A U.S. drone killed four a-Qaida supects in Yemen Thursday, a security official said, the third such strike in five days as the Yemeni president prepared for White House talks.<\/p>\n
Yemen’s U.S.-backed campaign against al-Qaida in the Arabian Pensinsula (AQAP) was expected to be high on the agenda of Abdrabuh Mansur Hadi’s talks with President Barack Obama later on Thursday.<\/p>\n
Washington regards AQAP, a merger of militants in Yemen and neighboring Saudi Arabia, as the worldwide jihadist network’s most active and dangerous branch.<\/p>\n
The latest drone strike came in the southeastern province of Hadramawt province, where AQAP militants have carried out a string of attacks on security personnel, the Yemeni security official told Agence France Presse.<\/p>\n
The unmanned aircraft “raided an al-Qaida vehicle in the Wadi Ser area destroying it and killing four militants,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.<\/p>\n
It was the third deadly drone strike in five days to hit al-Qaida in Yemen.<\/p>\n
On Tuesday, a U.S. drone killed three suspected militants in the southern province of Shabwa. On Saturday, a drone killed six suspected militants in the Mahfad mountains of neighboring Abyan province<\/p>\n
The United States, the only country to operate drones in the region, has sharply increased its use of them against Al-Qaeda targets in Yemen over the past two years.<\/p>\n
U.S. drones strikes in Yemen nearly tripled in 2012 compared to 2011, from 18 to 53, according to the New America Foundation, a Washington-based think-tank.<\/p>\n
The jihadists remain active in the south and east of Yemen despite an offensive by the army in summer 2012 that recaptured most of Abyan province’s main towns.<\/p>\n
AQAP took advantage of the weakness of Yemen’s central government during an uprising against now-ousted president Ali Abdullah Saleh in 2011 to seize large swathes of territory across the south and east.<\/p>\n
Washington has given strong support to the efforts of Saleh’s successor, Hadi, to reassert central government control.<\/p>\n
That support was to be high on the agenda of Hadi’s talks with Obama later on Thursday, along with the fate of the dozens of of Yemeni al-Qaida suspects still held at the U.S. detention centre in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.<\/p>\n
Obama would seek to “further strengthen our counter-terrorism partnership, and enable the return of Yemeni detainees at Guantanamo Bay who have been designated for transfer,” the White House said.<\/p>\n
Several key AQAP leaders have been killed in U.S. drone strikes, most recently the group’s deputy leader Saeed al-Shehri whose death was confirmed by the jihadists on July 17.<\/p>\n
But, although weakened, AQAP still carries out frequent hit-and-run attacks against the Yemeni security forces.<\/p>\n
Source:Agence France Presse<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A U.S. drone killed four a-Qaida supects in Yemen Thursday, a security official said, the third such strike in five days as the Yemeni president prepared for White House talks.<\/p>\n
Yemen’s U.S.-backed campaign against al-Qaida in the Arabian Pensinsula (AQAP) was expected to be high on the agenda of Abdrabuh Mansur Hadi’s talks with President Barack Obama later on Thursday.<\/p>\n
Washington regards AQAP, a merger of militants in Yemen and neighboring Saudi Arabia, as the worldwide jihadist network’s most active and dangerous branch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":9750,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=526"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}