Eight-year-old American girl ,U.S. Soldier killed in Trump Yemen raid
Like Carter In Iran or Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in their 'assassination of bin Laden' Trump's aircraft just don't seem to work.....
The pre-dawn raid was plagued by trouble from the start. A tilt-rotor MV-22 transporting the commandos experienced a “hard landing” near the target location, and had to be destroyed.............. -.theguardian.com
Trump and the Israeli right: Hawks of a feather
Socialist Worker Online-Jan 9, 2017
The U.S. refusal to veto a UN resolution condemning Israeli .... carnage in Syria andYemen, the rise of ISIS, and the intensifying Iranian/Saudi ...
Will Allies Keep Trump in the Dark?
Commentary Magazine-Jan 12, 2017
... Russian doves, but the administration is also made up of Iran hawks. ... Russia andIran are working closely in Syria to ensure the genocidal ... It may soon discover that the necessity of countering Iranian objectives in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, ... Furthermore, the notion that Israeli intelligence officials will balk at ...
Costly Yemen SEAL raid could bolster anti-US anger
CNN-Feb 2, 2017
(CNN) The US Special Forces raid in central Yemen on January 29 is .... In Horton's view, "The Trump administration's stance on Iran can only ...
White House calls Yemen raid a 'successful operation by all standards'
In-Depth-Los Angeles Times-Feb 2, 2017
In-Depth-Los Angeles Times-Feb 2, 2017
Misplaced blame on Trump for Yemen raid ignores deeper problems
The Hill (blog)-Feb 2, 2017
Some U.S. military officials, Reuters reports, blame President Trump ... relations, and masks deeper problems with U.S. counterterrorism efforts.
Trump goes to Delaware to witness return of remains of Navy SEAL ...
Los Angeles Times-Feb 1, 2017
Trump made an unannounced trip to Dover Air Force Base in ... the American-born Al Qaeda leader who was based in Yemen and killed in a 2011 drone strike. ... "We do want to better our relations with Russia," Haley said ...
End the war in Yemen, Mr. Trump - The Week
theweek.com/articles/663273/end-war-yemen-mr-trump
Nov 22, 2016 - What will Donald Trump do with American foreign policy? ... positive change toU.S. foreign policy, he should seek to end the war in Yemen. ... the terms of the specialrelationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia.https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/01/yemen-strike-eight-year-old-american-girl-killed-al-awlaki
Eight-year-old American girl 'killed in Yemen raid approved by Trump'
Anwar al-Awlaki’s daughter, Nawar, may have been fatally shot in intelligence operation on al-Qaida that left at least 14 people, including a US commando, dead
President Donald Trump personally approved a US commando raid in Yemen that left one elite serviceman dead and may have killed an eight-year-old American girl, the US military has told the Guardian.
At least 14 people died in Sunday’s raid by the elite Joint Special Operations Command, which was the subject of a preliminary inquiry to determine if allegations of civilian deaths were sufficiently credible to merit a full investigation.
On Wednesday night, US central command said in a statement that the team conducting the inquiry had already confirmed that civilians were “likely killed” in the raid and that “casualties may include children”. It is continuing to look into whether there “were any still-undetected civilian casualties”.
Col John Thomas, a spokesman for central command, said in the statement: “Al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula has a horrifying history of hiding women and children within militant operating areas and terrorist camps, and continuously shows a callous disregard for innocent lives.
“That’s what makes cases like these so especially tragic.”
The operation was launched to gather intelligence on suspected operations by al-Qaida in the Arabian peninsula (AQAP), according to Thomas. Planning for the raid “started months before”, under Barack Obama’s administration, but was “not previously approved”, he said.
Thomas said he did not know why the prior administration did not authorize the operation, but said the Obama administration had effectively exercised a “pocket veto” over it.
A former official said the operation had been reviewed several times, but the underlying intelligence was not judged strong enough to justify the risks, and the case was left to the incoming Trump administration to make its own judgment.
An eight-year-old girl, Nawar al-Awlaki, was killed in the raid, according to her family. Nawar, also known as Nora, is the daughter of the al-Qaida propagandist and American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed in a September 2011 US drone strike in Yemen. Awlaki’s 16-year-old son Abdulrahman was killed in a second drone strike soon afterwards.
On the campaign trail, Trump endorsed killing relatives of terrorist suspects, which is a war crime. “The other thing with the terrorists is you have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families,” he told Fox News in December 2015.
On Tuesday, Thomas strongly denied that US military forces knew the girl was in the compound before launching the operation, or that any of what Central Command said were an “estimated” 14 people ultimately killed in the raid were civilians.
“If we did, we would know now, already, there were civilian casualties,” he said.
In an interview with the Guardian, the girl’s grandfather, Nasser al-Awlaki, said he did not believe the Americans meant to kill his granddaughter. Nawar, who was staying at the house with her mother, was shot in the neck and died two hours later.
“I don’t think this incident was intentional,” Nasser al-Awlaki said in a phone interview fromYemen.
The elder Awlaki, a former government minister, said the village in which his granddaughter was staying was not an AQAP hotbed, but rather home to her uncles, tribal sheikhs who were actually fighting with the legal government of Yemen, which the ruling Iran-backed Houthi movement ousted in a coup.
Awlaki said the exiled former government was sending arms to his relatives from its southern stronghold in Aden, to combat the Houthis.
“If the Americans assumed that those arms were going to the hands of al-Qaida or something, I don’t know,” Nasser al-Awlaki said. “I cannot understand why the Americans use this big commando strike, which is similar to what happened to Osama bin Laden, in a small village in Yemen.”
At the White House, spokesman Sean Spicer stated: “No American citizen will ever be targeted” in counter-terrorism operations, though it was unclear if Spicer was announcing a new policy or was freelancing.
The pre-dawn raid was plagued by trouble from the start. A tilt-rotor MV-22 transporting the commandos experienced a “hard landing” near the target location, and had to be destroyed..............
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