US Strikes Terrorism Targets In Yemen As War Against Al-Qaida Persists

As many as 16 civilians – eight women and eight children – were also killed, a Yemeni provincial official said, drawing condemnation of the raid from human rights groups.

It is not clear how wide-ranging the new authorities are. “We’re doing work on the bad guys”.

“The White House’s new fool has received a painful blow at your hands in his first outing on your land”, Yemeni al-Qaeda leader Qasim al-Rimi said.

“Period”, Van Jones, a former Obama administration official, said, according to Buzz Feed.

Manned and unmanned aircraft were used and the military assesses that al Qaeda personnel were killed.

That approval process, the Examiner reports, was frustrating and unnecessarily complex for USA military leaders there, requiring commanders to submit memos justifying the action to the White House.

“It’s definitely helping us understand the network and further develop it out …”

That is, the USA military is not just focused on the Islamic State anymore and has not stopped despite the ill-fated raid Donald Trump approved just days into his presidency. Mattis delegated this authority down the chain of command to U.S. Central Command, who approved both rounds of airstrikes. “The air raid hit al-Tunsi’s convoy in the Aqrabat district in Idlib”, a local media activist said.

An NBC News report Monday said that USA intelligence officials said the raid produced no real actionable intelligence.

Following the mission, a Pentagon official said, “Almost everything went wrong”.

A senior official yesterday insisted, however, that, “the raid produced valuable intelligence”.

The defence official said the group was well armed and U.S. strikes since Thursday have included AQAP’s heavy weapons.”We would expect that they certainly have light anti-aircraft and they possibly have MANPADS, that is a possibility we have seen”, the official said, referring man-portable air defence systems.

Al-Qaida in Yemen, seen as the militant group’s most unsafe offshoot, has seized large swaths of land and entire cities starting from 2011, the year the mass uprising started and ended with longtime ruler Ali Abdullah Saleh leaving power.

Al-Jaouf added that the top tribal figure, Abdel-Elah al-Dhahab, whose brothers were accused of links to al-Qaida and were killed in the January raid, survived the latest strikes.

Some Somalis are also part of AQAP who share ideological ties as the al-Shabaab terrorist group in Somalia is another Al Qaeda affiliate, the official said.

Thursday’s airstrikes come a month after US special forces carried out a raid in the same province.

On Friday, defense officials made the case for the value of the “large volumes” of materiel recovered by the U.S. Special Operations team in the January raid.

Yemeni officials conceded that they aren’t really sure what the objective of the USA airstrikes is, though some U.S. officials made vague reference to threats of al-Qaeda launch attacks overseas from central Yemen.