Al-Qaeda attack on a checkpoint in Yemen kills 12; troops kidnapped

A Yemeni security official says al-Qaeda militants attacked a checkpoint in a southern city, killing four troops and losing eight of their own in the firefight.

The official says militants in pickup trucks assaulted the security post in the outskirts of the port city of Aden on Saturday. He says one security force member and three Qaeda fighters were wounded.

In a separate incident, another official says that militants kidnapped a senior intelligence officer and two soldiers in the town of Radda south of the capital Sana’a.

Officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak to the press.

Alarming death toll

Meanwhile, at least 222 people including 183 militants have been killed in five days of clashes around the strategic south Yemen town of Louder which Qaeda is trying to seize, a security official said on Saturday.

Thirty-seven people were killed on Friday, the official told AFP, among them a child of 12 killed by a shell burst inside the town. During the day, five tribal auxiliaries were also reported killed along with 31 militants.

Louder was quiet on Saturday “after the Qaeda fighters withdrew to positions they occupied before the fighting began, leaving behind several snipers,” another military source said of the clashes that erupted on Monday.

The source said the Qaeda militants pulled back to Um Sorra five kilometers (three miles) southwest of Louder and towards Wadhia and Arqub 10 and 15 kilometers away respectively.

Louder lies some 150 kilometers northeast of Zinjibar, the Abyan provincial capital that militants of the Qaeda-linked Partisans of Sharia (Islamic law) overran last May.

The authorities announced on Friday they had deployed around 200 members of anti-terrorist forces to Louder to counter the mounting Qaeda threat.

Firefights erupted on Monday between the army backed by tribal levies and the militants. Since then the extremists have lost 183 men, and the army said it has suffered 14 dead.

Another 24 members of the so-called popular resistance committees were also killed, in addition to the child killed by shellfire.

Qaeda briefly seized Louder in August 2010 before being driven out by the army.

A tribal source said the militants wanted to recapture it because of its strategic location between Shabwa, Bayda and Lahij provinces where Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, is also active.

Abyan province has fallen completely under AQAP control except for Louder and Mudia.

The United States considers the Yemen-based AQAP to be the most deadly and active branch of the global terror network.

The group seized control of a significant amount of territory in Abyan during the turmoil that led to the replacement of President Ali Abdullah Saleh by his deputy.

The conflict with Islamists in the south is one of several challenges facing the new president, Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who took office vowing to fight Qaeda.