In Yemen, experts see war crimes in US-backed air campaign
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November21|Yamanyoon
The taxi driver happened to pass by just after a volley of airstrikes hit a highway in western Yemen. The driver, Mohammed al-Khal, stopped, took a wounded ice cream vendor into his car and rushed him to the nearest hospital.
But the warplanes were still hunting. Moments after al-Khal pulled up at the hospital in the town of Abs, hell was unleashed.
A missile struck just outside the hospital entrance, “like a ball of fire,” one witness said. Al-Khal, a father of eight, was incinerated in his car. The blast ripped through patients and family waiting in an outdoor reception area. Nineteen people were killed, along with two civilians killed on the highway.
The attack in August typified what has been a pattern in the nearly 2-year-old air campaign by Saudi Arabia and its allies against Yemen.
Rights groups and U.N. officials say the U.S.-backed coalition has often either deliberately or recklessly depended on faulty intelligence, failed to distinguish between civilian and military targets and disregarded the likelihood of civilian casualties.
Experts say some of the strikes amount to war crimes.
“The Saudis have been committing war crimes in Yemen,” said Gabor Rona, a professor teaching the laws of war at Columbia University. He pointed to “indiscriminate targeting, that is, attacks in which the attacker makes no effort to distinguish between combatants and civilians.” And he warned that American personnel helping the coalition “may also be guilty of war crimes.”
