Five civilians were killed in a US navy Seal raid in Yemen against al-Qaida militants, a human rights organisation said on Wednesday.
US central command said that the raid on Tuesday had killed seven members of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (Aqap) in Marib governorate, “through a combination of small arms fire and precision airstrikes.”
However, Reprieve, a London-based human rights group, said it had talked to two sources from the raided village, al-Jubah, who dispute that account.
Both sources said that the raid went wrong from the start as the Seals opened fire on a 70-year-old partially blind man, named as Nasser Al-Adhal, who had come out of his house to see what was going on, possibly to greet them after mistaking them for visitors. On hearing al-Adhal being shot, other men then emerged from their homes, and four of them were shot dead by the Seals, according to the Reprieve account.
Kate Higham, who leads investigations into assassinations at Reprieve, said the group talked to an al-Jubah resident who was there at the time of the raid, and another who was away from the village but who had spoken to relatives about the incident.
“We are still trying to get a really full picture of exactly what happened,” Higham said. “But what we do know is that Seals landed in the village; they appear to have been trying to target a group of possible militants but in the course of the ground raid something went wrong – and they ended up killing a number of the people from the village, including a man of about 70, Nasser al-Adhal, who suffered from very bad eyesight.”
“The four other villagers were killed when they started to argue with the Navy Seals after the shooting of Nasser al-Adhal. Six villagers were seriously injured, including another elderly man who was around 69 years-old,” Reprieve said in a statement, adding that a fight with al-Qaida militants started only after the villagers had been killed.
“Al-Qaida fighters gathering nearby, who are thought to have been the original target of the raid, were alerted by the gunshots in the village and firefight ensued in which at least two of them were killed. The Navy Seals then left with the help of air support from a helicopter,” the Reprieve account said.
In an emailed response to the Reprieve report, a US central command spokesman, Maj Josh Jacques, said it would be investigated.
“We routinely conduct strikes and other operations against Aqap in Yemen. This allegation will be looked at more closely; Centcom takes all allegations of civilian casualties seriously. We work diligently and deliberately to be precise in our airstrikes. We comply with the law of armed conflict and take all reasonable precautions during the planning and execution of airstrikes to reduce the risk of harm to civilians,” Maj Jacques said.
On 29 January, a Navy Seal raid on a village of al-Ghayil in al-Bayda province killed up to 25 civilians including nine children under the age of 13. It followed a reported order by the Trump administration to designate parts of Yemen “areas of active hostilities”, thus loosening the restrictions on US military operations there. Under the Obama administration guidelines, operations in Yemen would only be approved if there was “near certainty” there would no civilian casualties.
“What we have seen generally under the Trump administration is a massive increase in the amount of military action being taken in Yemen,” Higham said. “There are real concerns about what legal regime Trump thinks he is acting under, whether there are safeguards they are trying to follow to limit the number of innocent people being killed. Areas of active hostilities is a very poorly defined term that doesn’t have any clear meaning.”