SANA, Dec 7 (Reuters): A woman, a 10-year-old boy and a local al Qaeda leader were among at least 11 people killed alongside two Western hostages when U.S.-led forces battled militants in a failed rescue mission in Yemen, residents said on Sunday.
U.S. special forces raided the village of Dafaar in Shabwa province, a militant stronghold in southern Yemen, shortly after midnight on Saturday, killing several members of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).
American journalist Luke Somers, 33, and South African teacher Pierre Korkie, 56, were shot and killed by their captors during the raid intended to secure the hostages' freedom, U.S. officials said.
AQAP, formed in 2006 by the merger of the Yemeni and Saudi branches of the network, has for years been seen by Washington as one of the movement's most dangerous branches.
Western governments fear an advance by Shi'ite Muslim Houthi fighters with links to Iran has bolstered support among Yemeni Sunnis for AQAP, which has established itself in parts of south and east Yemen, including Shabwa where the raid took place.
However, since Islamic State in Syria and Iraq began distributing films of its militants executing Western hostages, the focus on AQAP, which has traditionally used hostage-taking as a way to raise funds, had diminished until now.
At least one Briton and a Turkish man are still held by the group.
The Yemen-based group, loyal to the wider al Qaeda organization founded by the late Osama bin Laden, has denounced Islamic State, but Western and Gulf sources have said there may be operational connections between the two.
"AQAP and Daesh (Islamic State) are essentially the same organization but have different methods of execution and tactics," a senior Yemeni intelligence official said on the sidelines of a conference in Bahrain this weekend.
"They have killed hostages before, like the Yemeni special forces soldiers in Abyan in 2011. There are some AQAP cells that have pledged allegiance to the caliphate but there is division over the legitimacy of Daesh in its vision but not tactics."
Apart from the woman and the 10-year-old boy, reports on social media feeds of known militants said one of those killed was an AQAP commander and two members of the group. Six other people from the same southern Yemen tribe also died, the reports said, although they could not be immediately verified by Reuters.
