SUROOSH: Today was the day.
I hoped that this guarantee of safe passage for this interview
with AQAP would hold.
Okay, I'm ready.
MAN: You feeling good?
Yeah.
Only our people, no one else knows where the place is.
So now that they've given us this guarantee,
you feel better about everything?
Great.
It's something in Islam?
The man we were meeting was one of the top AQAP leaders in Aden.
He's well known in the city, but ask that we mask his identity.
I wasn't exactly at my most relaxed.
(Grass rustling) Oh, geez!
Scared me, sorry! (Laughing)
A brush with a stray cat almost gave me a heart attack,
but it also helped loosen up the AQAP leader.
We were finally ready to start.
So let me ask that question again.
How would you describe AQAP?
What are its aims and how will you achieve them?
Tell me about al Qaeda's strategy.
Why did al Qaeda decide to make this shift to focus on local,
and to focus on the community?
So the recent war that took place here with the Houthis,
did that war help al Qaeda overall?
Did you come out of it stronger?
How have drone attacks affected the al Qaeda organization here?
It's been 15 years since al Qaeda attacked
the World Trade Center.
It was an attack that altered the course of history
and changed the world.
The response by America and the coalition was to bomb
Afghanistan and Iraq, and hundreds of thousands,
if not millions of Muslims have either died,
are suffering, have been displaced.
And the question I have to you as a senior member
of al Qaeda is, was it worth it?
If there was any message you could send to
the next president, what would it be?
Just over a quarter century ago, a small group of young jihadists
who were loyal to Osama bin Laden came here to the south of
Yemen with the hope of taking the place over.
And it's taken a long time,
but it seems that their dreams may finally be realized.
Arguably, today al Qaeda is way more powerful
than it was after 9/11.
Al Qaeda can talk the rhetoric, al Qaeda have alliances with
different groups that, before 9/11,
nobody would be meeting with them.
From a Western perspective, the idea of joining al Qaeda seems
like insanity, but in a country with virtually no functioning
government, and after a brutal civil war,
and the only thing you see of the US are drone strikes
raining down from the sky, it is all too easy to see
the appeal to young men.