Iona Craig, Death in Al Ghayil: Women and Children in This Yemeni Village Recall the Horror of Trump’s ‘Highly Successful’ SEAL Raid, The Intercept, Thursday, 9 March 2017. “On January 29 [2017], 5-year-old Sinan al Ameri was asleep with his mother, his aunt, and 12 other children in a one-room stone hut typical of poor rural villages in the highlands of Yemen. A little after 1 a.m., the women and children awoke to the sound of a gunfight erupting a few hundred feet away. Roughly 30 members of Navy SEAL Team 6 were storming the eastern hillside of the remote settlement [the village of al Ghayil, ‘part of a cluster of settlements known as Yakla in the Qayfa tribal region of Yemen’s al Bayda province]…. According to White House press secretary Sean Spicer, the al Ghayil raid ‘was a very, very well thought out and executed effort,’ planning for which began under the Obama administration back in November 2016. Although Ned Price, former National Security Council spokesperson, and Colin Kahl, the national security adviser under Vice President Biden, challenged Spicer’s account, what is agreed upon is that Trump gave the final green light over dinner at the White House on January 25. According to two people with direct knowledge, the White House did not notify the U.S. ambassador to Yemen in advance of the operation.”
Update: Peter Maass, Iona Craig Won A 2018 George Polk Award for Her Investigation of a SEAL Team Raid That Killed Women and Children in Yemen. Here’s How She Did It. The Intercept, Saturday, 24 February 2018.
The Intercept’s reporting from al Ghayil in the aftermath of the raid and the eyewitness accounts provided by residents, as well as information from current and former military officials, challenge many of the Trump administration’s key claims about the ‘highly successful’ operation, from the description of an assault on a fortified compound — there are no compounds or walled-off houses in the village — to the ‘large amounts of vital intelligence’ the president said were collected.
According to a current U.S. special operations adviser and a former senior special operations officer, it was not intelligence the Pentagon was after but a key member of al Qaeda. The raid was launched in an effort to capture or kill Qassim al Rimi, the leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, according to the special operations adviser, who asked to remain anonymous because details behind the raid are classified.
Villagers interviewed by The Intercept rejected claims that al Rimi was present in al Ghayil, although one resident described seeing an unfamiliar black SUV arriving in the village hours before the raid. Six days after the operation, AQAP media channels released an audio statement from al Rimi, who mocked President Trump and the raid. The White House and the military have denied that the AQAP leader was the target of the mission, insisting the SEALs were sent in to capture electronic devices and material to be used for intelligence gathering. A spokesperson for CENTCOM told The Intercept the military has not yet determined whether al Rimi was in al Ghayil when the SEALs arrived.
Although some details about the mission remain unclear, the account that has emerged suggests the Trump White House is breaking with Obama administration policies that were intended to limit civilian casualties. The change — if permanent — would increase the likelihood of civilian deaths in so-called capture or kill missions like the January 29 raid….
While the Yakla raid supposedly took place under presidential policy guidelines set up under the Obama administration — standards repeatedly used to defend the U.S. drone program — further developments last week indicate the Trump administration is no longer abiding by the condition of ‘near certainty’ that civilians will not be killed or injured in operations.
A defense official speaking to the Washington Post stated that the military has been granted temporary authority to regard selected areas of Yemen as ‘areas of active hostility.’ That change, while shortening the approval process for military action, effectively puts the U.S. on a war footing in any area of Yemen designated, but unlikely to be disclosed, by the military, noted Cori Crider, a lawyer at the international human rights organization Reprieve who has represented Yemeni drone strike victims. This authority has a lower bar: Civilian deaths have to be ‘proportionate’ rather than avoided with a ‘near certainty,’ as set out by the previous administration for the use of lethal force ‘outside areas of active hostilities.’
‘This means that all of those much-vaunted “standards” the Obama administration said they were using to minimize civilian casualties in drone strikes in Yemen have been chucked right out the window,’ said Crider.