A mortar round reportedly was fired at a school next to the U.S. Embassy in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa on March 18, injuring some local guards and schoolchildren. The attack came shortly after a bomb explosion on a Yemeni government compound injured five soldiers in the southern province of Abyan, an area with a history of jihadist activities. The attacks follow a Jan. 18 attack on Belgian tourists in Hadhramaut; before that, a suicide attack also killed a number of Spanish tourists in July 2007 in the province of Marib. The U.S. embassy has been the target of previous attempted attacks as well — at least three since 1988.

The March 18 attacks appear to be the work of al Qaeda-linked jihadists who have been trying to revive their activities in the Arabian Peninsula following the destruction of their assets in neighboring Saudi Arabia. Conditions in Yemen are favorable for a jihadist resurgence there — which would severely hurt the country’s prospects for international investment and cooperation.

With these attacks, jihadists in the country are showcasing once again their ability to strike simultaneously in two separate parts of the country. They staged simultaneous (but failed) attacks in September 2006 against two energy-related targets in the Hadhramaut region’s Dubba area and in the Marib area (the same areas where tourists were later attacked). However, the March 18 strikes against the U.S. Embassy and an army compound — both likely to be heavily guarded targets — show a willingness to take greater risks than before.

In many ways, Yemen is ripe for far greater levels of Islamist militant action. Authorities in the country have had a policy of releasing jihadists following intercession by tribal leadership — on March 10, a court released a key al Qaeda operative, Jaber al-Banna, who allegedly was involved in the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden. The country’s intelligence and security services have had a significant Salafist-Jihadist presence since 1994, when the North Yemeni government of Ali Abdallah Saleh aligned itself with jihadist forces to fight Marxists in the country’s civil war. In recent years there have been reports of escapes of jihadist prisoners from high-security detention facilities, and jihadists announced the formation of an al Qaeda node in the country in June 2006.

Stratfor has noted in the past how Yemen sits at the crossroads of four major jihadist theatres. Two of them, Somalia and Iraq, are facing an exodus of jihadist fighters — many of whom are likely to seek sanctuary in Yemen (and might already be doing so). Furthermore, al Qaeda, while it has been highly active in the Southwest Asian theatre, needs to be able to revive itself in the Arab world. Yemen would be one place where it could do so with relative ease because of the country’s conservative tribal structure, widespread poverty, and abundance of arms and ammunition.

An increase in jihadist attacks will severely hurt Sanaa’s recent efforts to attract foreign investment into its feeble energy sector; it is trying to compete economically with the other countries on the Arabian Peninsula who, unlike Yemen, are part of the Gulf Cooperation Council. The Yemeni government has been engaged thus far in a balancing act — trying to use a light touch with the Islamist militancy on the domestic front while trying to assuage the wider world’s concerns that it could become a jihadist haven. It will have to alter that course, however, if it is to defeat jihadists before they become too powerful.