SANAA (Reuters) - Yemen has expanded its week-long search for suspected backers of Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network and arrested militants belonging to other factions, a government official said on Tuesday.
The campaign to arrest three suspected militants associated with al Qaeda ``has been expanded to include any Islamic extremist elements from any hardline Islamic organization,'' the official said.
He said the death toll from a clash last week between security forces and the militants and their tribal hosts rose to 24 troops after six wounded soldiers died in hospital.
Four tribesmen were also killed in last Tuesday's three-hour battle in Marib province, some 88 miles east of the capital.
President Ali Abdullah Saleh ordered his forces on Friday to use an ``iron fist'' to deal with any security threat as security forces continued to comb an eastern hinterland in search of the militants.
However, officials said there had been no violent encounters since Tuesday. The government has won pledges from tribal chiefs for cooperation in the search.
Western diplomats say most of the militants in Yemen are veterans who fought against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Many are protected by powerful tribal leaders in rugged mountainous regions, they say.
AMERICAN PRAISE
Secretary of State Colin Powell has praised Sanaa's ``effort in combating terrorism'' in a message to Saleh, the official Yemeni media reported.
The crackdown is the first military operation against al Qaeda outside Afghanistan, where U.S. troops are searching for bin Laden whom Washington blames for planning the September 11 attacks on the United States.
Analysts have said that the hunt for the suspected bin Laden supporters appeared to be an attempt by Yemen to clean up its reputation as a haven for Muslim militants.
The crackdown, which comes a few weeks after Saleh held talks in Washington on fighting terrorism, coincides with media speculation that Yemen, along with Somalia and Sudan, could be a target in a second phase of the U.S. war on terrorism.