US tells citizens to leave Yemen

The United States told its citizens in Yemen on Tuesday to leave immediately and ordered the evacuation of non-essential U.S. government staff because of the threat of terrorist attacks, continuing a trend in the last week of concerns over security for U.S. personnel in the region more broadly.

The State Department announcement was the latest warning since Washington issued a worldwide travel alert Friday and closed several embassies in Yemen and U.S. missions across the Middle East and Africa.

"The Department urges U.S. citizens to defer travel to Yemen and those U.S. citizens currently living in Yemen to depart immediately," the statement posted on its website said.

"On August 6, 2013, the Department of State ordered the departure of non-emergency U.S. government personnel from Yemen due to the continued potential for terrorist attacks," it added.

In response to the State Department’s request, the Pentagon began evacuating some unspecified American personnel Tuesday, but is still keeping a presence there.

"The U.S. Department of Defense continues to have personnel on the ground in Yemen to support the U.S. State Department and monitor the security situation,” said its statement on the situation.

The warnings from the government were a chief result of an intercepted secret message between al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri and his deputy in Yemen about plans for a major terror attack, which also set off the continuing shutdown of many U.S. embassies, two officials told the Associated Press Monday.

A U.S. intelligence official and a Mideast diplomat said al-Zawahiri's message was picked up several weeks ago and appeared to initially target Yemeni interests. The threat was expanded to include American or other Western sites abroad, officials said, indicating the target could be a single embassy, a number of posts or some other site. Lawmakers have said it was a massive plot in the final stages, but they have offered no specifics.

Yemen is home to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), one of the most active affiliates of the network established by Osama bin Laden, and a group which the United States has targeted in an extensive drone campaign in recent years.

The U.S. killed four people Tuesday who were alleged to be affiliated with the group.

In reaction to the U.S. warnings for its citizens, Yemeni Foreign Minister Abu-Bakr al-Qirbi criticized the measures but said they would not affect relations with the United States.

"Unfortunately, these measures, although they are taken to protect their citizens, in reality they serve the goals that the terrorist elements are seeking to achieve," al-Qirbi told Reuters.

"Yemen had taken these threats seriously and had taken all the necessary measures to protect all the foreign missions in the country," he added.

Authorities in Yemen, meanwhile, released the names of 25 wanted Al-Qaeda suspects and said those people had been planning terrorist attacks targeting "foreign offices and organizations and Yemeni installations" in the capital Sanaa and other cities across the country.

The Yemeni government also went on high alert Monday, stepping up security at government facilities and checkpoints.

A U.S. official familiar with the threat information said the decision to close the embassies was based on a broad swath of information, not just the intercept. The official said the U.S. has made clear in the past that AQAP makes its own operational decisions — that there are back-and-forth communications between Al-Qaeda leadership and AQAP, but that they operate independently. The official was not authorized to disclose the information to reporters and thus spoke on condition of anonymity.

The surveillance is part of the continuing effort to track the spread of al-Qaeda from its birthplace in Afghanistan and Pakistan to countries where governments and security forces are weaker and less welcoming to the U.S. or harder for American counterterrorist forces to penetrate — such as Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Mali and Libya — as well as Yemen.

AQAP also has been blamed for the foiled Christmas Day 2009 effort to bomb an airliner over Detroit, and the explosives-laden parcels intercepted the following year aboard cargo flights. The CIA and Pentagon jointly run drone targeting of Al-Qaeda in Yemen.

The Obama administration announced the embassy closures one day after President Barack Obama met with Yemeni President Abdo Rabby Mansour Hadi. A person familiar with the meeting said Obama and Hadi did discuss AQAP but their talks did not directly result in the embassy closures and travel ban.

Al Jazeera and wire services