U.S. May Evacuate Embassy In Yemen Amid Rising Unrest Including Al Qaeda Threat
The State Department is updating its plans to evacuate the U.S. embassy in Yemen’s capital city of Sana’a amid growing violence in the country between military and rebel forces, CNN reported.
Although U.S. Defense Department officials had been watching the situation for several weeks, the violence has “grown more serious” over the past several days, according to CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr, and now included fighting “around the airport in the capital.”
“When you can’t rely on commercial air traffic to get diplomats out, that’s when the military begins to watch very carefully,” Starr said Tuesday on CNN’s “Legal View with Ashleigh Banfield.”
Any request to evacuate would have to come from the U.S. ambassador to Yemen, Starr said, but added “that has not yet happened.” She said after the 2012 bombing of the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, American officials don’t “wait around” for violence to escalate.
However, Starr said if the U.S. did close the embassy, diplomats would “lose their window into understanding what al-Qaida is up to in that country (and) any plots against the U.S.”
Wild Thing’s comment………
We will see if they really do this or not, since Obama loves his Muslim terrorists.