The bombing of a wedding party in Yemen by an apparent Saudi Arabia airstrike has killed 135 people. The Saudi-led coalition, which has air supremacy in the area, denied responsibility for the tragedy.
Two missiles tore through two tents in the Al-Wahijah village in southwestern Yemen, where a wedding celebration was underway. According to media reports, the ill-fated wedding reception was held by a local man affiliated with the Houthi rebels, who are being targeted by Saudi-led airstrikes.
The UN estimates that 135 people died in the attack. Many of the dead were women and children, witnesses said.
The bombed wedding celebration took place not far from the Red Sea port of Mokha, which has “witnessed aerial bombardment on many occasions,” Yemeni-based journalist, Muhammad Al-Attab, told RT.
UN chief Ban Ki-moon has condemned the airstrikes, once again stressing that “there is no military solution to the conflict.”
“This may be the single deadliest incident since the start of the conflict,” UN human rights agency spokesman Rupert Colville told reporters.
A senior official in the Yemeni government told AP that attack was conducted by a Saudi-led coalition which struck the wedding by “mistake.”
"Great shooting!"
The coalition rejected the accusations saying that it did not carry out any airstrikes in the region.
“There have been no air operations by the coalition in that area for three days.
This is totally false news,” Coalition spokesman Brigadier-General Ahmed al-Asseri told Reuters.
“The coalition knows its responsibility and will always acknowledge a mistake if we make it. Take into consideration the chaotic situation in Yemen, with several armed elements and forces active around the country. Also, people sometimes cannot distinguish between canon, mortar and Katyusha (multiple launch rocket systems),” he added.
The tragedy in Al-Wahijah village is not the first time Coalition missiles have hit crowded places in Yemen, Belkis Wille from Human Rights Watch, said.
“There have been many airstrikes since the beginning of this war that led to large civilian casualty numbers. I’ve documented several strikes since the beginning of the war on market places, because market places are going to be crowded. In one strike you see 60-65 people killed all at once, all civilians,” she said. “By the laws of war you can’t target them, especially when there is no military around,” Wille said.
Sanaa-based political analyst, Hisham Omeisy, also pointed the finger at the Saudi-led forces, saying, “the Houthis don’t have fighter jets.”
“The UN and the international community need to directly condemn the Saudis for these attacks, they need to take a harder line,” he told RT.
The editor of London-based 'al-Quds al-Arabi' paper, Abdel Bari Atwan, called the bombing of the wedding “a massacre,” adding that “this is a daily routine now that Saudi-led coalition warplanes are bombing civilians in Yemen under the pretext of shelling the Houthis and Ali Abdullah Saleh’s opposition.”
The Saudi-led coalition launched its anti-Houthi campaign in March, 2015, after the “Ansar Allah” Houthi movement captured huge territories in Yemen including the capital of Sana’a and the country’s second largest city, Aden. Official UN figures illustrate that almost 4,900 people have been killed since Saudi forces began their bombardment of Yemen.
The bombing of the wedding comes just a day after Saudi-led coalition helicopters reportedly killed more than 30 people – primarily civilians – in a northern Yemeni village.
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The real truth on 9/11 slowly continues to bleed out
Technical experts are mounting major challenges to official U.S. government accounts of how three World Trade Center skyscrapers collapsed in near-freefall after the 9/11 attacks 15 years ago.
Many researchers are focusing especially on the little-known collapse of
The Empire and the inevitable fall of the Obama criminal regime
STRATFOR Editor’s Note: This installment on the United States, presented in two parts, is the 16th in a series of STRATFOR monographs on the geopolitics of countries influential in world affairs.
Like nearly all of the peoples of North and South America, most Americans are not originally from the territory that became the United States.
A look back at 2011 predictions for the future in order to put events of today into perspective
We have already discussed in the first part of this analysis how the American geography dooms whoever controls the territory to being a global power, but there are a number of other outcomes that shape what that power will be like. The first and most critical is the impact of that geography on the American mindset.
This e-mail outlines and confirms the acts of espionage against Indonesia and Indonesians by Akiko Makino and the others involved both in Kobe University and in AI Lab at University of Airlangga, Surabaya; Bahasa Indonesia original follows English translation...
UPDATED 01/07/2015 : FOX NEWS CORPORATE PHARMA SHILL MEGAN KELLY AND FOX NEWS QUACK DOCTOR NOW PUSHING TAMIFLU FOR PREGNANT WOMEN AND CHILDREN;
THE 5TH ESTATE UNEQUIVOCALLY WARNS THE PUBLIC NOT TO TAKE OR GIVE THIS PROVEN DANGEROUS, INEFFECTIVE DRUG TO ANYONE
Obama criminals now resulting to biowarfare in quest to destroy Chinese and ASEAN economy; "novel virus substrain" points directly to a Kawaoka / Fouchier / Ernala-Ginting Kobe lab virus weaponized and genetically altered to specifically target and infect the Asian population: Ribavirin...
The 5th Estate has just purchased a library on H5N1 "Novel" virus pandemics, there are dozens of PDF and Exel documents we feel will assist you in saving lives following intentional releases of the H5N1 and now MERS viruses; we will begin by printing those that appear to be extremely relevant here: H5N1 Kobe-Kawaoka-Ernala series continues soon with more "Smoking Gun" e-mails from Teridah Ernala to The 5th Estate . . .
On October 12, 2002 the Indonesian island of Bali experienced a terrorist attack that rocked the world. It was unquestionably well-coordinated and executed, the largest in the country's history.