SANAA, Yemen — An explosive system detonated and killed six troops loyal to a United Arab Emirates-backed secessionist group Monday in southern Yemen, a army spokesman mentioned, the most recent assault blamed on al-Qaida militants within the impoverished Arab nation.
The explosion hit a army car because it handed in a mountainous space within the Modiyah district of southern Abyan province, mentioned Mohamed al-Naqib, a spokesman for the Southern Armed Forces, the army arm of the secessionist Southern Transitional Council.
Eleven different troops have been wounded, he added.
The UAE-backed council controls a lot of Yemen’s south. It’s at odds with the internationally acknowledged authorities, though they’re allies in Yemen’s yearslong battle in opposition to the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels who management the north and the capital Sanaa.
Al-Naqib blamed al-Qaida within the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, for the assault.
AQAP is seen as one of many extra harmful branches of the phobia group nonetheless working greater than a decade after the killing of founder Osama bin Laden.
It’s lively in a number of areas in Yemen, exploiting the nation’s civil battle to cement its presence within the nation on the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula.
Yemen’s ruinous civil battle started in 2014 when the Houthis seized the capital of Sanaa and far of northern Yemen and compelled the internationally acknowledged authorities into exile.