COLE, USS

american destroyer attacked in 2000 while refueling in yemen, focusing international attention on the developing conflict between the united states and terrorists in the region.

On 12 October 2000 two men exploded a small boat in the port of Aden alongside USS Cole, killing themselves and seventeen U.S. sailors and wounding thirty-nine. Despite suspicion that the bombing was sponsored by the al-Qaʿida network, initially no links were found and the U.S. administration decided against a retaliatory strike on al-Qaʿida camps in Afghanistan. In a videotaped speech in January 2001, Osama bin Ladin praised the attack as a blow against American "injustice" but denied his own involvement, in an interview with the Kuwaiti newspaper al-Raʾy al-Amm. In June an al-Qaʿida recruitment tape that claimed responsibility for the bombing was brought to public attention by the newspaper; and in December, a letter was discovered ordering attacks on American ships in Yemen, purportedly written by bin Ladin in late 1997, before U.S. ships began to refuel in Aden. In the months following the attack, Yemen captured a number of mostly local suspects; in 2003 it revealed confessions had been made alleging that the attack was ordered by the prominent cleric Shaykh Zindani, a leader of the Islah Party. In 2002 U.S. forces killed one fugitive suspect and in 2003 indicted two of ten further suspects when they escaped from jail in Yemen.

George R. Wilkes