A suicide bomber blew himself up in the southern Yemeni city of Mukalla on Sunday in an attack claimed by Daesh, killing at least ten recruits and wounding 15 as they lined up at a police headquarters, a security source said. It was the second deadly blast to hit the city, which was a hub for Al-Qaeda before the group was pushed out in a military offensive last month. In a message on its online news agency Amaq, Daesh said the attacker was a "martrydom-seeker" who had detonated his explosive belt. Al-Qaeda militants took advantage of more than a year of war in Yemen to carve out a mini-state stretching across much of the southern coast but an attack by government troops backed by the United Arab Emirates reversed many of their gains. Their militant rivals in Yemen's branch of Daesh rose last year and have launched a series of suicide attacks on all parties to Yemen's tangled conflict. Saudi Arabia, the UAE and other Arab countries intervened in Yemen's civil war in March 2015 in support of the internationally recognized government. The US military announced last week it had deployed a small number of personnel to Yemen to aid in the fight against AQAP, its first troop presence in the country since the Houthi takeover, though its campaign of unmanned drone attacks on AQAP members continued unabated throughout the war. Daesh in Yemen said it carried out a suicide bombing that killed 10 soldiers in Mukalla on Thursday, hours before the prime minister was due to visit the city, which until two weeks ago was a militant stronghold. Prime Minister Ahmed Obeid Bin Daghr was on his first visit to Mukalla, a port city on the Arabian Sea, since it was recaptured by government soldiers in April after a year-long occupation by Al-Qaeda. Medical sources said 10 soldiers had been killed at a naval camp near the port of Khalaf in Mukalla when a car exploded. About 15 soldiers were wounded, they said. "The explosion is not going to affect the visit or its aims," a government source told Reuters. Mukalla, the capital of the vast eastern province of Hadramout and important shipping hub, had been the center of a rich mini-state that Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) built up over the past year as it took control of an almost 600-km (370-mile) band of Arabian Sea coastline. — Agencies
