Six soldiers belonging to a south Yemen-based successionist force were killed by a planted explosive device on Monday in an attack the United Arab Emirates-backed group says was executed by al-Qaeda’s Yemeni branch.
Mohamed al-Naqib, a spokesman for the Southern Armed Forces, the armed wing of the Southern Transitional Council (STC), said the explosion targeted a military vehicle in the Modiyah district of southern Abyan province.
Al-Naqib blamed al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) for the attack and added that an additional 11 soldiers were also wounded in the explosion.
Yemen divided
Yemen’s political and military control is divided between various state and non-state actors. The STC, a breakaway Sunni faction seeking an independent state in Yemen’s south, controls much of the country’s coastline near Aden, while Yemen’s internationally recognized government controls much of the central and northeastern regions.
Despite the STC’s successionist goals, the group has aligned itself with the Yemeni government in the fight against the Iranian-backed Shia Houthis as well as the AQAP.
Although al-Qaeda’s presence across the Middle East has broadly weakened over the last decade, AQAP remains one of the international terror group’s most powerful cells, taking advantage of the chaos from Yemen’s civil war to reestablish itself in the country.
