Regional Al-Qaeda networks still pose threat: Obama

WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama said Friday that Al-Qaeda's regional units still posed a threat but that the network was weaker overall, after the United States shut embassies due to security concerns.

Obama, addressing a news conference, said that the United States wanted to strengthen individual countries' capacity to target Al-Qaeda militants.

"This tightly organized and relatively centralized Al-Qaeda that attacked us on 9/11 has been broken apart. And it is very weak and does not have a lot of operational capacity," Obama said.

But Obama pointed to dangers of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a unit of the extremist group that effectively controls parts of Yemen.

"We still have these regional organizations like AQAP that can pose a threat," Obama said.

Regional militants can "drive, potentially, a truck bomb into an embassy wall and can kill some people."

"That requires us, then, to make sure that we have a strategy that is strengthening those partners so that they've got their own capacity to deal with what are potentially manageable, regional threats if these countries are a little bit stronger," he said.