<html>
<body>
<h2><b>Obama ordered US air strikes on
Yemen</b></h2><font size=3>
<a href="http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/dec2009/yeme-d21.shtml" eudora="autourl">
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/dec2009/yeme-d21.shtml<br>
</a></font><h5><b>By Barry Grey <br>
21 December 2009</b></h5><font size=3>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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
He continued: “The US military used cruise missiles in the attacks on two
separate locations in Yemen. Pictures broadcast tonight on <i>al-Jazeera
</i>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.”<br><br>
ABC News cited White House officials as telling reporters that Obama
contacted Yemen President Saleh after the blitz to “congratulate” him on
the attacks.<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, told the <i>New York Times</i>,
which reported Saturday on the US role in the attacks, “Yemen should be
congratulated for actions against Al Qaeda.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br>
<img src="http://www.wsws.org/images/2009dec/d21-map-yemen-480.jpg" alt="Map of the Middle East">
<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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
<i>Daily Telegraph </i>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.”<br><br>
This is clear signal that Washington is extending the war in Afghanistan
and Pakistan to Yemen.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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…”<br><br>
The US has already carried out military strikes on Somalia and used
Ethiopia to conduct a proxy war and occupation of the country.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
<br><br>
</font><x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
<font size=3 color="#FF0000">Freedom Archives<br>
522 Valencia Street<br>
San Francisco, CA 94110<br><br>
</font><font size=3 color="#008000">415 863-9977<br><br>
</font><font size=3 color="#0000FF">
<a href="http://www.freedomarchives.org/" eudora="autourl">
www.Freedomarchives.org</a></font><font size=3> </font></body>
</html>