Officials confirmed this Monday that yet another high ranking military officer had been gunned down by al-Qaeda operatives in the southern city of Taiz on Sunday evening, Yemen' second most populous city.
AFP quoted a local official as saying, "Gunmen shot dead a police officer in Taiz."
Commander Abdel Malek Saleh was traveling in his vehicle late on Sunday evening when two unknown masked gunmen rising a motorbike tailed him for a while before gunning him down right in the city centre.
This attack came a day after a distant relative of President Abdo Rabbo Mansour Hadi,Colonel Ali Nasser Dambur escaped, but only just a similar assassination attack in the south-eastern province of Hadhramawt. Colonel Dambur was hit by four bullets in his back and chest.
While Yemen is no stranger to such attack against its military and intelligence officers, the frequency and ferocity with which al-0Qaeda has operated over the past few months has increased fear that the central government may be losing its battle against Islamic extremism ism.
Racked by poverty and political instability many analysts have warned that Yemen could not possibly stand alone against terror, not when its adversaries sought so viciously to exploit every weaknesses and vacuum to dig in its claws into society's psyche and attract more support to its cause.
Ever since 2011 when al-Qaeda exploited Yemen's popular unrest to its advantage by expanding its zone of control and claiming its own large swathes of lands in the southern province of Abyan, the group has relentlessly escalated the scale of its attacks, emboldened by its the effectiveness of its hit-and-run assassination tactics.
Dozens of officers have died by the hands of al-Qaeda since 2011, painful reminders of Yemen's terror realities.