The plan was to breach the embassy wall and storm the compound. It never worked. Dressed in Yemeni army uniforms, the militants passed a Central Security Forces checkpoint on the road, then reached the outer parking lot gate about two hundred yards from the embassy. When guards denied them entry, they opened fire and detonated the first car bomb at the guard post. A second suicide driver made it past the outer checkpoint and blew his vehicle up near the civilian entrance after hitting an inner ring of concrete barriers. The blast killed Yemeni security personnel, the embassy's contracted front-gate guard, and civilians - including Susan Elbaneh and her husband - who had been queuing for visas and routine paperwork. Ambassador Stephen Seche was on the third floor of the chancery when the first explosion shook the building.

The fighting lasted ten to fifteen minutes. The second bomb failed to breach the embassy wall; propane tanks packed into the vehicle to amplify the blast flew across the compound without achieving their purpose. Three militants held the gate area but could not force their way inside. At 9:33 they fired on an arriving fire truck and forced it to retreat. One attempted to create an opening by detonating his suicide vest against a wall; it did not work. Another tried; it did not work either. By 9:53, with six of the attackers dead, the last one tried to surrender to a police officer while cooking a grenade in his hand. The officer stepped away in time. The attacker blew himself up. The toll stood at nineteen dead and sixteen wounded.

Hours after the attack, an unknown group calling itself Islamic Jihad in Yemen issued a statement claiming responsibility and threatening further attacks unless imprisoned militants were freed. A US State Department spokesman said the attack bore all the hallmarks of al-Qaeda. Analysts suspected the Islamic Jihad name was a front - that al-Qaeda's Yemeni network, resurgent since a 2006 prison escape freed several key operatives, had conducted the operation and used the smaller group as cover. On 14 November, al-Qaeda in the Southern Arabian Peninsula publicly claimed the attack. A Yemeni security official later confirmed the perpetrators had trained at al-Qaeda camps in Hadhramaut and Marib, and that three had recently returned from fighting in Iraq.

Yemeni investigators arrested six suspects. When the trial began on 10 January 2009, the prosecution accused three of the defendants of a strange crime: issuing false terror claims as Islamic Jihad while communicating with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Mossad. The main defendant, 26-year-old Bassam al-Haidari, was accused of sending an email to Olmert that read We are the Organisation of Islamic Jihad and you are Jews, but you are honest, and we are ready to do anything. On 23 March the court convicted all three. Haidari received the death sentence, upheld on appeal in 2010. Human rights lawyer Abdul-Rahman Ali Barman rejected the case as politically motivated and announced plans to appeal to the Supreme Court, arguing that Haidari's opposition to the Yemeni government had as much to do with his sentence as any crime he had committed.

Seven years later, in 2015, Al Jazeera broadcast an investigative documentary built around Hani Muhammad Mujahid, an al-Qaeda member who said he had been working as an informant for Yemen's Political Security Organization at the time of the attack. Mujahid said he had warned his handlers of the coming attack three times - three months before, one week before, and three days before - and that the Yemeni government had allowed it to proceed because the resulting crisis served Yemen's claim to be a frontline state against terror. Former British intelligence officer Richard Barrett found parts of Mujahid's account credible. A former FBI investigator observed that complicity on the part of one or more members of the Yemeni government would be very disappointing, but wouldn't necessarily be surprising. The investigation had by that point stalled.

Susan Elbaneh's remains were returned to New York. Her family in Lackawanna - a community with a significant Yemeni-American population - mourned a daughter who had been on the cusp of her adult life. The six Yemeni soldiers who died that morning were not named in most American news accounts; neither were the five other Yemeni civilians who were killed alongside Susan and her husband. They had been waiting for visas, paperwork, stamps - the bureaucratic apparatus of a country that takes other people's time and occasionally gives it back. They were workers and applicants, not targets. The embassy reopened for standard operations on 20 September, three days after the attack. The Sanaa compound would remain a flashpoint for more than a decade afterward, symbol and site of a longer confrontation that did not end with those fifteen minutes.