Trump doubles US air strikes on Yemen

April 20, 2017
Issue 
Girls demonstrate against the Saudi-led coalition outside the offices of the United Nations in Yemen's capital Sanaa in 2015.

Trump doubles US air strikes on Yemen

The United States administration of Donald Trump has so far carried out at least 70 air strikes in Yemen, TeleSUR English said on April 4, more than twice as many as those carried out last year under the Barck Obama administration, according to data provided by the Pentagon.

The Pentagon said that day that the US had carried out 20 airstrikes in Yemen over the past week. The US military said the air strikes were carried out by unmanned drones, allegedly against targets and fighters belonging to al-Qaeda’s branch in Yemen, regarded as one of the terrorist group’s most powerful factions.

The Trump administration had also carried out a limited operation in Yemen against a high-ranking al-Qaeda commander that was not granted by Obama on grounds of being too risky. It killed more than 30 Yemeni civilians and one US special forces officer.

Yemen is also under another military attack by Saudi Arabia and 12 of its regional allies, who have been bombing the country on a daily basis since March 2015, killing more than 10,000 people, many of them civilians.

Yemen: Hundreds of thousands protest US-backed Saudi war

Marking two years since the beginning of the US-backed Saudi-led invasion of Yemen, hundreds of thousands of people poured into the streets of the capital of Sana’a to protest the brutality of the bombing campaign, TeleSUR English said on March 26.

The conflict began in March 2015 in efforts to reinstall toppled President Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi and to suppress the Shiite armed militias that oppose the Saudi-backed former leader.

On March 23, the United Nations human rights office said an average of 100 civilians a month are dying in Yemen’s war, most killed by the Saudi-led coalition's air strikes and shelling.

“There is a disaster in Yemen and Saudi Arabia will not stop destroying our country,” Ahmed Al Moaiad, a London-based Yemeni activist, recently told TeleSUR. “That’s why the Yemeni people have to resist this invasion.”

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