War #4.
(LWJ) — Unmanned US Predator or Reaper strike aircraft killed 15 al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula fighters yesterday in an attack in a village outside of the terrorist-controlled city of Zinjibar in southern Lebanon.
The Predators, or “drones” as they are more commonly called, struck twice near Zinjibar, the provincial capital of Abyan after coordinating with the Yemeni government, a Yemeni military official told The Yemen Post. Yemen’s Interior Ministry has denied the strikes were carried out by US aircraft.
The strikes took place in the village of Al Khamila, about six miles outside of Zinjibar, according to a report in Reuters yesterday that stated the attack was carried out by the Yemeni Air Force.
The target of the strike is unclear, and no senior AQAP leaders or operatives were reported killed. Fifteen “suspected al Qaeda fighters” were killed and 12 more were wounded.
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 constitutes “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,” he said.