Terrorism Threat Closes U.S. Embassies in Middle East, Africa

Published: Friday, August 2, 2013 at 8:42 a.m.

Last Modified: Friday, August 2, 2013 at 8:42 a.m.

WASHINGTON | A terrorism threat has prompted the United States to close dozens of American diplomatic missions in the Middle East, North Africa and elsewhere through the weekend, U.S. officials said Thursday.

Officials gave few details about what prompted the move to close an unusually large number of U.S. missions, but said there was ?credible? information that an al-Qaida regional affiliate might be plotting an attack sometime in the coming days.

?It?s not often that we close a bunch of embassies at once,? said one official, adding that the threat was being taken particularly seriously by American intelligence agencies.

The official said that the State Department was planning to have nearly all U.S. diplomatic facilities in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia closed through the weekend, including missions in Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. In much of the Muslim world, diplomatic facilities are generally closed on Friday and Saturday, but open on Sunday.

A State Department spokeswoman, Marie Harf, told reporters Thursday that the decision was taken ?out of an abundance of caution and care for our employees and others who may be visiting our installations.? The State Department did not announce Thursday which terror group might be plotting an attack, but U.S. officials indicated that the threat originated from one of al-Qaida?s regional affiliates.

To date, the only al-Qaida affiliate that has shown both a desire and an ability to attack U.S. facilities overseas is al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, a group based in Yemen.

In a meeting at the White House on Thursday, President Barack Obama met with Yemen?s president, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi. U.S. and Yemeni officials said that counterterrorism operations in Yemen were among the main topics of the meeting. U.S. drones have carried out three separate strikes in Yemen over the past week, according to Long War Journal, a website that tracks drone strikes.

The closings come toward the end of the Ramadan holidays and the approaching one-year anniversary of the terror attack on Sept. 11, 2012, on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya.

?This seems to be a late-Ramadan threat,? one senior U.S. diplomat said. ?We don?t have information on the specific details.?

Source: http://www.theledger.com/article/20130802/news/130809890

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