Strategypage reports that al Qaeda in Yemen has had a very bad month:
It was a bad month for AQAP (al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula). Between April 19 and 21st at least 60 AQAP men were killed, mostly by American UAV missile attacks but also by Yemeni troops attacking AQAP bases. Another fifty or more Islamic terrorists were killed in the last week as the army began a ground offensive against rural AQAP bases. Since mid-April nearly two hundred AQAP members have been killed and several hundred wounded. Over 200 have been captured and more than a thousand have fled to more remote areas of the south or are trying to get out of Yemen. All known AQAP bases have been captured and intelligence specialists are working overtime processing captured material and the DNA of the dead.
I will say that President Obama has been willing to kill jihadis, although he wants to limit our killing to drones and helping others kill jihadis. Which is fine as long as those limited means kill enough to keep them at bay until the eagerness for jihad burns its way out of Moslem societies that create jihadi raw material.
What gets me is that the president has an apparent blind spot when it comes to Iraq--a place we killed lots of jihadis prior to his election, and which could use some of even his preferred method of killing jihadis:
The Iraqi government is actively seeking armed drones from the U.S. to combat al Qaeda in its increasingly violent Anbar province and, in a significant reversal, would welcome American military drone operators back into the country to target those militants on its behalf, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
I had wondered why we weren't doing that, and assumed that our shipments of Hellfire missiles for use by Iraq's fledgling air force was doing the job well enough:
The Iraqis have systems to fire Hellfire missiles, so we probably don't need armed drones. But just surveillance drones would be helpful.
Apparently not. I suspect armed drones and special forces/intelligence types would be useful, too.
Just remember, the plan to rely on the State Department rather than the US military to support Iraqis in completely defeating al Qaeda hasn't worked out as well as the administration hoped--although with no ugly incidents around our embassy, I guess the embassy protection plan is working out.
Let's do what we can to make sure al Qaeda in Iraq has a very bad month that creates lots of good jihadis.
UPDATE: The jihadis are not defeated, of course. But fortunately the element of surprise was not enough to kidnap two of our people there:
One of the two officers at the U.S. Embassy in Yemen who shot and killed a pair of suspected al-Qaida gunmen was getting a haircut at a barbershop when the attempted abduction took place, Yemeni security officials said Sunday. ...
The Yemeni officials said the armed militants arrived in a battered SUV and burst into the shop shouting: "Police! Police!" The officials said one of the two Americans was having his hair cut, while the second waited for his turn.
They said one of the Americans killed both militants before the pair jumped into their waiting SUV and drove off.
One was military. They left the country after that, after talking to Yemen authorities about the attack.
So this was part of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula's very bad month in Yemen.
