[REUTERS] Yemeni army forces backed by Arab coalition aircraft killed about 40 suspected al Qaeda gunnies on Sunday as they fought their way into two Death Eater strongholds in eastern Yemen, a local official and residents said.Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula
...the latest incarnation of various Qaeda and Qaeda-allied groups, including the now-defunct Aden-Abyan Islamic Army that boomed the USS Cole in 2000...
(AQAP) has exploited a 16-month-old civil war between the internationally recognized government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi and the Iran-allied Houthis to capture a 600-km (370-mile) stretch of Arabian Sea coastline in eastern Yemen.
Hadi's troops and forces from the Saudi-led Arab coalition drove out AQAP - widely considered the most dangerous branch of the global Death Eater group - from the Hadramout
...the formerly independent Qu'aiti state and sultanate, annexed by Communist South Yemen in 1968, encompassing a region along the Gulf of Aden, extending eastwards to the borders of the Dhofar region of Oman. The people are called Hadhramis and speak Hadhrami Arabic. The city Tarimis is estimated to contain the highest concentration of descendants of the Prophet Muhammad (PTUI) anywhere in the world, approximately seven in every square yard...
bustling provincial capital of Mukalla in April.
The bully boyz have since repeatedly withdrawn from and then returned to Zinjibar and Jaar, the capital of Abyan
...a governorate of Yemen. The region was a base to the Aden-Abyan Islamic Army terrorist group until it dropped the name and joined al-Qaeda. Its capital is Zinjibar. In March 2011, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula declared the governate an
Islamic Emirateafter seizing control of the region. The New York Times fastidiously reported that those in control, while Islamic hard boyz, are not in fact al-Qaeda, but something else that looks, tastes, smells, and acts the same. Yemeni government forces launched an effort to re-establish control of the region when President-for-Life Saleh was tossed and the carnage continues...
and the province's second largest city.
Abyan Governor Al-Khader Mohammed al-Saidi, speaking by telephone from Jaar, told Rooters that three brigades took part in the operation and that troops have "taken complete control of both cities".
Saidi said that 40 AQAP members were killed in both cities, while the rest fled. He said three soldiers were killed and several were maimed in the operation.
"We met with citizens and fighters and both were happy to be free under government authority," the governor said.
Residents said an AQAP jacket wallah went
kaboom!in a car trying to attack troops in Zinjibar, a city of some 100,000 people, but no one else was hurt.