4 Qaeda militants killed in Yemen raids

Yemeni forces gunned down two Al-Qaeda militants in a raid on their southern hideout early on Tuesday, hours after drone strikes killed two others in the centre of the country, officials and tribesmen said. The army backed by militiamen "raided a house where Al-Qaeda militants were hiding" in Jaar, prompting a firefight in which "two militants were killed and three others were arrested," Mohsen bin Jamila, an official in the region, told AFP. Abdullatif al-Sayed, who leads the militiamen known as the Popular Resistance Committees, was wounded during the early morning clashes, the official said. Jaar, which the army recaptured from the jihadists in June with the help of the militiamen, was the site of a suicide attack on Saturday in which 45 people were killed. Closer to Sanaa in Bayda province, two drones targeted Al-Qaeda positions, killing two other militants among them a local leader of the network identified as Abu Osama al-Maaribi, tribal sources said. Al-Qaeda fighters have been regrouping over the past two days in Al-Hammah and Al-Manaseh, near the town of Rada, in Bayda province, 170 kilometres (105 miles) southeast of the capital, the sources said. "Four explosions rocked the area, which was overflown by two drones in the evening," said one source. "A car belonging to an Al-Qaeda member was hit by a missile and caught fire." The United States is the only country that has drones in the region and it has stepped up its strikes on Al-Qaeda targets in the south and east of Yemen. Washington regards the Yemen-based Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula as the most threatening branch of the global jihadist network. Hundreds of Al-Qaeda gunmen bowed to tribal pressure in January and withdrew from Rada, which they had held for nine days. At the time the fighters were described as close to Tarek al-Dahab, the brother-in-law of the Yemeni-American extremist Anwar al-Awlaqi, killed in a US air strike in September 2011. Dahab was himself killed in mid-February.