SANAA: An attack on Houthi leaders in Yemen’s capital claimed by the self-styled Islamic State (IS) group has killed at least 28 people, doctors said on Tuesday, in the latest anti-Shia assault by the Sunni extremists.

Yemen was previously the preserve of IS’s militant rival Al Qaeda, which controls swathes of the south and east, but since March the IS has claimed a string of high-profile attacks.

The car bomb late on Monday targeted two brothers, both Houthi rebel chiefs, during a gathering to mourn the death of a relative, a security source said. Eight women were among the dead.

IS said online it had organised the attack on a “Shia nest”. The group has repeatedly targeted Shias, not only in Yemen but across the region.

On Friday, a Saudi IS suicide bomber killed 26 people and wounded 227 in a Shia mosque in Kuwait.

In Yemen, IS claimed a car bombing that killed two people outside a Shia mosque in Sanaa on June 20 and a series of attacks in the capital four days earlier that killed 31.

IS, which on Monday marked the first anniversary of its declaration of ‘caliphate’ in Iraq and Syria, launched its Yemen campaign in March with a series of bombings of Shia mosques that killed 142 people.

The attacks have overshadowed the operations of rival Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula which overran Mukalla, capital of Hadramawt province in southeast Yemen, in March.

Washington still regards AQAP as the network’s most dangerous branch and has kept up a drone war against its leaders inside Yemen. But analysts say IS now is clearly in the ascendant.

IS was “in the process of supplanting AQAP, which is becoming just one of a number of forces in the Sunni tribal camp in southern Yemen”, said Mathieu Guidere, Islamic studies professor at France’s University of Toulouse.

Published in Dawn, July 1st, 2015

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