An update on this story: Six of the nine Westerners previously reported dead are now reported as missing in the story below.
Jihadists have a knack for rendering helpless the countries in which they take sufficient control: They destroy the internal means of creating wealth by discouraging free enterprise under a regime of physical and intellectual fear. Islamic regimes and their clerics have often inculcated an aversion to new developments and practices as bida, or innovation, that either distracts from Islamic piety or potentially present new opportunities for various sins.
With that mentality, once existing knowledge is plundered and its sources appropriated after a jihadist takeover, the well runs dry. It is not unlike the period of plundering and re-distribution that follows a communist takeover — for example, the celebrated Chollima period in North Korea — where, due to the supply of things to appropriate, there is a fleeting sense among the populace (and outside sympathizers) that the system works: “a Golden Age” that can never be recaptured because the generators of wealth have been destroyed.
Meanwhile, the jihadists then attack those who would try to help them. We have seen this pattern in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Somalia as well as this story in Yemen. The result of the jihadists’ success is a helpless, angry, and readily indoctrinated and controlled populace.
“3 foreign women dead in Yemen, al-Qaida suspected,” by Ahmed al-Haj for the Associated Press, June 15:
SAN’A, Yemen (AP) “” Shepherds found the mutilated bodies on Monday of two German nurses and a South Korean teacher who were kidnapped while picnicking in an area of Yemen known as a hideout for al-Qaida.
Experts said the killings bore the hallmarks not of local tribesmen but of jihadist militants who had returned home after fighting in conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.
The dead women disappeared in the remote northern province of Saada Friday while on an outing with six other foreigners, including a German doctor, his wife and their three young children. The whereabouts of the six were unknown, the Yemeni government said.
Yemeni authorities announced a state of high alert in the area and were “conducting extensive searches and investigations,” according to a government statement. Besides the German family, a British man was also missing. They all worked for World Wide Services Foundation, a Dutch aid group helping with medical care in the province.
The incident is the latest attack against foreigners in this impoverished Arab nation on the tip of the Arabian peninsula where al-Qaida has a firm foothold in its remote areas.
The government blamed the kidnapping on a Shiite rebel group that has been leading an uprising in the province for the past several years, but the group denied it had anything to do with it. Initially, Yemeni security officials had reported all nine were killed, but the government later said six were still missing.
Nearly all past fatal attacks against foreigners in Yemen have been by Islamist militants.
“I think that it would have to be outside sources” that carried out the attack, said Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism expert at the Swedish National Defense College, noting that the killings, including reports that the bodies were mutilated, bear the hallmarks of al-Qaida.
The killings “represent a nasty turning point in Yemen,” he said. […]
Yemen is the Arab world’s poorest nation “” and one of its most unstable “” making it fertile territory for al-Qaida to set up camp. The country is also in a strategic location, next door to some of the world’s most important oil producing nations. It also lies just across the Gulf of Aden from Somalia, an even more tumultuous nation where the U.S. has said militants from the terror network have been increasing their activity.
One can’t help but think Yemen might be less poor if other states in the region hadn’t blown so much “charitable” money on groups aiming to destroy Israel.