(LWJ) — US aircraft targeted a police station in southern Yemen that was recently taken over by fighters from al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, according to reports from the region.
Six “Islamic militants” were killed in a nighttime airstrike on a police station in the town of Mudiya in Abyan province, a stronghold of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a Yemeni official told The Associated Press. Yemeni officials said US aircraft carried out the strike and that the Yemeni Air Force does not have the ability to conduct strikes at night.
A report in the Yemeni newspaper Akhbar al Youm claimed the airstrike was conducted by the unmanned US Predators or Reapers, and said that more than 50 “al Qaeda militants” were killed in the attack.
The exact target of the strike is unclear. No senior al Qaeda leader or operatives were reported to have been killed in the strike.
Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has been fighting under the banner of the Ansar al Sharia, or the Army of Islamic law. Ansar al Sharia as “AQAP’s version of the Islamic State of Iraq,” which is al Qaeda’s political and military front in Iraq, a senior US intelligence official told The Long War Journal.
“Ansar al Sharia is pulling in allied Islamist groups and sympathetic tribes into its orbit, and seeks to implement an Islamic State much like the Taliban did in Afghanistan and al Qaeda attempted in Iraq,” the official said. In an official statement released by Ansar al Sharia in May 2011, the group said it wishes to take control of “all administrative, political, economic, cultural, monitoring, and other responsibilities” in Yemen.