I just can’t for the life of me understand why they hate the US so much that they’d wish harm upon it, as if out of vengeance for some perceived wrongdoing:
On March 5, 13-year-old Amer Ali al-Saqra Huraidan and his cousin were on their way home from visiting relatives in al-Hudhi, a small town in the eastern Yemeni province of Hadramout. As they drove along a desert highway around 4 p.m. local time, a U.S. drone circled overhead. Somewhere thousands of miles away, the drone operator launched a strike.
A short time later, Amer’s cousin Hasan awoke to fire and smoke rising from the mangled pickup truck and heard the buzz of the drone overhead. He had wounds on his right hand, leg, and head; chunks of shrapnel would later be removed from his body. But Amer was barely recognizable. The strike had charred his body and torn it to pieces, killing him instantly.
In a phone interview with The Intercept, Hasan, 19, said first responders were reluctant to come to the scene because they were concerned about a possible second strike by the drone that still hovered overhead. He and his family have been left wondering how the U.S. military mistook a fifth grader for a militant.
[…]
The strike that killed Amer was the first of three attacks near al-Hudhi in the span of a week. Seven other people were killed in strikes on March 7 and March 9, according to members of the al-Mahashima tribe to which all of the dead belonged. Independent sources on the ground in Yemen, as well as the international rights group Reprieve, confirmed the tribe members’ accounts. The victims, they noted, were poor people displaced from al-Jawf province, their lives upended by fighting that has raged on since 2014. None of them were affiliated with the Islamic State or Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, known as AQAP, the sources said.
Two days after Amer was killed, a man named Saleh al-Wuhair stood on top of a hill in al-Hudhi, looking for cell service to make a call. At around 5 p.m., a missile came flying down and killed him, according to a member of his family and independent observers in Yemen.
Because the area was targeted twice in two days, tribe members drove out to al-Hudhi to urge residents to relocate to a safer place. On March 9, a half-dozen members of the tribe — three of them the adult children of Abdullah al-Qibli al-Wuhair, a local tribal leader, and three of them his adult grandchildren — were driving back to Marib when a drone targeted an area called al-Abr at around 5 p.m. All six of them were killed.
Collateral damage, people. Just a couple oopsies. Nothing to see here.
