(Previous Incident Code: YEM162 )

At least four people were killed in a US drone strike in Mareb. They were travelling in a vehicle travelling to a farm in the area. Witnesses named two of the victims as Naif Faraj and Mousleh al Arahabi the dead were allegedly al Qaeda but it was not immediately clear what Faraj or Arahabi’s rank was or what role they played in AQAP.

The attack came over two days after it emerged that, on April 24, a CIA spy and a lieutenant colonel with JSOC shot dead two armed men in Sanaa. The two US officers were at a barber in Sanaa when the unnamed Yemenis reportedly tried to kidnap them. The two US officers quickly left the country, with the blessing of the Yemeni government. Jeb Boone reported it was not clear if the two men were targeted because they were US officers or merely victims of an attempted kidnapping.

Boone, who covered the youth uprising in Yemen in 2011, said US intelligence officers are easy to identify in Sanaa, if the would-be kidnappers had targetted the men specifically. Boon, writing in Vice News, said: ‘Their out-of-uniform uniform, ubiquitous and often including 5-11 cargo pants, a pair of Oakley sunglasses and full beards, functioned as a caricature that could be plucked right out of the latest instalment of the Call of Duty franchise.’