has killed scores of people and splintered the regime, the Yemeni military and the country’s powerful tribes.
There was no sign that Saleh, who was in Saudi Arabia being treated for a wound he sustained on Friday in a rocket attack, was ready to step down. Vice President Abed Rabbo Masour Hadi told European diplomats that Saleh’s “health is improving greatly and he will return to the country in the coming days,” according to the state-run news agency.
The return of Saleh, 68, who has held power since 1978, could lead to further bloodshed, something the Obama administration is anxious to avoid. US officials have soured on their onetime ally after a tumultuous four months in which pro-Saleh gunmen attacked anti-regime protesters, top military officials and diplomats defected, and street battles erupted in the capital, Sanaa, between Saleh’s forces and those of a rival tribal sheikh.
Washington is worried that al-Qaeda’s local branch, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, could exploit the growing unrest to expand a sanctuary in Yemen from which to launch attacks on neighboring Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil producer, and US targets.
“We are calling for a peaceful and orderly transition, a nonviolent transition that is consistent with Yemen’s own constitution,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Monday. “We think an immediate transition is in the best interests of the Yemeni people.”
Members of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, an amalgam of Yemenis, Saudis and others, including Americans, were behind the 2000 USS Cole attack, as well as the failed 2009 Christmas attempt to bomb an airliner over Detroit and a failed 2010 plot to ship bombs disguised as printer cartridges to the US.
