WASHINGTON (AFP) –- President Barack Obama says he has “no intention” of sending U.S. troops to fight militants in Yemen and Somalia, despite growing concern over the presence of militant cells there.

Obama made a fresh push for international cooperation to confront militants in Yemen, where the top U.S. military officer, Admiral Michael Mullen, said sending troops was “not a possibility.”
“I never rule out any possibility in a world that is this complex... In countries like Yemen, in countries like Somalia, I think working with international partners is most effective at this point,” Obama said in a People interview to be published Friday. The magazine released a transcript Sunday.
“I have no intention of sending U.S. boots on the ground in these regions.”
He insisted the lawless tribal belt straddling the Afghanistan-Pakistan border “remains the epicenter of Al-Qaeda,” but acknowledged a Yemen-based affiliate of Osama bin Laden's network has become “a more serious problem.”
Recent strikes on Al-Qaeda positions in Yemen, including cruise missile attacks, were reportedly led by the United States, which has vowed to boost its economic and military aid to Sanaa. London and Washington have already announced plans to fund a counter-extremism police in the country.
Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged in a CNN interview that the United States was providing “some support” to Yemen's efforts to strike Al-Qaeda militants, but insisted Sanaa led the operations.
Yemen has been hostile to any suggestion of U.S. military intervention, but analysts fear bin Laden's ancestral homeland cannot tackle the militants on its own and U.S. officials have said they are seeking to boost military and intelligence cooperation with Yemen.
General David Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command, which oversees a region encompassing the Middle East, the Gulf, the Horn of Africa and Central Asia, welcomed Yemen's desire to tackle extremists on its own.
“We would always want a host nation to deal with a problem itself. We want to help. We're providing assistance,” he told CNN after returning from a trip to Yemen during which he held talks with President Ali Abdullah Saleh.
Petraeus said Washington planned to more than double its economic aid to Yemen this year to 150 million dollars or more, up from 70 million last year. But U.S. officials have insisted the total aid amount has not yet been determined.
Washington has urged Yemen to crack down on Al-Qaeda but Sanaa already faces a litany of challenges.
And President Saleh said, in remarks broadcast Sunday, that he is open to dialogue with militants.
“If Al-Qaeda lay down their arms, renounce violence and terrorism and return to wisdom, we are prepared to deal with them,” Saleh told Abu Dhabi TV.
“We can't return to sort of a garrison-state notion that we're just going to hunker down and this is only an issue of firepower and boots on the ground,” he added.
A thinly stretched U.S. military has deployed large troop contingents in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan -- where Obama has vowed to focus his war against Al-Qaeda militants who have also sought refuge in neighboring Pakistan -- is set to triple under his watch from 2008 levels, reaching some 100,000 later this year.