[News] Obama ordered US air strikes on Yemen killing scores of civilians

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Obama ordered US air strikes on Yemen

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/dec2009/yeme-d21.shtml

By Barry Grey
21 December 2009

US President Barack Obama personally issued the 
order for US air strikes in Yemen last Thursday 
which killed scores of civilians, including women and children.

US warplanes used cruise missiles against alleged 
Al Qaeda camps in the Abyan village of al 
Maajala, some 480 kilometers southeast of the 
capital Sana’a, and in the Arhab district, 60 
kilometers to the northeast of Sana’a. The US 
strikes were apparently coordinated with the 
US-backed dictatorship of Yemen President Ali 
Abdallah Saleh, whose military forces attacked 
the bombed towns as well as a third village, 
resulting in the deaths of some 120 people, 
according to Yemen opposition spokesmen.

Local officials and witnesses in the area of 
Mahsad, the site of the heaviest US bombardment, 
put the number of those killed at more than 60 
and said the dead were mostly civilians. They 
denied that the target was an al Qaeda stronghold.

Brian Ross, an investigative reporter for ABC 
News, first reported Friday night on the “ABC 
World News” program that US warplanes had been 
involved in the attacks. He said, “White House 
officials tell ABC News the orders for the US 
military to attack the suspected Al Qaeda sites 
in Yemen on Thursday came directly from the Oval Office.”

He continued: “The US military used cruise 
missiles in the attacks on two separate locations 
in Yemen. Pictures broadcast tonight on 
al-Jazeera showed dozens of bodies covered by 
sheets. Officials said some 35 suspected Al Qaeda 
figures had been killed. Opposition groups said 
dozens of civilians were also killed.”

ABC News cited White House officials as telling 
reporters that Obama contacted Yemen President 
Saleh after the blitz to “congratulate” him on the attacks.

US officials refused to comment Friday on the ABC 
News report, but they did not deny it. “We are 
not going to get into any details at this point,” 
one official said. He added that Yemen and the US 
“cooperate closely on counterterrorism.”

Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, told the New 
York Times, which reported Saturday on the US 
role in the attacks, “Yemen should be 
congratulated for actions against Al Qaeda.”

Thousands of Yemenis took to the streets in 
southern Yemen Saturday to denounce the barbaric 
military operations. According to local sources, 
some 3,000 people in Dhal’e province and hundreds 
in Lahj and Abyan provinces marched in the 
protest, shouting anti-government slogans and 
demanding an investigation into the attacks.

The Joint Meeting Parties, an opposition 
coalition of six parties, condemned the targeting 
of civilians at a rally of 10,000 people in Taiz 
province, 260 kilometers south of Sana’a. A 
leading member of the coalition described the attacks as a “heinous crime.”

The Southern Movement, which seeks secession from 
the north, said the raids were an attack on the 
people of the south, not Al Qaeda. “This is 
genocide,” said Abbass al Asal, a leading 
politician in the Southern Movement. He said an 
air and ground attack in Abyan had killed 64 
civilians, including 23 children and 17 women.

According to an Associated Press report on 
Saturday, residents of Abyan said there was no Al 
Qaeda training camp in the area and that the 
heavy assault had destroyed homes­a collection of 
mud brick houses, huts and tents­in the rural 
tribal area. A resident of the area, Ali Mohammed 
Mansour, said he helped bury the dead. He 
dismissed claims that the site was a training 
camp, pointing out that the community was only 
100 meters from a major highway and two kilometers from an army base.

Mansour said that one of those killed, Mohammed 
Saleh al-Kazemi, a Saudi who had come to Yemen 
after fighting in Afghanistan and had been 
imprisoned for two years before being released in 
2005, had lived in the village with his family 
since his release and was not in hiding.

Thursday’s attacks were part of a growing US 
military escalation in Yemen, which is being 
coordinated with the US-allied regime of 
President Saleh and the Saudi monarchy, which, in 
turn, is backed by Egypt. Until Thursday, 
large-scale US military violence was concentrated 
in the north of Yemen and directed against an 
insurgency by fighters from the Houthi tribe, 
which practices a brand of Shiite Islam distinct from that of Iran.
Map of the Middle East


Last week, Houthi fighters claimed that US 
fighter jets had launched 28 attacks on the 
northwestern province of Sa’ada, which is near 
the border with Saudi Arabia. Since August, when 
President Saleh announced the launching of 
“Operation Scorched Earth” to wipe out Houthi 
resistance, Saudi troops and planes have been 
attacking border regions in Yemen to the south of 
Saudi Arabia. Saleh, Riyadh and Cairo claim that 
the Houthis are being backed and supplied by Iran, which denies the charges.

The Obama administration conflates the various 
oppositional movements in Yemen with Al Qaeda, 
despite the fact that Al Qaeda is a Sunni 
movement and is deeply hostile to Shiites, such 
as the Houthis. The British Daily Telegraph 
reported December 13, citing unnamed American 
officials, that the US had sent Special Forces 
troops to Yemen to train the country’s army. The 
newspaper quoted a US military official as 
saying, “Yemen is becoming a reserve base for Al 
Qaeda’s activities in Pakistan and Afghanistan.”

This is clear signal that Washington is extending 
the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen.

Saudi fighter jets are reportedly using 
phosphorus bombs against Houthi fighters. On 
December 13, Houthi sources said that Saudi 
forces had launched a major cross-border strike, 
leaving at least 70 civilians dead and more than 
100 others injured in the northern district of Razeh.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and 
the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) 
have issued warnings on the dire conditions of 
hundreds of thousands of Yemenis who have been 
displaced by the combined government and Saudi 
assault on the north. UNCHR estimates that up to 
175,000 people have been forced to leave their 
homes in Sa’ada and take refuge in overcrowded 
camps that have insufficient food and water. 
Children have died as a result of the conditions in the camps.

The US air strikes in Yemen last Thursday came on 
the same day that Washington carried out a 
massive drone attack in Pakistan’s North 
Waziristan province that pummeled a village, killing at least 17 people.

These developments, coinciding with the arrival 
of the first of the 30,000 additional troops 
Obama has dispatched to Afghanistan, demonstrate 
that the Obama administration is carrying out a 
policy of military aggression and colonial 
conquest surpassing even that of the Bush 
administration. They provide an indication of 
expanding death and destruction that were only 
hinted at in Obama’s December 1 speech at West 
Point, in which he announced his escalation of 
the war in Afghanistan, and suggested more 
directly in his December 10 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech.

In his West Point speech, Obama declared, “The 
struggle against violent extremism will not be 
finished quickly,” adding that it “extends well 
beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan.” He went on to 
speak of “disorderly regions and diffuse enemies” 
and mentioned by name Somalia and Yemen.

His Nobel speech was a bellicose brief for 
imperialist war and neo-colonialism. Obama touted 
the virtues of pre-emptive war and singled out a 
series of potential targets of US military 
aggression, including Iran, Sudan, Congo, Zimbabwe and Myanmar.

As with US imperialism’s interventions in Iraq, 
Afghanistan and Pakistan, the escalating US 
aggression in Yemen has nothing to do with 
defeating Al Qaeda or protecting the American 
people from terrorism. It is motivated by the 
drive of the American ruling elite to establish 
hegemony in the oil-rich regions of the Middle 
East and Central Asia and gain US control over 
strategically critical pipeline and maritime routes.

Yemen occupies a crucial geographical position, 
which made it a battleground between the US and 
the Soviet Union during the Cold War. As the 
Associated Press noted in a report on last 
Thursday’s air strikes, “Yemen is located on a 
strategic maritime crossroad at the Red Sea and 
the Gulf of Aden, the access point to the Suez 
Canal­and across the Gulf is Somalia, an even more tumultuous nation
”

The US has already carried out military strikes 
on Somalia and used Ethiopia to conduct a proxy 
war and occupation of the country.

In its drive to establish American military and 
political control over Yemen, the US is inflaming 
tensions throughout the region­particularly 
between Saudi Arabia and Egypt on one side, and Iran on the other.

The US military intervention around the Gulf of 
Aden, both covert and overt, must be taken as a 
warning of the catastrophic implications, both 
for the targeted populations and for the American 
people, of US imperialism’s global designs. It is 
up to the American and international working 
class to put a stop to Washington’s neo-colonial strategy.

This requires a direct struggle against the Obama 
administration. Little more than a year after his 
election as the candidate of “change” and “hope,” 
Obama stands exposed as a war criminal and 
instrument of Wall Street and the US 
military-intelligence apparatus. To fight 
militarism, the working class must build an 
independent socialist movement in opposition to 
Obama, the Democratic Party and the two-party 
system, and capitalism, which is the source of oppression and war.




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