Yemen: Scourge of U.S. Drones

Images from Intercept

U.S. drones have resumed circling the skies of Yemen with the standard pretext of targeting "AlQaeda militants." Two teenage cousins, Amer and Hasan, were targeted on March 5 on the road between Hadramaut and Marib. Amer was killed on the spot and Hasan seriously injured. Seven more Yemeni civilians and families were killed by U.S. drones on March 7 and March 9 in the same part of the country. All of them were civilians displaced by the lengthy and destructive war. Their lives were already devastated. They needed to be helped with food and accommodation, not murdered as brutally as they were.

Drone strikes occurred in Yemen in 2002 and 2009, then tapered off to give Saudi airstrikes a chance to cause maximum harm and ruination in their unsuccessful effort to crush the Ansarallah revolutionary movement. From 2017, under Trump's "new secret killing rules," drone attacks recommenced slaughtering 166 Yemeni civilians from January to October of 2017. In January 2018 alone, U.S. carried out 302 drone strikes in Yemen. A total of at least 200 Yemeni civilians, many of them women and children, have reportedly been killed by American drones. The actual figures are thought to be much higher.

AQAP and ISIL (AlQaeda of Arabian Peninsula and AlQaeda of Iraq & Levant) had reached Yemen 3 years after the start of the Syrian war. They are now comfortably established, many of them joining the war against Ansarallah and fighting alongside the Saudi led coalition forces. Yet again, AlQaeda and the United States have ended up having a common foe and the latter's face-saving device is spurious claims of targeting AlQaeda in Yemen. Neither AQAP nor ISIL are struggling to defend themselves against U.S. drones. But the civilians of Yemen are.