Yemen Mourns Its Civilians Again

Fifteen members of a family, including seven children, were killed Tuesday in air strikes carried out by the US-backed and Saudi-led coalition in Qatabah, Southern Yemen.

News ID: 447425

Date: 01 October 2019 - 20:00

RNA - They were buried on Wednesday in their village of Al-Fakhir, on the edge of the town ringed by mountains, as their loved ones voiced shock and anger. Qatabah, on the edge of Al-Daleh province, has seen fierce fighting between Saudi-backed pro-government forces and the Houthi Ansarullah forces. According to the United Nations, the town is witnessing non-stop and daily clashes.

The new tragedy came after President Donald Trump vetoed a bill by Congress to end US support for the dirty war on Yemen, especially to put ground forces into a conflict environment, where both civilians and service members can die.

This is not the first time that the US Army has helped the Saudi-led coalition to bomb a town and kill its innocent civilians. For years, the United States has been taking military action against the country on the pretext of fighting Al-Qaeda, predominantly through drone strikes and airstrikes. Long before Trump decided to join the Saudis in the conflict, the Obama administration was busy killing civilians there.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism puts Obama’s killings at ten times the number of Bush administration drone assassinations. According to the bureau, the Obama death toll included thousands of civilians at wedding parties, funerals, and more mundane activities.

The fifteen civilian victims, including women and children, re in fact part of a higher civilian death toll in Yemen, based on Yemeni news reports. Most of the killing result from fighting on the ground, where Saudi-backed forces launch an offensive against the resistance forces, who toppled the puppet government before the war in 2015.

With President Trump now joining the circle of war-criminals-in-chief, there will be no trial in The Hague. This is yet another opportunity to hold a murderous president to account for killing civilians and acts of official assassination that are patently illegal under International Law. Even the UN has said in a new report that the US is complicit in Saudi war crimes in Yemen.

That the raid “worked” is perhaps the greatest myth of all. It was a botched raid, no more than a tactical pause in an ongoing proxy warfare. It is silly to argue that the botched raid will ever set off a political firestorm back in the US. No one is going to criticize the process that the Trump administration has used to approve the criminal escalation of the conflict. Nothing is politically toxic about America’s involvement in the Saudi-led war on Yemen. America owns the war and the escalation - and the consequences. The Americans had all the answers during the Obama administration.

Even at the United Nations no one (except for a few members) is going to question the illegality of escalation and the daily killing of civilians, much less take a very different path against the United States and Saudi Arabia. It marks such an incredible betrayal of the international community and the awesome responsibility that they must shoulder, especially in the UN Charter sphere.

This is an accurate recounting of the real situation in Yemen - destroy them and don’t help them, also destabilize and spread extremists to everywhere. Far from bringing “freedom and democracy” to that country, the US-backed and Saudi-led conflict has sowed chaos and death. It is a recipe for targeting civilian objects and costing people their lives - without thinking about regional security or diplomatic and political consequences, things that the Americans and the Saudis never think about.

In light of the Tuesday massacre and his Muslim travel ban, however, it is evident that President Trump wants to play a significant role in the instability of Yemen. That says why both the UN and the people of Yemen hold his administration in contempt. Instead of delegitimizing these sentiments as “They hate us for our freedoms” or “They can’t fix their own problems,” perhaps he should pay more attention to the conditions these people live in and the US government’s role in the instability of their country.

Corporate media not only fails to acknowledge this, but also does not rationally examine the criminality of the US-backed and Saudi-led war. It is easy to forget, and important to remember, that few in Washington are willing to accept such realities.

847/940