Al Qaeda Raids in Yemen: a Show and a Massacre, US Applauds
Lets review. a) Qasim al Reimi manages to escape just minutes before the raid north of Sana’a in Arhab. Looks good on paper if you believe in fairy tales. b) Yemen bombs a Bedouin village in Abyan, where separatist sentiments are running high, killing over 60. The Yemeni military say the dead number 30 and were al Qaeda but the photos show women and children. The casualty lists show extremely poor Bedouin families wiped out en masse c) Obama calls Saleh and says “Good Job!” The Western media uses headlines like “Yemen Forces Strike Al Qaeda, Kill 34.” Its like deja vu all over again.
YemenOnline.Decembe 18- Three of al Qaeda members escaped from the last military attack carried out by security forces in a number of areas in Yemen yesterday.Kassim Al-Reami,Hisam Mogali and the third one is believed to be a non-Yemeni have escaped during the attack into unknown area .
al Jazeera: At least 34 people have been killed in raids on suspected al-Qaeda hide-outs and training sites in Yemen, security officials have said.
At least 30 suspected fighters militants were killed on Thursday in the area of Mahsad in the southern province of Abyan, Saleh el-Shamsy, a provincial security official, said.
Government forces killed four suspected fighters and arrested 17 others in a raid in the Arhab district, which lies northeast of the capital Sanaa, the Yemeni interior ministry said.
Those killed and arrested in Arhab “planned to strike at schools as well as interests at home and abroad,” the ministry said, without elaborating.
‘Many more killed’
Residents of Abyan said that there was no al-Qaeda training camp in the area and that the raids had destroyed several homes.
Abbas al-Assal, a local human rights activist who was at the scene, said 64 people were killed, including 23 children and 17 women.
“The government wants to show the world that it is serious in pursuing al-Qaeda elements and that the south of Yemen is a refuge for al-Qaeda. That is not true at all,” al-Assal told the Associated Press by telephone.
Ali Mohammed Mansour, gave similar casualty figures, and said that he helped bury the dead in a mass grave.
Attack criticised
Mohammed Hazran, Abyan’s deputy governor, said that 10 al-Qaeda suspects were killed in the attack, including Mohammed Saleh al-Kazemi, a Saudi who had resided in the country since fighting in Afghanistan.
He was imprisoned in Yemen for two years before being released in 2005.
A provincial security official said that “grave mistakes occurred in the operation due to failures of information, which led to a large number of civilian deaths”.
Mansour, the resident, rejected claims that targeted site was a training camp, and said that community was only 100 metres away from a main road and two kilometres from an army base.
“If [al-Kazemi] was wanted, why didn’t the authorities come and arrest him all this time?” he said.
Al-Qaeda fighters are thought to be living among tribes that have raised concerns with the central government, especially in the northeast of the country.
Yemen’s government has in recent months ordered a series of deadly raids against Houthi fighters in the north of the country, as well as a growing separatist campaign in the south of the country.
