SANA, Yemen — Yemen deployed several hundred extra troops to two mountainous eastern provinces that are al-Qaeda’s main strongholds in the country and where the suspected would-be Christmas airplane bomber might have visited, security officials said Saturday.
The reinforcements, aiming to beef up the military’s presence in a remote region where the government has little control, were Yemen’s latest move in a stepped-up campaign to combat al-Qaeda.
The United States plans to more than double its counter terrorism aid to the impoverished, fragmented Arab nation in the coming year to boost the fight.
Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. general who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and who announced the increased aid, arrived in Yemen on Saturday and met with President Ali Abdullah Saleh, a Yemeni government official said. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.
The confrontation with al-Qaeda’s branch in Yemen gained new urgency after the failed attempt on Christmas Day to bomb a U.S. airliner headed to Detroit.
U.S. and Yemeni investigators have been trying to track the steps of suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab in Yemen, which he visited from August until Dec. 7. He was there ostensibly to study Arabic in Sana, but he disappeared for much of that time.
Yemeni security officials said Abdulmutallab might have traveled to Marif or Jouf provinces — remote, mountainous regions east of the capital where al-Qaeda’s presence is the strongest — though the officials cautioned that it was not certain where he met up with members of the terror group.
