Rozina Ali reports on some of the civilian casualties caused by U.S. airstrikes in Yemen:
Hassan’s brothers were already there, digging through the rubble, searching for the remains of a family. “They were scattered and torn into pieces,” he said. Rescuers recovered mangled bodies. Among them were two faces Hassan recognized well: the five-year-old boy, Hamad, and a three-year-old girl, Dareen, who was rushed to a hospital in Sanaa, Yemen’s capital. Hamad was dead.
He “was roasted,” Hassan recalled, adding quietly that it was a “horrifying” sight. He later sent me photos of Dareen that were circulating on social media; she was attached to a breathing tube, her body covered in gauze and her face marbled with burn marks. In the debris, locals found remnants of Tomahawk missiles, which Airwars, a British nonprofit organization that tracks civilian harm in conflict zones, confirmed were the munitions used in the strike.
The U.S. is illegally bombing Yemen because it will not rein in the Israeli government’s war and genocide in Gaza. Our military is blowing up and incinerating Yemeni civilians, including children, when it could demand and insist on a ceasefire in Gaza instead. The U.S. is likely committing war crimes in a campaign that has never been debated or voted on in Congress. Our government is resorting to military action that will almost certainly cause more evils than it prevents. This is shameful and indefensible. Americans should demand an immediate end to the bombing.
A ceasefire in Gaza would have much greater success in ending attacks on shipping in the Red Sea. We know this because it has already happened for a short period of time. During the brief ceasefire at the start of the year, there were no more attacks on commercial shipping. It was only after the U.S. resumed bombing Yemen and Israel resumed bombing Gaza that the attacks started up again. The administration already had the result it claims to want, and the president threw it away so that he could look “tougher” than Biden.
According to Ali’s report, these are some of the results of that reckless decision:
Eventually, Hassan told me, rescuers who dug through the rubble counted fifteen dead, all women and children. Among them were Risala, age thirteen; Saleh, age nine; Abdullah, age six; Nazam, age six; Abdulkader, age five; Hadi, age three; and Motlak, a newborn baby. The baby’s mother was also killed.
There are many innocent Yemenis that are dead today when they should be alive, but the president made an arbitrary and illegal decision that killed them. This should be front and center in the coverage and discussion of the bombing campaign, but it has received relatively little attention. Senators have been outraged about the hypothetical danger that U.S. pilots might have been in because of the administration’s security lapses, but they seem to be unaware of the actual deaths of the innocents that those pilots killed.
Read the rest of the article at Eunomia
Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.
