My first guess is that the first cable cut was a botched signals intelligence collection operation being conducted by a SIGINT submarine (such as the USS Jimmy Carter).  

They would have been attempting to raise the cable to splice in an intercept system, but either the cable broke during the lift, or they had it onboard, cut into it, lost one end of the cable, and were unable to recover it.  

The use of submarines to install "wiretaps" on undersea cables is not new; the practice goes back at least to the 1970s when NSA scored a huge hit by being able to make an installation on a Soviet undersea telephone cable that was the primary communications link to an important Soviet military base.  

The rest of the outages in the ME could have been arranged to cover for the first one, or could have been arranged to cause traffic to divert to other routes that have already been successfully intercepted.  

Second guess it, it's Al Qaeda.  Somehow I doubt they have the capability to so this sort of thing, particularly the knowledge of the cable routes.