I found this article on the Yemen Post this morning while trawling google news:
Certainly an attention grabbing headline! Unfortunately there doesn’t yet appear to be any other reports online supporting this statement, however an anonymous Al Qaeda leader reported to the Yemen Post that its organisational structure has altered from a ‘pyramidial hierarchy’ to a ‘clustered builduo’, and that such decentralisation makes Al Qaeda’s operations easier to conduct.
In terms of oil, however, the article reports that:
Though targeting oil and other facilities has been made in retaliation to the injustice and arbitrary arrests towards Al-Qaeda followers, he declared that it is illegal. He claims to be against it and says, “Oil is our wealth and property. It is not the property of a president, a king or a minister. Though it is consumed by our enemies, they will depart one day and it will return to us.” “I denounce targeting oil industry whatever the excuse may be.”
and
Al-Qaeda higher leadership always calls on their followers to move away from ‘desert areas’, as defined by him, stressing any attack that does not distress the enemy is not practical.
These excerpts can be viewed mostly in light of the 6 October 2002 Limburg attack, whereby a French flagged oil tanker’s starboard was rammed by a TNT laden dinghy in the Gulf of Aden. The fire and explosion that followed caused 90,000 barrels of crude oil to spill into the Gulf, killed one person and injured 12 others.
Either way, if this is the case, I suppose it is a good thing for all actors involved in the oil industries–which is arguably nearly everyone–but it’s also concerning how this will be offset in terms of what might be considered a target instead.
