Five Yemeni soldiers and five assailants were killed in an Al-Qaeda attack on a military base in the southern province of Abyan on Monday, a security source said.
A car rigged with explosives carrying five Al-Qaeda militants pulled up to a military base in the district of Mudiya in Abyan, the source told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Four men wearing explosive belts ran out of the car towards the base , but were all shot dead before they could blow themselves up, the source said. The vehicle then exploded outside the base , killing the driver and four soldiers from a UAE-backed contingent in the Yemeni army. Nine soldiers were also wounded. Yemen 's southern provinces, including Abyan, have seen a long-running US drone war against Al-Qaeda's Yemeni branch.
Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has flourished in the chaos of Yemen 's civil war pitting the Saudi-backed government of President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi against Huthi rebels.
The United States, the only government to operate drones over the impoverished country, considers AQAP to be the radical group's most dangerous branch and backs the UAE-trained contingent in southern Yemen .
The United Arab Emirates is a key component of a Saudi-led military coalition that intervened in the war to support Hadi's government in 2015.
More than 8,600 people have since been killed in Yemen , according to the World Health Organization.
Meanwhile, over 11 million Yemeni children need humanitarian aid as a result of a war raging since March 2015, the UN's humanitarian coordination agency OCHA said on Monday.
A Saudi-led Arab military coalition intervened in Yemen in 2015 to support the government of President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi after Iran-backed Huthi rebels forced him into exile.
OCHA, which described the conflict as "devastating" said children are facing "the largest food security crisis in the world and an unprecedented cholera outbreak". "Deprived of access to basic health and nutrition services, children are unable to fulfil their potential," it said in a statement.
Children in Yemen are dying of "preventable causes like malnutrition, diarrhoea, and respiratory tract infections," it said. "The education system is on the brink of collapse, with more than five million children at risk of being deprived of their right to education."
The United Nations has listed Yemen as the world's number one humanitarian crisis, with seven million people on the brink of famine and a cholera outbreak that has caused more than 2,000 deaths.
More than 8,650 people have been killed in the conflict and around 58,600 others wounded, many of them civilians, according to the World Health Organization.
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