“The drone strikes are the face of America to many Yemenis,” said Farea Al-Muslimi, a Yemeni spokesperson testifying in front of a Senate committee this week. “I have spoken to many victims of U.S. drone strikes, like a mother in Ja’ar who had to identify her innocent 18-year-old son’s body through a video from a stranger’s cell phone, or the father is Shuqra who held his four- and six-year-old children as they died in his arms.”
Al-Muslimi, who spent a year in the U.S. on a State Department exchange program, has become a leading advocate calling for an end to drone strikes that he says are terrorizing innocent communities.
Just one week ago, the U.S. bombed Wessab, Muslimi’s hometown in an attack targeting one individual. “The Yemeni government could have easily found and arrested him. Even local government could have captured him if the U.S. had told them to,” he said.
The Yemeni government has stepped up anti-terror policing, recently sending 11 Al-Qaeda militants to prison. A Yemeni court sentenced the men to terms of 10 years in prison this week for forming armed gangs to destabilize the country and planning attacks on foreign embassies and security forces.
The U.S. has taken a different approach to thwarting terror in Yemen, recently launching a barrage of missiles at the mountain village of Wessab in an indiscriminate attack that Muslimi says “terrified thousands of simple, poor farmers.”
Once advertised to the American public as a precise method of killing enemy combatants and terrorists, drones have come under fire as victims begin to come forward demanding a change.
“I have a personal experience of the fear [drones] cause. Late last year I was Abyan with an American journalist colleague [when] suddenly I heard a buzz. The local people we were interviewing said based on past experiences it was an American drone. My heart sank. I felt helpless. It was the first time that I had truly feared for my life.”
Muslimi’s testimony underscores a recent report by Reprieve, a human rights organization who claim, “The U.S. drone program is terrorizing entire civilian populations, nearly half of which are children.”
The Reprieve report published last month, called “Drones: No Safe Place for Children,” shows that in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen — three countries where the U.S. uses lethal drones in the hunt to eliminate al-Qaeda — at least 204 children have been killed by drone strikes over the past decade.
Much of the information for the groundbreaking report was drawn from the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a news organization recording combatant and civilian deaths caused by U.S. drone strikes. Overall, approximately 3,180 people have been killed by U.S. missile strikes from unmanned aircraft since 2002. Of this number, over 1,000 have been confirmed civilians. In Yemen alone, 44-54 drone strikes have killed up to 138 civilians.