Obama ordered US air strikes on Yemen

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Obama ordered US air strikes on Yemen
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 homes—a collection of mud brick
houses, huts and tents—in 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.

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 Myamar.

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 Canal—and
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 region—particularly
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.

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

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