Drone strike ‘kills four Qaeda suspects’ in Yemen

TIL Desk/World/Aden(Yemen)/A drone strike has killed four suspected Al-Qaeda fighters in central Yemen , a local official said. The United States is the only force known to operate armed drones over Yemen. “A car carrying four fighters was hit as it drove on a mountain road” in Bayda province, the official said yesterday. “All of them were killed.”

“The fighters were from Al-Qaeda,” he said. Washington considers the Yemen-based Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to be the radical group’s most dangerous branch. AQAP has flourished in the chaos of the country’s civil war, which pits the Saudi-backed government of President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi against the Huthi Shiite rebels.

A long-running drone war against AQAP has intensified since US President Donald Trump took office in January. An air raid he ordered that month killed a US Navy SEAL and several Yemeni civilians in Bayda.