Yemen, US drone attacks in Yemen protect no one but Al-Qaeda
Lo scorso 5 dicembre, gli yemeniti assistettero impotenti ad uno dei massacri più terribili nella memoria recente del paese. Terroristi vestiti con uniformi dell'esercito attaccarono un ospedale all'interno del compound del Ministero della Difesa nella capitale, Sana'a, uccidendo più di 50 persone e ferendone più di 150.
The victims were men, women and children; patients, doctors and nurses;
locals and foreigners. Footage from surveillance cameras showed a gunman
attacking a surgeon as he operated on a patient in the emergency room,
and another casually lobbing a grenade into a crowd of people cowering
on the floor.
The spontaneous public backlash against Al-Qaeda in
the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) was more intense than anything the country
has witnessed in decades. AQAP, which has long tried to cultivate an
image of fighting on behalf of ordinary Yemenis against foreign
aggression, was excoriated on TV, newspapers, radio and social media—all
this was even before the group announced responsibility for the attack.
But
then, on the following night after the government began broadcasting
the videos, and as rage against AQAP was reaching a fevered pitch, an
unmanned American military drone flying over the Rada’a province, some
150 kilometers south-east of Sana’a, fired a missile into Yemen. It
struck a vehicle in a wedding procession, killing 12 people and wounding
dozens more. Almost instantly, the public discourse shifted, the anger
redirected. Al-Qaeda had almost destroyed itself but America came to its
rescue.
In a country that has suffered almost a decade of U.S.
drone strikes and watched them obliterate hundreds of innocent lives, it
mattered little that the “official” target in Rada’a were several
militants among the wedding goers. Rather, that drone strike reminded
Yemenis, once again, that it is American terror that looms over
them—constantly. As one Yemeni activist said: “If you escape AQAP, you
don’t escape U.S. drones.”
AQAP seized the opportunity. On Dec.
22, the group’s military leader, Qasim Al-Raimi, apologized for the
hospital attack in a video statement and promised to pay compensation to
survivors and victims’ families. The mistake, he claimed, was that the
group had attacked the wrong building, that their actual target had been
the drone control center within the ministry of defense compound,
jointly run by U.S. and Yemeni military personnel. However implausible
this story may be, the apology and promise of compensation are in stark
contrast to America’s cold silence for the civilians it killed.
American
intervention did years worth of public relations on behalf of AQAP.
While this is the latest and certainly the most blatant example, it is
far from the only instance of the U.S. indirectly assisting Al-Qaeda’s
PR machine—and even its human resources department. It was actually in
the Rada’a district that a researcher, who recently visited the area,
discovered a local AQAP leader who was complaining about new recruits
not carrying out their regular religious prayers—they did not join
Al-Qaeda for ideological reasons, but because they saw the group as a
means to avenge relatives killed in U.S. drone strikes and for other
reasons that have nothing to do with ideology.
In many parts of
Yemen, it is not AQAP that is feared, but America. Not long ago, I
visited the area of Khawlan, a 30-minute drive from Sana’a, where a U.S.
missile struck a vehicle full of passengers, killing everyone,
including a local schoolteacher. He’d been with his cousin, the driver,
who had picked up other people as a normal fare ride. How were the
cousins to know that these people were on the U.S. kill list? Children
were waiting in the classroom for two hours the next morning before the
news came that their teacher, Ali, was dead. Now, whenever teachers are
late for class, students at the school become terrified that the U.S.
may have killed them.
U.S. drones also undermine the legitimacy
of America’s valuable ally in Yemen, president Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi.
In August, Hadi visited the U.S., and while meeting with CIA director
John Brennan a drone was fired into his hometown of Abyan. The
president’s return to Yemen was followed by days of intensive drone
strikes across the country. Hadi then publicly defended the drone
strikes—all of which made him look like more of an American stooge than a
man of his people. Hadi is already in an uphill battle to prove himself
to Yemenis, as regional and Western powers had selected him as the only
name on the ballot to replace former President Ali Abdulla Saleh.
There
are also economic consequences for drone strikes. For example, the same
month that Hadi was in the U.S., the Yemeni government announced that
it qualified 18 international oil companies to bid on 20 onshore
exploration blocks, mostly in the provinces of Hadramout and Marib,
which hold more than 85 percent of the country’s oil reserves.
Hadramout
and Marib also happen to be the sites of regular U.S. strikes that
targeted not only suspected Islamic militants but also powerful local
leaders, including a prominent religious cleric who preached against
Al-Qaeda and many civilians. This has had locals increasingly protesting
against U.S. drones and the central government’s complicity. This also
exacerbates pre-existing tensions in Hadramout, where many Yemenis have
long sought autonomy from Sana’a.
In such an environment, it is
unclear how oil companies would mitigate the risk of their staff and
operations being held hostage to angry locals after another drone
strike.
While the U.S. is the largest donor of humanitarian aid
to Yemen, Washington has done an excellent job of having itself
perceived as the enemy of the Yemeni people while helping Al-Qaeda in
ways Al-Qaeda could never have dreamt of itself.
Source Yemen Times
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