Over the past few months, ISIS has targeted several Hadi-affiliated checkpoints and many innocent Yemeni civilians in Yemen’s port city of Aden. This comes as the Islamic State allegedly set up a training camp at a secret location inside the city last summer.
In January, a suicide car bombing killed 11 civilians directly outside the palace of Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi, who claims to be the legitimate president of Yemen. In February, 15 pro-Hadi troops were killed by a suicide bomber disguised in military uniform. In early March, ISIS gunmen killed 16 people (including 4 Christian nuns) in the Sheikh Osman suburb of Yemen.
While sporadic ISIS appearances are on the increase inside Aden, the Islamic State also keeps appearing in the countryside of Yemen, often spawned out of defecting Ansar al-Sharia ranks. Occasionally, ISIS units manage to capture actual towns as they have done in Lawdar not long ago; however, they often disappear into the deserts of Yemen or what could be considered mere thin air.
While the Islamic State was established in Iraq, it quickly spread into Syria. Despite suffering many setbacks in the aforementioned countries over the past year, ISIS has now emerged in many new countries; namely Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, Egypt, Nigeria and Somalia.
More often than not, it is merely local militia chieftains who join ISIS partially for ideological reasons but also due to being upset with the failed states in their turbulent countries home countries. The Islamic State still faces a considerable task if they ever intend to connect their territories across various nations; meanwhile, the United Nations seem more committed than ever to destroy ISIS once and for all.
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