US drone strike kills 4 AQAP fighters

US drones struck yet again in the Yemeni province of Al Baydah, according to a report from the country. The strike is the fourth in Yemen in the past week.

Yemeni security officials have told the Yemen Post that an unmanned Predator or more heavily armed Reaper struck a vehicle as it traveled in Al Baydah province yesterday, killing four al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula fighters. The strike took place just two hours after an AQAP suicide bomber killed four soldiers from the Republican Guards in an attack in the city of Al Baydah.

No senior AQAP leaders or operatives were reported killed in the strike. US military and intelligence officials contacted by The Long War Journal would neither confirm nor deny that yesterday’s strike took place.

Yesterday’s strike followed three other strikes in central and southern Yemen that have taken place since March 9.

The last strike occurred on March 11, when the unmanned warplanes killed three AQAP fighters in Jaar. The target of the strike was weapons seized by AQAP during last week’s assault on a military base in Al Koud in neighboring Abyan province. In that assault, AQAP overran a Yemeni mechanized base in Al Koud, killing 185 troops, wounding over 150, and capturing at least 55 more.

On March 10, AQAP “hideouts” in Jaar were targeted; 10 AQAP fighters were reported to have been killed. And on March 9, the Predators and Reapers hit an AQAP hideout in a rural area near Al Baydah. Abdulwahhab al-Homaiqani, an AQAP commander in the city, and 16 of his fighters were reported to have been killed in the strike.

The CIA and the US military’s Joint Special Operations Command are known to have carried out at least 21 air and missile strikes inside Yemen since December 2009, including yesterday’s strike in Al Baydah. Other recent airstrikes are believed to have been carried out by the US also, but little evidence has emerged to directly link the attacks to the US.

Since the beginning of May 2011, the US is known to have carried out 15 airstrikes in Yemen. Five of those strikes have taken place so far in 2012, with four of those occurring in the last week.

The pace of the US airstrikes has increased as AQAP and its political front, Ansar al Sharia, have taken control of vast areas of southern Yemen. In Abyan, the cities of Al Koud, Ja’ar, and Shaqra are currently run by AQAP. The terror group also controls Azzan in Shabwa province. AQAP seized control of Rada’a in Al Baydah in January but later withdrew after negotiating a peace agreement with the local government.

Bill Roggio is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Editor of FDD's Long War Journal.

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4 Comments

  • mike merlo says:

    Besides Djibouti I now strongly suspect we now have drone & spec ops facilities in either Saudi Arabia, Oman or both.

  • Gerald says:

    Whack-a-Mole!!

  • Max says:

    @ mike Merlo, let’s not forget the base in the Seychelles. Probably too far for Yemen ops, but its certainly good for anti-piracy ones. Im hoping the tempo if Yemen drone attacks picks up like it did in Pakistan from 2008 on wards. Unlike in Pakistan, strikes in Yemen and Somalia do not have a hostile government. If AQAP cluster in one spot then aerial power will be vaporize them. So as long as last weeks figures hold up, where you have 40+ AQAP killed in every strike(hard to keep that up since they will most likely scatter) but even if it is 15-20 for every strike they will be kept off balance. And hopefully the Yemen government truly takes the fight to them, and not follow Pakistan’s way of making and breaking deals with Al-Qaeda. I think there is enough will within the Yemeni security establishment to concentrate a relatively large amount of ground forces to strike at AQAP, provided we continue with high frequency+intensity airstrikes, which we should not have an issue with. In 4 years since 2008, Al-Qaeda central has been decimated in Pakistan, and that’s just with Drone strikes, imagine what could happen to AQAP if they face the combined lethal doses of drone strikes and a Yemeni Army ground incursion?

  • Devin Leonard says:

    And the hits just keep on coming:)

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