Trump escalates the US's own war on Yemen

It was a quiet, star filled January night in 2017 and 8 year old Nawar Al Awlaki was asleep with her mother in her Uncle's house in Yakla, a rural village in the mountains of Al Bayda, a region of South Yemen.  Suddenly she was woken by the sound of gunfire and she instinctively went to hide.

Her neighbours were under attack and were being killed as they fled their homes, including the Ameri family with three children -  Aisha, 4, Hussein, 5 and Khadija, 7.  

Nawar's home then came under attack and she was shot in the neck by a bullet that came through the window.  Despite her own assurances to her mother not to worry, she died two hours later from a loss of blood.  

25 civilians died that night, including 9 children under the age of 13, one of them a 3 month old boy and a pregnant woman who was shot in the stomach.

The photo below shows some of the children who survived that terrible night, haunted by the loss of their family members and the horrific scenes they witnessed.

As the chaos and devastation in the small Yemeni village unfolded, a new US President was settling in to his new home at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  Trump had been President for just 8 days and the war in Yemen was almost completing 2 years. Already there were reports of human rights violations on the part of the Saudi coalition, using weapons supplied by the US and the UK.

To date, with the war in Yemen now well into its fourth year, the Council on Foreign Relations estimates the civilian death toll as 16,200 but this is likely to be a conservative estimate, and accurate figures are very difficult to gather, given the restricted access to the country.  

The US is now appearing to act as peacemaker with the Defence Secretary, Mattis, trying to squeeze a ceasefire out of the warring parties within the next 30 days.

However, while the US encourages a cessation of hostilities, the Trump administration keeps hidden its own direct operations and human rights violations in the country. 

The attack on Yakla, that killed Nawar and 24 of her friends and neighbours was, in fact, launched by Donald Trump himself.   

An NBC investigation found that this particular Special Ops ground raid was discussed and approved “during dinner” with Trump’s National Security team, including the former National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn.

It is not so widely reported that, in addition to supporting Saudi Arabia in its campaign, the USA is itself directly bombing Yemen and has been doing so since 2002, when then President Bush embarked on the so called ‘counterterrorism’ program in response to 9/11.   

The program expanded under Obama and has literally exploded under Trump, with the inevitable associated casualties which the administration are now refusing to release.

Just two months after 9/11 in November 2001, George W Bush entered into an agreement with the now deceased Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, in which the shrewd Saleh gave permission for Bush to set up a CIA ‘counterterrorism’ training camp in his country in return for a $400 million aid package.  

In addition, the US Government turned a blind eye to some of Saleh’s more brutal control measures at home, while he allowed the US to start a ‘targeted’ drone bombing effort to take out key AQAP (Al Qaeada in the Arabian Penninsula) personnel in Yemen.

The US uses a combination of unmanned Predator drone attacks, launched from a base in Djibouti, as well as traditional air strikes and ‘Special Ops’ ground missions, such as the one in Yakla, to assassinate ‘terrorist targets’ in the rural mountain villages across Yemen.  

These operations targeting ‘known militants and terrorists’ are often described rather glibly as "surgical strikes", but they have been found to be nothing of the sort. 

One of the worst cases of  ‘collateral damage’ during Obama’s Presidency was in December 2013 when a wedding party was mistakenly targeted, killing 12.  

After the US Government initially denied any civilian casualties, an investigation by Reprieve, a British human rights organisation, found that “more than $1 million was paid to the families of those killed and injured.”

In fact, the rate of civilian casualties not only in Yemen but also in Pakistan, Somalia and Afghanistan, became so concerning for Obama that in 2016 towards the end of his Presidency, he signed an executive order to provide more transparency on civilian casualties, including reports of all missions, numbers killed and planned condolences and reparations to the families of deceased and injured civilians.

This increased transparency can be seen on the Bureau of Investigative Journalism website, which lists all known attacks with details.  Details which, since Trump's inauguration, are no longer available.

Unfortunately, when Trump came into power, his administration decided to ignore the executive order and as a result, any attempt at transparency of the number of casualties was lost.  This coincided with a dramatic rise in the number of operations immediately after Trump became President.  

To date, since his inauguration, Trump has launched 163 known drone strikes in Yemen, now surpassing the number conducted during Obama’s entire 8 year tenure as President.    

One of the first things Trump did on becoming US President was to designate Yemen as an area of ‘active hostilities’.  This allowed him to launch attacks unchecked by the rigorous ‘sign-off’ process that Obama had put in place previously to ensure some accountability.   

The Navy Seal raid on Yakla involved 50 special forces soldiers going house to house, shooting anyone who left their homes and burning down houses with women and children inside.  One of the villagers had lost his son during the 2013 wedding party drone strike but had survived himself only to be killed 3 years later during this botched raid.

The White House subsequently announced the raid as “successful by all standards” and even when the father of one Navy Seal who died in the raid, came out and demanded answers, Trump refused to take responsibility for his decision in giving it the green light.

It might be safe to assume that this catastrophic loss of civilian life so early in Trump’s tenure would see him scale back and take a slightly more cautious approach.  Sadly not.  Shortly thereafter, the US administration got somewhat ‘trigger happy’ and launched almost 100 drone strikes in just a couple of months in the Spring of 2017.

However, while we have an idea of the number of strikes, there is almost no information about the number of casualties, particularly civilian, since Trump decided not to release the report as required by the executive order.

The charts below, published by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, are revealing and show the extent of the White House cover up.  The first shows the number of strikes, in blue.  The second shows the number of 'reported' civilian casualties in red.

The spokesperson for the National Security Council told the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, that there had been “NO increase in the number of civilian casualties compared to the previous year”.   This is a somewhat disingenuous statement, given that the administration has published no report into how many civilians were killed in 2016 or 2017 and the chart below bears that out.   

To believe that there has been no increase in civilian casualties when the number of strikes has more than tripled, is to believe that Trump's inauguration crowd was the biggest in history..... yet another Trump lie.

The report for 2016 should have been published by 1st May 2017 but the deadline quietly came and went.  And with all eyes now on Saudi Arabia’s transgressions both in Yemen and recently in the gruesome killing of a journalist in Turkey, these US operations are sliding nicely under the radar, for the time being.  

Secretary Mattis has directed Department of Defence representatives not to give out information on strikes, and a spokesman told the BIJ “Secretary Mattis has made it clear we are not providing numbers or tactics that gives our adversaries any advantage”.  

But this secrecy is troubling civil liberties groups and it should concern us all.   The US Government under Trump is eroding any semblance of accountability for murdering innocent civilians in foreign lands...... sound familiar?