Armies of Liberation

The western media black-out continues:

Clearly for FOX News, news worthiness depends on who is doing the killing; one person killed by al Qaeda vastly outweighs the hundred killed by the Yemeni government in the last week. For a day, CNN ran the headline: Yemeni women burn veils, wow, interesting, at least they mentioned “Yemen,” as the state was simultaneously pounding residences in Taiz with artillery and shelling villages in Arhab with missiles.

And neither one can find for five seconds for this from today, (if its not working try this direct link.)

Fox News: Car Bomb Kills Anti-Terror Chief in South Yemen.

VS.

- Airstrikes on Arhab leave 120 civilians killed, 340 wounded

- Nationwide slaughter since UN SC council resolution 2014

- One million demand regime change

- Yemen Post: Several Million of Yemeni gathered nationwide in the streets of Yemen yesterday, demanding the fall of the regime and Ali Abdullah Saleh’s trial as they say the president is continuing to murder his people.

Protesters had spell out “butcher” across their chest in red ink in denunciation of president Saleh’s many crimes. “He’s using snipers to gun down women and children, Sana’a and Taiz are under shelling attacks everyday…Saleh is killing Yemeni and the World stands silent…We will not,” said Mohamed Hassan Said a defected officer.

In Sana’a, the capital, a funeral march was organized to bury the bodies of the victims of the revolution amongst whom was 4 year-old little Waffa. While carrying the coffins the crowd was chorusing anti-regime slogan, asking the international community to bear witness of the crimes committed against peaceful Yemeni people. (Read on …)

Yemen’s defense minister on Tuesday afternoon survived the attempted bombing, targeting his motorcade during his visit to the military units of the Yemeni army stationed in Western part of the city of Zanzibar, in Abyan province. The blast, which sources said was a mine planted in the minister’s car, targeted the minister and senior military leader, Major General Faisal Rajab 119 and the brigade commander, who announced his support for the protests against the regime of President Saleh of Yemen. al Teef.

The regime later denied the event occurred. For a wrap up of the last weeks, see Critical Threats Gulf of Aden Security Review.

al jazeera reports clashes in al Houta.

Dozens of alleged al-Qaeda gunmen attacked security and government buildings in the southern town of Huta, killing two policeman and wounding five others, Yemeni medics and residents said.

Fierce clashes broke out at dawn on Wednesday between the armed men and police around the local branches of intelligence and central bank, and the courts in the Lahij province town of Huta, before dispersing toward nearby farms, residents said. (Read on …)

Update: 1) UNHCHR 20,000 internally displaced displaced by the fighting. 2) Residents report severe water shortage, roads cut.

original: So I’m the only one who recalls Saleh’s long time stooge Khalidabdul Nabi ( al Nabi background here) and all that blah blah about reviving the Aden Abyan Islamic Army to establish an Islamic Emirate. As recently as 48 hours ago the USG was talking about AQAP in Abyan. Is it shorthand for any jihaddist, a scare tactic or ignorance? The militants in Abyan are historically more likely to be state jihaddists than the Wahishi death cult. Saleh has corrupted everything in Yemen including its jihaddists.

See 12/28/09 “Nabi calls for an Islamist state in Yemen.” Do we recall the January 09 face to face meeting with Saleh and Nabi and others that culminated in the Feb 09 release of the 109 aged members of the Aden Abyan Islamic Army (as the Yemeni embassy described them at the time, making quite clear at the time they were not al Qaeda). For names of the attendees, see here. There was also a large chunk of cash that changed hands at the time. Earlier on Khanfar, Abyan.

DW “Saleh is known for the creative use of chaos as a means of control, and has pitted jihadists against the South before, so it could be a strategy,” Professor Sheila Carapico, a Yemen expert at the University of Richmond and the American University in Cairo, told Deutsche Welle….Yemen’s elite, American-trained counterterrorism units had been engaging AQAP elements in fierce clashes throughout the region in recent months but were pulled out of Abyan just days before the AQAP raid on Zinjibar took place. Reports from Zinjibar claimed that the militants were unopposed and took over the city without a shot being fired, an unusual event given the severity of combat that had taken place between government forces and militants in the preceding weeks.

Local residents in Zinjibar also claim that, far from being hardcore AQAP fighters, the militants were members of the estimated 300-strong Ansar al-Sharia movement, a group of local tribesman committed to setting up a fundamentalist state in the south of Yemen, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. Ansar al-Sharia is thought to have no connections with the protestors in the capital Sanaa or the opposition forces battling his troops elsewhere in the country.

Other reporting (Read on …)

The spree continues, Yemen Post

At least three people were killed, including two soldiers and another wounded in Yemen’s southern province of Hadhramout.

Private sources said that suspected Al-Qaeda militants attacked a governmental patrol vehicle at a checkpoint belonging to the Central Security Unit in Mukalla, killing two soldiers and a civilian and wounding another. (Read on …)

Wired: Also on Friday, another group of suspected terrorists attacked a security checkpoint in the southern province of Shabwa. At least three police officers were killed and another one was injured.

Hindustan Times:
Al-Qaeda militants have kidnapped an intelligence officer today in Yemen’s south while unknown gunmen killed a soldier and a policeman in separate attacks, a security official told AFP. “Masked Al-Qaeda armed men stopped a bus in Loder,” in Abyan province, which has become one of the jihadists’ stronghold, and “abducted a Yemeni intelligence officer named Fadhel Ahmed Mohsen,” said the official. (Read on …)

Its been two days and there’s no independent confirmation that this even happened. Its such a murky country due to the censorship. But if true, the incident also shows that AQAP is continuing its violence in Yemen.

4/7/11 ADEN — Two soldiers kidnapped by tribesmen in southern Yemen were found with their throats slit on Tuesday in the restive province of Abyan, an Al-Qaeda stronghold, a security official said.

The two soldiers were murdered in an Al-Qaeda-style execution, the official said, requesting anonymity.

He said the execution of hostages went against the norms of Yemeni tribes, which often resort to kidnapping as a means of exerting pressure on local authorities, implying Al-Qaeda militants could have been behind the killings.

Local residents told AFP the corpses were found with gunshot and knife wounds on the side of a road outside the unrest-strewn town of Loder.

The two soldiers were kidnapped last Thursday in Loder by tribesmen in retaliation for the Yemeni military’s killing of six suspected Al-Qaeda militants last month.

A security official said on March 26 that army troops killed the six as they attacked an army post in Loder.

Yemeni forces kill 11 al-Qaeda members
[11/April/2011]
ABYAN, April 11 (Saba)- At least 11 al-Qaeda members, including two foreigners, were killed on Monday in a clash with Yemeni forces in the southern Yemeni province of Abyan, a security source has said.

The source was quoted by the military-run 26sep.net as saying that al-Qaeda members had attacked a checkpoint at Mudia district in Abyan, killing two Yemeni soldiers and wounding five others.

The source added that a number of al-Qaeda members were also injured in the clash.