A Yemeni cabinet
minister on Tuesday criticized the U.S.’s drone war in Yemen, a tactic that is
supposed to eliminate alleged al-Qaeda threats, but which often kills civilians
and generates outrage among the local population.
“To have an
innocent person fall, this is a major breach,” Yemeni Human Rights Minister
Hooria Mashhour told Reuters.
“I am in favor
of changing the anti-terrorism strategy, I think there are more effective
strategies,” she said, that “can be applied on the ground without harming
civilians and without leading to human rights violations.”
Washington
bribes the Yemeni regime of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi with money and
military aid in exchange for allowing the U.S. to relentlessly bomb the country
with drones.
The Washington
Post reported last month that the Yemeni government as a policy tries to conceal
when U.S. drones kill civilians, instead automatically and systematically
describing the victims as al-Qaeda militants, regardless of the
truth.
It is rare for
members of the Yemeni government to speak out against the drones, but a member
of parliament similarly denounced the drone war last
October.
“At first people
didn’t talk, but after Radaa, things have changed,” said parliamentarian Ali
Abd-Rabbu al-Qadi, referring to a drone strike in September that killed 12
civilians in the town of Radaa. “These air strikes prepare the ground for
al-Qaeda and terrorism.”
The expanding
drone war in Yemen, which often kills civilians, does in fact cause blowback and
help al-Qaeda recruitment - as attested to by numerous Yemen experts,
investigative reporting on the ground, polling, testimony from Yemen activists,
and the actual fact that recent bungled terrorist attacks aimed at the U.S. have
cited such drone attacks as motivating factors.
After another
September drone strike that killed 13 civilians, a local Yemeni activist told
CNN, “I would not be surprised if a hundred tribesmen joined the lines of
al-Qaeda as a result of the latest drone mistake. This part of Yemen takes
revenge very seriously.”
“Our entire
village is angry at the government and the Americans,” a Yemeni villager named
Mohammed told the Post. “If the Americans are responsible, I would have no
choice but to sympathize with al-Qaeda because al-Qaeda is fighting
America.”
Many in the U.S.
intelligence community also believe the drone war is contributing to the
al-Qaeda presence in Yemen. Robert Grenier, who headed the CIA’s
counter-terrorism center and was previously a CIA station chief in Pakistan,
told The Guardian in June that he is “very concerned about the creation of a
larger terrorist safe haven in Yemen.”
“We have gone a
long way down the road of creating a situation where we are creating more
enemies than we are removing from the battlefield,” he said regarding drones in
Yemen. antiwar.com
On Tuesday,
antiwar.com reported that U.S. drones killed 17 people in Yemen in four straight
days. Strikes against
Yemen escalated dramatically in 2012, and the large number of strikes so far in
January suggest this will continue to be a growing target for U.S. drones going
forward. antiwar.com U.S. drone
strikes have also become a permanent feature of life for people of Pakistan and
Afghanistan. A report by
researchers at the Stanford and NYU schools of law found in September that the
drone program is “terrorizing” the people of Pakistan and that it is having
“counterproductive” effects. "The number of
'high-level' militants killed as a percentage of total casualties is extremely
low -- estimated at just 2% [of deaths]", says the Stanford/NYU
report. The United
States carried out more drone strikes last year in Afghanistan than it has
during its eight-year-long air war in Pakistan, launching 447 strikes and
killing thousands. RT AFP reported
that new Pentagon plans would heighten the U.S. reliance on drones in
Afghanistan.
ISH/HJ
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