Yemen Interior Minister, Abdul-Qader Qahtan announced on Sunday, following a meeting with US Ambassador to Yemen, Gerald Feierstein that the US would help train Yemen police forces as part of both countries' security and military cooperation agreements.
This new rapprochement between Sana'a and Washington comes less than a week after Yemeni officials confirmed the arrivals of American troops to Yemen. An estimated 1,700 troops arrived in Yemen on Monday. About 1,500 were sent to a military base in the southern province of Lahj in keeping with Washington security efforts against al-Qaeda in the region, while the 200 other soldiers will prop up the US embassy security details in the capital, Sana'a.
Determined to preserve Yemen' political and security stability, the US has spared no efforts in assisting Sana'a meet its financial, security, political and military requirements; something Ambassador Feierstein said his country would continue to do as to allow Yemen fulfill its democratic ambitions.
While Yemen has been working actively at solving its many internal issues through the National Dialogue Conference, all in keeping with the GCC brokered power transfer proposal (signed in 2011 in Riyadh by the members of the opposition and former President Ali Abdullah Saleh), security has been ever deteriorating.
While Yemen was relatively safe back in 2011, except for a few remote tribal areas, with Sana'a central government in control of its institutions, 2013 Yemen has seen tribes challenge the authority of the central government through sabotage attacks, al-Qaeda has grown accustomed to kidnapping foreigners to finance its operations and criminal gangs are using Yemen as a by-pass country for their illegal trades.