State of emergency declared in Yemen

Yemen's parliament agreed yesterday to impose a 30-day state of emergency, further infuriating anti-government demonstrators who vowed to go ahead with a planned mass march Friday on President Ali Abdullah Saleh's palace.

"We will enter his bedroom if we have to and drag him out," said Mohammed Qahtan, a spokesman for a coalition of opposition political parties. Yemen's growing protest movement has demanded that Saleh resign immediately.

The Obama administration and regional governments have grown increasingly concerned at the rapid disintegration of Saleh's 32-year-old regime, whose cooperation they depend on to fight Yemen-based al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, known as AQAP.

Fearing a breakdown in counterterrorism operations and opportunities for militant gains if Saleh is violently overthrown or resigns precipitously, they have urged him to get in front of the situation and make plans for an orderly transfer of power, according to sources close to the situation. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid inflaming Yemeni actors on all sides.

Concerned governments have issued only guarded public statements. "I think things are obviously, or evidently, very unsettled in Yemen," Defense Secretary Robert Gates told reporters in Cairo.

"We've had a good working relationship with President Saleh. He's been an important ally in the counterterrorism arena," Gates said. Although the secretary noted that "clearly, there's a lot of unhappiness inside Yemen," he said in response to questions that the United States had not done "any post-Saleh planning."

U.S. military personnel in Yemen and armed drones flying over its territory gather intelligence on AQAP and look for opportunities to target the group's leaders.

At the State Department, spokesman Mark Toner said there were no plans to curtail U.S. economic and military assistance to Yemen.

On Monday, Saleh sent his foreign minister to Saudi Arabia seeking the kingdom's intervention in persuading Yemeni tribal leaders to pull back from the opposition.

Instead, sources said, the Saudis and others have pressed Saleh to come up with a plan for an earlier, orderly exit. The demonstrators have rejected his offer this week to step down by the end of the year.