![]() ![]() The report also includes photos of metal shards identified as shrapnel from four Hellfire missiles that were fired. Investigators said they spoke with senior Yemeni officials including President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, as well as U.S. The attack targeted a convoy of 11 vehicles traveling from the site of a wedding near the city of Rad’a to the groom’s village, according to the report, which said that the bride was among a small number of female travelers and that “shrapnel grazed the bride under one eye, and blew her trousseau to pieces.” The investigation by Human Rights Watch, a group that has been consistently critical of the targeted killing program, concluded that the attack killed 12 men, ages 20 to 65, and wounded 15 others, citing accounts from survivors, relatives of the dead, local officials and news media reports. The report represents the most detailed independent examination to date of a strike that has focused attention on the administration’s struggles to tighten the rules for targeted killing, provide more information about such operations to the public and gradually shift full control of the drone campaign from the CIA to the Pentagon.Ĭaitlin Hayden, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, declined to comment on the report or the Dec. 12 strike but said the United States takes “extraordinary care” in its counterterrorism operations to avoid civilian casualties and noted that Yemeni officials described the targets as “dangerous senior al-Qaeda militants.” Overall, Human Rights Watch “found that the operations did not comply with the targeted killing policies that President Obama outlined” in a speech in May, the report said, citing in particular Obama’s requirement of “near-certainty” that no civilians would be harmed. officials that only militants were killed in the operation, although the report acknowledged that members of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the terrorist network’s affiliate in Yemen, may have been among the dead. The findings contradict assertions by U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command, targeted a line of vehicles that were part of a wedding procession, and that evidence indicates “some, if not all those killed and wounded were civilians.” The report by Human Rights Watch concluded that the strike, which was carried out by the U.S. ![]() drone strike in December that killed at least a dozen people in Yemen failed to comply with rules imposed by President Obama last year to protect civilians, according to an investigation by a human rights organization released Thursday. ![]()
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