(Previous Incident Codes: YEM115 USYEM131 )

One member of Al Qaeda was killed in a suspected US drone strike at some point before February 2013 in Shabwa province. There are currently no known reports of civilian harm.

In February AFP reported Adel al Abab (aka Adil al Abab, Abu al Zubair) was killed in the second of a pair of strikes in a mountainous region in the eastern Shabwa province. An Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) source told the agency: “A drone strike had targetted Sheikh Adel al-Abab’s vehicle but he escaped and fled to a mountainous region where a raid by another drone killed him immediately.”

AQAP’s most senior cleric, according to Yemen expert Gregory Johnsen (The Last Refuge), al Abab was reportedly killed in October 2012 in Shabwa province. He was a religious scholar at the Dawa Center in Sanaa. In a question and answer session translated and published by the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, al Abab revealed how AQAP used the Ansar al Shariah brand in Yemen: “The name Ansar al-Shariah is what we use to introduce ourselves in areas where we work to tell people about our work and goals, and that we are on the path of Allah.”