New information is emerging about what happened during the recent raid in Yemen by US military forces including the US Navy Seals that resulted in many civilians being killed, including women and children. These new reports were provided by survivors of the attacks.

Another survivor of the raid, Saleh Mohsen Amery, said his house was attacked and his daughter killed. Her 4-year-old son survived.

“They attacked the mosque, school, medical unit and a prison in the area,” he said.

He added, “Anybody leaving the house was hit and killed … and people in here have nothing but Kalashnikovs,” or AK-47s, to defend themselves.

After the fighting stopped, Amery said, people were too terrified to immediately hospitalize any of the wounded.

“We feared the planes would attack again,” he said. “Most people were taken to the hospital at 6 in the morning.”
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Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, told reporters Monday that local reports of female civilian casualties should be taken with “a grain of salt,” because several women took up fighting positions and fired on U.S. forces. By Wednesday, U.S. Central Command acknowledged there were noncombatants, including children, among the casualties.

The Trump administration is trying to place the blame for this latest fiasco on the Obama administration because the plan was initiated during his last month in office. While Obama was indeed responsible for many drone killings of civilians, this particular decision can be laid at the feet of Trump and his advisors.

Needless to say, this has sparked intense anger and AQAP (Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) is using it as a propaganda tool.

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, known as AQAP, claimed that “American soldiers shot children and women in cold blood and left the police dogs to crunch on the corpses of the dead.”
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As for Abdel Raouf Dhahab, the target of the operation, he was among those killed. Farea Muslimi, chairman of Sanaa Center for Strategic studies, said his death will stir anti-U.S. sentiment — not because he belonged to AQAP but because he didn’t.

Ahmad Salmani, another local from Yakla, said as much. “Dhahab is not AQAP, and everyone knows that he is a tribal sheikh and has nothing to do with AQAP,” Salmani said in an interview. “Because of this, now everyone… is willing to risk his life to kill a U.S. soldier.”

And so the bloody cycle of violence and retribution continues. One has to wonder how the ordinary people of Yemen must wonder about their small, desperately poor country becoming the site of a war between adversaries who seem to care little who and how many innocent people get killed, wounded, or otherwise have their lives destroyed.