Aden — A drone strike killed four suspected Al-Qaeda fighters in central Yemen on Monday, a local official said.

The United States is the only force known to operate armed drones over Yemen.

"A car carrying four fighters was hit as it drove on a mountain road" in Bayda province, the official said. "All of them were killed."

"The fighters were from Al-Qaeda," he said.

Washington considers the Yemen-based Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to be the radical group's most dangerous branch.

AQAP has flourished in the chaos of the country's civil war.

A long-running drone war against AQAP has intensified since US President Donald Trump took office in January.

An air raid he ordered that month killed a US Navy SEAL and several Yemeni civilians in Bayda.

US strikes in Yemen have typically targeted suspected Al-Qaeda fighters, but last month the United States said it had killed dozens of fighters from its rival, the Daesh group, at training camps in Bayda. — AFP