For Pacifica Radio, August 5th, 2018, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all, welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the author of Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and editorial director of Antiwar.com.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 4,700 interviews now going back to 2003, at scotthorton.org or at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, you guys, time to welcome Iona Craig back to the show, a great journalist, reports often out of Yemen for The Intercept.
And this extremely important story, it's running today on Antiwar.com.
It's called US-backed Saudi airstrike on family with nine children shows clear violations of the laws of war.
Welcome back to the show, Iona.
How are you doing?
Good to be here.
Thanks, Scott.
Very happy to have you here.
And what a great piece of reporting.
You have an intelligence document describing, I guess, an American report about the Saudi airstrike.
But then you went and talked with the victims of the airstrike, the survivors of the airstrike, to get their side of the story, as well.
Really great piece of journalism that you have here.
But before we delve too far into what you wrote here, I want to, for the audience, for the context, I want people to understand what you cite from The Wall Street Journal here in your piece, as well.
Two different Wall Street Journal reports that talk about the United States' role in this war.
And I think it really makes clear this is an American war.
They help with the selling of the weapons, the planes and the bombs, the maintenance on the planes, the training of the pilots, the targeting assistance for picking the targets that are to be bombed.
And then, of course, the midair refueling that makes all these sorties possible.
I think that makes it pretty clear without the United States, this war would not exist.
Right.
Well, I mean, as I mentioned in the piece, you know, the U.S. is more directly involved in the Saudi coalition's air war than it has been in any other foreign led bombing campaign in history.
So although the U.S. doesn't see itself as a belligerent, it is involved in all of those ways that you just mentioned.
And therefore, it does have the leverage to be able to shut down that air campaign at any time if it wanted to, by pulling out that refueling, etc.
And it's quite clear, you know, from this document that I saw that the U.S. is sitting in the command center, which we knew already, but that they are actually recording these incidents of clear violations of the laws of war and yet seemingly then doing nothing else about it.
I did try and contact CENTCOM to ask for comments about how many of these similar incidents they had recorded over the course of the air campaign since 2015.
What they were doing about them, and were they helping with any kinds of investigations or at least logging the cases of IHL, international humanitarian law violations when they're seeing them?
But they failed to respond.
And I put those questions to them more than once and they didn't respond to my questions about that.
So I think a lot of what was in this intelligence document wasn't necessarily surprising, but it was the first time this has kind of been seen in such detail.
And that kind of sense that everybody's known really that this kind of thing is going on, but when you actually kind of see it in such clear detail, it is shocking because I think even when I saw it, it was something I would have expected back in 2015 at the beginning of the air campaign.
But you would have thought after three years of a bombing that they would have learned some significant lessons in trying to avoid civilian casualties.
And what this shows is that's clearly not the case.
And it's only literally by pure chance that this family of nine children survived and the bomb narrowly missed them by a matter of a few meters.
We're going to add here real quick to that the U.S. Navy rules the seven seas and including the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden there, of course, and has been helping to enforce the blockade.
And then, as you mentioned, 2015, this war is now three and a half years old, almost.
Just a little bit of extra context for people who are not so familiar with this story.
As Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting pointed out last week, MSNBC has not done a single story on Yemen for a year solid now.
So people, I guess, might be forgiven, Americans who only learn from the news, not from reading, from TV news, could be forgiven for not even knowing that this war is happening at all.
But I'll add one more thing here, too, which is that Nasser Araby, formerly a New York Times reporter who I speak to pretty regularly from SANA, has told me in the past that to the people of Yemen, this is the American-Saudi war.
They're not being fooled by this at all.
They know good and well that this war is backed by the USA and, in a sense, is led by the USA, as we were saying.
It couldn't even be possible without American support for the so-called Saudi-led campaign here.
So, quite importantly.
All right.
Now, so, first of all, well, I guess let's get back to the Intel report in a minute.
Talk to us about the survivors of this airstrike.
You say this 500-pound bomb barely missed them, huh?
Yeah.
So, Shuaib al-Masawah, who's the journalist who did this story with me, he actually was the one who went up to the location of this airstrike, which we were able to find because in the intelligence document, it actually had the GPS location of where it had happened.
And it was quite a remote area, but it's in Fardah, which is the northern governorate that is next door to Saudi Arabia, runs along the border.
And it is the most heavily bombed governorate in Yemen.
It's kind of the Houthis' original kind of homeland, if you like.
And like I say, it abuts the Saudi border.
But yeah, this family, they were living in tents.
They're Bedouins, so they're nomadic, and they move around with work.
They had three tents.
Luckily for them, they'd reinforced those tents, so they were material kind of canvas on the roof, if you like.
But they had stone walls.
Shuaib actually got some photographs.
And it was probably the fact that they were stone walls that saved their lives, because even in the intelligence document, it says this 500 pound American made bomb missed them by 30 meters.
Now the father of the family, he estimates it was closer to 15 or 20 meters.
But I've done my own research on the blast radius of weapons, and a 500 pound bomb will break windows up to 100 meters away.
So if you're within 15 to 30 meters of a bomb being dropped at that size, it's very likely you're going to be severely injured, if not killed.
But because of those stone walls, if it had been pure fabric tents, I'm sure some of those children would have been severely injured, if not killed in the process.
So it was only by chance they were aiming to hit those tents that it wasn't successful.
And it was using a precision guided weapon, which the US have been, you know, many of the lawmakers have been claiming that the safer weapons to use because they avoid civilian casualties.
And I think what this intelligence report clearly shows is that it's all very well having precision guided weapons, but if they're being used in such a cavalier way with no intelligence to support what they're striking, no further information, and they're being fired on civilians, then clearly they're going to kill civilians.
And so I think it really exposes that kind of reasoning that both the UK, the British government and the US have given for not just continuing the sale of precision guided weapons, which are also called smart bombs, but in fact, increasing them that it will save civilian lives, but it won't if you're using them in the manner that the Saudi coalition is clearly using, as can be seen by this report.
And then so and this is part of the report was that they had a drone flying overhead in the first place, and they use that intelligence to pick the target.
But then once the bomb missed and the family came out of the tents, then they realized, oh, man, these are little children.
This is I think you say it's a family, including nine children came out.
And once they realized that, then they called off the secondary strike.
Is that right?
Right.
I mean, the intelligence report written by US personnel sort of talks about the Saudi officers, you know, distress after they realized there were civilians in there.
But of course, it's not really much good being distressed afterwards, if you're not putting that kind of level of concern into your targeting beforehand.
And so that strike was ordered without any intelligence information justifying it at all.
And it was a very short window between when those drones were hovering over and the command was was given.
It was, you know, just 45 minutes.
So in the terms of international humanitarian law, not only was did they fail to determine whether the target was military or civilian, but they also didn't adhere to the terms of precaution, which basically means you have to give time to allow that kind of intelligence to come to light, i.e. if they'd waited till the morning, would they have seen that these in fact were children and civilians wandering around and then been able to avoid actually carrying out the strike at all?
Did they claim in the document to have any reason to believe that this was a military target or they just, hey, there's a tent with some warm bodies in it.
They're probably bad guys or?
No, none at all.
And this was kind of another thing, you know, even if you were trying to give some leeway to the Saudi coalition in the way this report was was written, where it explicitly says there was no intelligence information or further information, that I would have expected to see a caveat in there to say, but this area was known to have been, you know, a location where either weapons were stored or where there have been movements of fighters seen.
But there was none of that.
There was no kind of caveat or qualifying details to suggest that was the case, other than beyond this kind of mentioning of the Saudi officers being deeply distressed after the strike had happened because they'd nearly killed some civilians.
But no, there is absolutely no mention of this location being any kind of a concern to the Saudi coalition.
And in fact, all indications are the opposite because it does explicitly say there's no intelligence or further information to suggest that this was a military target.
And then so now I think it's just great that your your partner in journalism here was able to go and talk with this family.
And you say in the article here you write about the effect that this attack has had on this family since then.
Yeah, right.
I mean, this is the trouble.
It's always, you know, about numbers and trying to put the kind of names to that and humanize these kind of cases.
You know, there's been over 17,800 air raids in Yemen now over the course of the last three and a half years.
And that's really a conservative estimate.
So you have to you know, it's really important for people to realize that these are people at the end of those those bombs.
And, you know, this family now they're living in caves in order to stay safe from airstrikes.
The father of the family, who's, you know, obviously providing their main income, who's a farmer, he's now living half a day's travel from his work as a farm laborer because it's not safe for them to live out in the open.
They don't feel now.
And they're haunted by it.
So, you know, the children, obviously, every time they hear a fighter jet, which is a lot if you're living in that part of Yemen, the children, you know, bursting into tears and think they're then they're about to be killed again or nearly killed.
And so, yeah, I mean, it's very distressing for people.
I, you know, I spent I was in Yemen in September 2015, which was the most heavily bombed month in the entire war so far, when there was over 900 strikes carried out.
And just the anxiety that goes with living under that kind of air campaign is really difficult to explain.
Even now, I have to move from my house here over the summer for about a week because there's the largest air tattoo, so air display of military aeroplanes in Europe that's held near to where I live, because it reminds me too much of that time of when I was in Sana'a and I used to sleep in the bathtub because, you know, you can hear the planes coming in on bombing runs.
You can hear the missiles being deployed.
And when you hear that whistle, you don't know where it's going to land.
And they were hitting houses randomly at that time.
And when you're talking about that amount of strikes, you're talking about scores of strikes in the space of 24 hours.
It's incredibly stressful atmosphere to live under.
And that's an adult.
You know, these are children.
So so, yeah, they're going to be living with that constantly now.
And as long as this this war goes on and they're living under fighter jets over their heads all the time.
Yeah.
Well, and probably as long as they live.
Right.
It's not like they have high quality therapists over there to help them get through their PTSD.
They're going to be traumatized like this probably for the rest of their lives.
Yeah, I'm sure.
And this is also the case.
They would have known people that would have been killed, you know, in in certainly in northern Yemen, there isn't anybody that can say that they don't know somebody that hasn't been or a family that hasn't been touched by by this by this air campaign.
He hasn't lost somebody that hasn't lost a relative in some in some way.
You know, I even found it at the beginning of the war when I was investigating airstrikes in the south of the country.
Every time I would talk to one family about losing a brother or a child, they would say, well, of course, my cousin got killed two weeks before.
And so I would go and see the next family and then the next family until I literally ran out of time.
I didn't have time to keep following this trail of every time I got to one family.
There was another family that they would say, oh, they've also lost a family member.
So, yeah, it's very relentless.
And this is, you know, three and a half years of this now and there's no end in sight right now.
And, you know, I remember toward the beginning of the war, I think probably in the first year of the war, the Rolling Stone reporter Matthew Akins went to SADA and he said, oh, they're bombing marketplaces, they're bombing the used car dealership, they're bombing everybody there.
They've destroyed the city.
They're killing civilians all day, every day up there.
Yeah, I mean, I was in SADA as well at the beginning of the war and they bombed all of the markets, all of the fuel stations in the old city.
They bombed a lot of the houses there and the markets and had done everything but bomb what is a very sacred site, the ancient mosque in the middle of the old city.
They bombed it numerous times all the way around it to the point that the walls were crumbling and it had to shut down without actually hitting the mosque itself.
So it was a kind of weird sense of messaging towards the population in SADA.
But yeah, I mean, it was quite clear when you were going down through the markets and this particular road that's just filled with shops and every single one of them had been completely demolished, bar one.
And the one that hadn't, there was an unexploded bomb sitting outside the door that just happened not to have gone off.
So, yeah, it's on a kind of devastating scale in places like SADA, which has just bombed so consistently now for three and a half years.
Well, and we've heard this whole time, too, about attacks on funerals, on marketplaces, the waterworks.
I believe it was Amnesty International that last week complained that the Saudis had bombed the waterworks up in SADA again for I don't know how many at the time.
And then yesterday there was a strike in Hodeidah where they killed a bunch of fishermen.
And so what does that say about the American help with the targeting here and the laws of war being followed when it seems like they're quite deliberately striking civilian targets like this?
Well, this is what's so revealing about this intelligence document, really, that this was on a strike, you know, from a strike in May 2018, not in May 2015 at the beginning of the conflict.
And so it really makes you understand how this kind of thing happens, how they end up just, you know, like yesterday.
It was very timely, as you mentioned, you know, the strike on the fishermen's market that also hit the front of the hospital in Hodeidah, which the Saudis, by the way, have completely denied that they carried out any strikes yesterday.
But they did the same after hitting the funeral in Sana'a that killed 140 people until it became so obvious that it was then that they eventually admitted it.
But, yeah, I think it's really a clear indication of exactly why this is happening, because they're carrying out strikes without proper intelligence, without the information and just kind of dropping bombs, you know, without a care.
And I think this is, you know, the US have become more involved in the offensive in Hodeidah, supposedly to help with targeting.
But I think everybody should be really concerned that this is this kind of bombing is happening without without any care being taken for either civilians or for the for the laws of war.
You know, just last month, the King Salman, he gave out a royal pardon to everybody who's taken part in the war in Yemen, which is a violation of international humanitarian law in itself, where you're supposed to investigate cases of potential violations or violations of the of the laws of war.
So it appears that they have this complete disregard for any kind of either proper procedure or even adhering to the real basics.
You know, as I wrote in this piece as well, the US gave around 750 million dollars worth of funding for training for the Saudi Air Force in exactly that, in minimising civilian harm in adhering to IHL and in the laws of war and all of that kind of thing.
And that was in last June.
And what's happened?
You know, where are these these kind of IHL monitors?
Where are the people that should be making sure this these kind of strikes aren't happening, whether it be on the fishermen's market in Hodeidah yesterday or on this family in Saida back in May?
Where are these people?
Because I asked those exact questions to CENTCOM and to the Saudi coalition, and neither of them responded.
I said, listen, this money has been spent.
Where are these people that you've trained?
They should be in the room.
These are the kind of people that should be in involved in the command process, which again, this intelligence document shows even the brigadier general who gave the order was not in the room when when the order was given.
And it would it would seem from the information that was in the document, he didn't even have a visual feed of the drone that was flying over and what the location was of the target.
So he ordered that target by somebody in the room phoning him and describing to him on the phone what the target was.
And that in even in the US, the normal scenario would be in the US Air Force that the judge advocate generals would be involved in that process in order to at least say they've tried to adhere to the laws of war, because you can't even say that in this case.
And I, you know, I think what what this is showing this this document is this isn't a unique incident.
This is just one of thousands of airstrikes that have gone on in Yemen over the last three and a half years.
But it's almost kind of routine for them to carry out strikes in this manner.
And that's really, really disturbing.
Well, and I mean, it really does raise questions.
I mean, clearly, in this case, you know, as as the document describes, this really does sound like a severe example of carelessness on their part.
But when we hear about them attacking the waterworks over and over again, attacking a fisherman's market, attacking a funeral where, you know, the one you talked about where 100 and something people were killed there, where this was a funeral that was being attended by powerful tribal leaders from all over the country, this kind of thing.
And I remember reading at the time that part of their tradition there is that funerals are kind of a safe space for people to for for enemies even to meet in peace and negotiate this kind of thing.
It really raises questions about just how accidental and careless all this is or whether these are, you know, part of a deliberate strategy to attack civilians and terrorize civilians.
Yeah, I mean, particularly in that that's in that funeral bombing, we probably will never really know that what happened in the decision making process.
And certainly, obviously, what the Saudis do in their own internal investigations is totally unreliable.
I mean, they've now investigated, I think, 75 out of those, you know, large number of strikes I mentioned of 17,800.
And in most of those cases, they've either blamed errors or malfunctions in the weaponry or pilot error or the weather or denied that they were even had fighter jets in the air at the time or that they carried out any strikes in the air at the time, even though the buildings were clearly flattened and there was a large crater in the ground afterwards, they've denied that they've been anywhere in the vicinity.
So I don't, this is the trouble, but very rarely do we get to find out the truth of what is going on behind these decisions being made.
And I mean, you'd have to say with that funeral bombing, because there were so many senior figures on the pro-Houthi side present in that funeral hall, you'd have to be suspicious that they would have done that deliberately and willing to accept any kind of flak that would come back at them for it, because they would see it as worthy.
And, you know, and not be too worried about the scores of civilians that have been killed in the process.
But yes, I think this is the problem.
And this is the good thing about having these kind of documents to see is really getting to the truth of the matter.
You know, this is a document that's been written by US personnel of exactly minute by minute of what happens in the command centre when a raid is, when an airstrike is carried out.
And that's, you know, that's so rare to see that and it was, you know, and it's horrifying.
And now, this pardon, as you say, granted by Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince now, and this is, I guess it's retroactive for any war crimes that may have been committed in the past, but then it sounds like a big disincentive to take care in the future of the people running the operations centre there, picking the targets there, know that they'll never be held accountable.
And why bother go through the extra effort of making sure of what it is that they're bombing?
Well, exactly.
I mean, it's kind of green lighting people, you know, commanders and anybody to say you can do what you like, because there will be no repercussions for it.
You know, as I already mentioned, that's it's a violation of the laws of war itself.
So even to do that is to give a pardon without any kind of investigation into breaches of IHL.
But yeah, it's kind of extraordinary that that would be put out as a public statement as well.
Because again, it shows a complete, not even disregard, but disdain even for IHL, because you know, you don't have to be particularly knowledgeable to realise that that is not in keeping with the Geneva Conventions, you know, so yeah, it's pretty extraordinary.
Again, I asked the Saudi coalition spokesman for details on that and whether it would include incidents like the one in my reporting, but you know, they never responded.
It's a very broad statement that the King Salman they put out on July 10th, that just calls it a noble royal order pardoning all military men of their respective military and disciplinary penalties.
So it's not really clear what that includes, but at the same time, it can therefore include everything if they wanted to.
Well, but didn't you hear he's a great reformer and he's opened up a couple of movie theatres there, Mohammed bin Salman.
And so anyway, that's what The Guardian says, don't worry about it.
And now, so speaking of which here, the humanitarian crisis, a guy on Twitter brought up to me earlier this week, a report by a journalist out of Norway, I think it was, it could have been Sweden, where she went to Sana and said, I don't know, man, I don't see anybody starving to death.
It seems like everything is okay.
People are sitting at the cafe having a nice cup of coffee and that there's a lot of narrative building going on about the humanitarian suffering in Yemen due to this war.
And I guess I could add that from all my discussions with the UN humanitarian, I forgot his exact title, McGoldrick, I think his name was, but I've talked with Doctors Without Borders and Oxfam and all these different people.
And it became clear that when they said last year that as many as a million people were infected with cholera, that really they were saying basically anybody with diarrhea has got cholera because they didn't have a way to diagnose it more specifically.
And so that number, that specific number at least, was pretty highly inflated.
But we've been warned all along that this is the poorest country in the Middle East, that they're largely dependent on foreign imports for their food.
There was a UN report that came out, I think a couple of months ago, that said that they estimated that 50,000 children had died of deprivation during this war.
And I just wonder if you can help with the context there of, I don't know if you can give us a ballpark number or anything like that, but the degree to which you think the humanitarian crisis is being overblown, if at all, or underplayed, if that.
Listen, I first reported on the hunger situation in Yemen back in 2012.
As you say, it was already the poorest country in the Middle East.
And at that time, it was being impacted because of the revolution in 2011 and the political uprising.
And basically, the way Yemen survives, it imports up to 90% of its food, even in peacetime.
You rock that, and it's going to have a really hard impact very quickly in a country that's so poor.
And those kind of figures recovered then by 2014.
But once the war kicked in in Yemen now, I mean, whoever the person was sitting in a coffee shop in Sana'a, yeah, you need to get out of the coffee shop in Sana'a to be able to see what is going on.
And I think that's really part of the law.
The problem is, even if you're going into hospitals and into the malnutrition centers, you will see children starving there.
But even then, it's really hard to, you don't get the sense of scale of it, because most of these people are living in very remote areas.
The most you might see in a change on the street in Sana'a, in the sense of humanitarian crisis, is a lot more people begging on the streets, people who are university educated ending up begging on the streets so they can feed their families.
And if you go into the hospitals and the cholera treatment centers and the wards for the acutely malnourished children, but the majority of the Yemeni population lives in rural areas.
And when I say rural areas, we're talking up in the mountains, miles off asphalt roads, a long way from any kind of hospitals, medical treatment or anything else.
And yeah, I mean, the UN figures now put, you know, what they call one step from famine, over 8 million people.
Certainly, every time I go back now, the people that I meet and I see, and it's happening across the country, are struggling more and more.
But I think what people have to understand is most of the time, this is not about a lack of food.
Because even though there's been this de facto blockade on the country by sea, particularly into Hodeidah, the food is still coming in elsewhere.
But a lot of it is coming by land many thousands of miles.
And because of the war economy and the war profiteers, everything just costs a lot, lot more, five times more, seven times more, in some cases, 10 times more.
The currency has massively devalued.
And people simply can't afford to buy that food that's sitting in the markets.
So you will go into the market and you will see flour, rice, beans.
But people can't afford to buy it.
And when you speak to the people that are coming into the market, they're buying a tenth of what they would have previously been buying for their families.
So it's, you know, it's economic collapse.
It's a war economy that the people at the top are making huge amounts of money out of.
And yes, you can still go and buy a new car in Yemen, your posh ice cream, your expensive materials or whatever else.
It's just going to cost you a lot more.
So it can seem like quite an invisible thing if you're sitting in a coffee shop in Sana'a.
But believe me, it's happening.
And the trouble is, the longer this war goes on, the more expensive goods are getting, the more the economy is suffering.
The currency is devaluing.
People haven't been paid government wages for years.
And people are starving.
And of course, when people are starving, it's always it's the very young and it's the very old that are dying as a result of that.
And it's not I think we kind of think of famine or starvation.
And Yemen hasn't reached the point of famine yet.
But what I think what we think of, it's a kind of 1980s image of, you know, children starving in huge IDP camps or displacement camps in one location.
But in Yemen, people are scattered in villages up in mountains all over the country.
And so it's not your stereotypical image of people starving.
And this is very much, you know, it's a human made crisis.
It's made by this war.
And it's an economic induced famine as well because of the economic collapse.
And that's kind of almost the torturous thing about it is people can drive into those markets or walk into those markets and see all that food, but they simply can't buy it.
All right, you guys, that is Iona Craig.
She's written this incredible piece with Shuaib Al-Mosawa for The Intercept.
U.S.-backed Saudi airstrike on family with nine children shows clear violations of the laws of war.
Thank you so much for your time again, Iona.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
All right, John, that's been anti-war radio for this morning.
Thanks very much for listening.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
Find my full interview archive at scotthorton.org and follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
See you next week.
