“I’m not aware of a concern like that,” the official said on Friday when asked if any of the US citizens waiting to be evacuated from Yemen were considered security threats.
There is no evidence at this point, according to the official, that any US citizens in Yemen fit the profile of a terrorist like Anwar al-Awlaki, the US citizen killed in a 2011 airstrike in Yemen for planning terrorist attacks against the United States.
The United States decision not to launch an evacuation operation for US citizens in Yemen was driven by security threats from factions on the ground, not from the people to be evacuated, the official said.
“It’s not out of malice that a US government military evacuation operation hasn’t been mounted in Yemen. The point is not that we have some animus against the people who are there, it’s just an extremely difficult situation,” the official explained.
Other countries in the region, according to the official, are better suited for conducting evacuation operations in the Middle East than the United States.
“It’s different for the US to be doing this compared to other countries, which would not face the same kinds of threats that we would if we were to do it,” the State Department representative added.
