BEIRUT, Lebanon — The Kuwaiti authorities said Tuesday that they had arrested six jihadists who were planning to attack the main United States military base in the country and other sites.
The six men, all Kuwaitis, gave “full confessions” about their plans to attack Camp Arifjan, a sprawling American logistics and supply base in the desert south of Kuwait City, along with Kuwaiti security agencies and other targets, according to a statement released by Kuwait’s Interior Ministry. The men were a “terrorist network” under the influence of Al Qaeda, the statement said.
The ministry did not provide further details. But the Kuwaiti newspaper Al Rai, citing a “security source,” said the men had confessed to buying a truck and filling it with chemicals and gas cylinders, with the intention of ramming it into Camp Arifjan.
The Kuwaiti authorities had been tracking the men for some time, the newspaper said. One of the six was believed to have been involved in a 2002 attack in which Kuwaiti extremists opened fire on Marines training on Failaka Island, off the Kuwaiti coast, killing one and wounding another, the newspaper reported.
Kuwait, a small, oil-rich country with a relatively vibrant elected Parliament, has been a staunch American ally ever since United States troops led the effort to liberate it from Iraq in 1991. It served as a crucial staging area for the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. A small number of militants who oppose the country’s relationship with the United States have periodically attacked American troops and civilians working with them.
