Al-Qaida hits posts in southern Yemen
38 soldiers killed, dozens wounded in 3 car-bomb attacks
SANAA, Yemen Under cover of heavy fog, al-Qaida militants disguised in military uniforms carried out three co-ordinated car bomb attacks on a security barracks and military posts in a southern Yemeni province Friday, killing at least 38 soldiers and wounding dozens others, military and security officials said.
The attacks were the largest since a U.S.-backed military offensive last year routed militants from significant swaths of territory they had seized during Yemen’s 2011 political turmoil. The assaults also underscored the fragility of the Yemeni military and the failure of the current leadership to meet longtime demands to restructure the military.
Yemen’s Supreme Security Committee, headed by the country’s president, issued a statement listing 10 al-Qaida militants as top perpetrators of the attacks, and vowing to bring “criminal, coward and terrorist elements to justice.”
Yemen, the Arab world’s most impoverished country, has been struggling for years with al-Qaida’s local branch, also known as the al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. The group has been waging a campaign of violence against Yemen’s military, including assassinations of security officers and government officials in suicide attacks or drive-by shootings.
The branch came to be considered by Washington as one of the world’s most dangerous terrorist groups after a series of attempted attacks on American soil. After being uprooted from southern towns it took over in 2011, the group has suffered some heavy blows, with a U.S. campaign of drone strikes killing a string of its prominent figures. Near-daily U.S. drone attacks in the first week of August killed 34 suspected al-Qaida militants.
Friday’s attack suggested the group was trying to surge back.
The simultaneous 6 a.m. attacks in the southern province of Shabwa, a one-time alQaida stronghold, caught the security forces unprepared, said Maj. Nasser Mohammed. The attacks took place in a remote region, about 500 kilometres southeast of the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, he said.