Yemeni MP Calls for Investigation of Civilian Slaughter Under Guise of Counter-Terror
After all this time and all the lies and all the elaborate hoaxes on the al Qaeda issue, who in the world takes Ali Abdullah Saleh at his word? Who, really?
The tens of millions offered by the Millennium Challenge Account didn’t spur any real reform, and apparently the winning smile just doesn’t cut it in Yemen either.
There’s been enough civilian slaughter in Sa’ada under the guise of counter-insurgency to warrent a war crimes tribunal. And there’s been enough in the South. A bogus counter-terror operation (or a sincere one, but we’ll never see that) doesn’t legitimize US support of a mass murderer.
SANAA (Reuters) – Yemen’s opposition accused the government on Friday of killing dozens of civilians, including whole families, in raids a day earlier which the authorities said had killed about 30 al Qaeda militants.
Yemen said on Thursday that security forces and warplanes had foiled a planned series of suicide bombings by attacking targets including an al Qaeda training center in the southern province of Abyan and sites in Arhab district.
The troops killed 30 al Qaeda militants and arrested 17 in Abyan and in Arhab, northeast of the capital Sanaa, it said.
U.S. President Barack Obama called Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, saying the operation “confirms Yemen’s resolve in confronting the danger of terrorism represented by al Qaeda for Yemen and the world,” Yemen’s state media said.
An opposition website quoted sources in Abyan as saying 18 children and 41 men and women were killed in the attack there, eight families losing four to seven members each.
“In a dangerous precedent, … the Sanaa regime committed a brutal massacre against our people,” exiled southern leader Ali Salem al-Beidh said in a statement, calling for an investigation by the United Nations, and by Arab and Muslim countries.
A government official accused Beidh, who lives in Germany, of supporting al Qaeda in his statement and called for him to be handed over to Yemen, the state news agency Saba said.
As well as fighting al Qaeda militants, Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest country, is battling separatist unrest in the south and a separate Shi’ite rebellion in the north.
Analysts say such conflicts, along with falling oil income, water shortages and a humanitarian crisis, add to instability in a region that includes oil superpower Saudi Arabia and one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.
MP Ali Ashal from the Islamist opposition Islah party called for a parliamentary investigation into the raids.
“We are surprised by this operation, which shows the extreme foolishness of those who ordered it, because they ordered the shedding of innocent blood,” Ashal told an opposition website.
