Photos: Al-Masirah TV, Screenshot courtesy Hussain Albukhaiti. Carnage resulting from a US-backed Saudi-led coalition airstrike targeting a car full of civilians in Hajah Yemen on Sunday October 21st, which killed at least 4 of the occupants including 1 child seen above, injuring 2 more civilians and completely destroying the vehicle.
On Sunday, Yemeni journalist Hussain Albukhaiti reported via twitter that a Saudi coalition airstrike had targeted yet another vehicle full of civilians, killing four including a young boy and injuring two more, while noting that the "Coalition keeps targeting busses cars trucks and anything that moves near #KSA [Kingdom of Saudi Arabia] border and in west coast Yemen":
As many as seven were potentially killed in the car attack, as Yemeni TV channel Al-Masirah reported that all seven civilians on board the car were killed. Another Yemeni journalist, Ahmed AbdulKareem writing forMintPress News also reported four deaths but only one injury from this strike. It is quite possible the discrepancy is due to the wounded later passing away and evidence of another body being found after Albukaiti first reported the news. Keep in mind this is the same Yemeni journalist who was among Yemeni journalists first breaking the story that it was a US bomb responsible for the Saudi airstrike in August which was later confirmed by CNN to have killed 40 children, while initial reports indicated 29 children killed.
Death counts do often tend to rise after initial reports, and at the same time both MintPress News and Albukaiti's reporting tends to be reliably accurate, so make what you will of the death count discrepancies but the fact remains either way that innocent Yemeni civilians are being intentionally targeted and slaughtered by a fully US-backed coalition carrying out a merciless genocide.
Just hours prior to this attack, another coalition airstrike targeted the Zayed Road in a residential neighborhood of the al-Hali district of Hodeida province, killing at least two and up to five civilians while injuring several others. Yemeni journalist Ahmed AbdulKareem reported two civilians were killed with six injured including children, "when United Arab Emirates (UAE) aircraft targeted the Zayed Road in the al-Hali district," while Al-Masirah TV reported five civilians killed and "several" injured when "Saudi fighter jets targeted a neighborhood in al-Ahli town," according to Voice of the People on Monday.
The article written by AbdulKareem and published by MintPress News on Tuesday also reports a third attack by Saudi border guards in Sada'a province which killed one woman and injured another:
In Sada’a, an Ansar Allah (Houthi) stronghold, a woman was killed and another injured when Saudi border guards fired artillery shells against a residential region in the border area of Shada. - MPN
That's at least seven more civilians killed in the latest wave of attacks over the weekend, with any civilians attempting to flee the violence in the various war zones across Yemen being targeted. Sometimes simply traveling in Yemen makes you a "legitimate military target" in the eyes of the Saudi Crown Prince and US government leaders. It has become common practice for the Saudi coalition to use the tactic of targeting any moving vehicle around an active war zone, effectively putting areas such as Hodeida in the past under military siege, forcing civilians to choose between staying in these kill-zones - the areas coming under attack by airstrikes, attack helicopters and shellings - or facing the likely fate of the vehicle full of fleeing passengers being hit with a Saudi-dropped and likely US bomb.
Just 10 days ago, two more buses full of civilians were targeted in Saudi airstrikes which left at least 20 Yemenis dead and 26 more injured. One bus was carrying elderly pilgrims heading to Mecca and Medina, while the other was full of internally displaced persons who were likely displaced from previous bombings, and both were near Hodeida when bombed, the strategic port city the US-backed coalition has been desperately but unsuccessfully trying to take control of from the Houthis for many months.
Meanwhile as the death count of Yemeni civilians including innocent women and children slaughtered by Saudi airstrikes continues to quickly pile up, the Media and government continues to focus on just one Saudi murder, a journalist killed in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul, Turkey. This clearly demonstrates that in the US and most of the West, the true reasons for mainstream coverage of human rights abuses such as these and government pressure on foreign regimes resulting from them are not at all humanitarian in nature as they would lead us to believe.
This narrow focus by the corporate Media and governments of the world for weeks now has led to unprecedented international pressure against the Saudi Kingdom over the murder of one single journalist who worked for the Washington Post - Jamal Khashoggi - while the ongoing mass murder of Yemeni civilians is being ignored, and the slaughter of at least 3,527 children and 2,277 women by the Saudi murderers over the course of the 3+ year war doesn't even warrant a mention right now in the mainstream media world.
Over three years of genocidal war crimes killing over 15,000 civilians gets a few brief media mentions and like zero international pressure against Saudi Arabia, but the murder of one single journalist suddenly gets solid coverage for weeks and builds unprecedented international pressure against the Kingdom?!?!
And yet still, all of Saudi Arabia's biggest weapons supply partners are extremely hesitant to take any real action and stop supplying bombs and financial aid to a Kingdom slaughtering children by the busload. At least there are a few politicians such as Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky and Emily Thornberry in the UK speaking up for real action to be taken in order to stop the Saudi war of terror on Yemen.
From SouthFront: "Labour shadow foreign secretary, Emily Thornberry, has called for action to be taken against the kingdom."
“The Saudi lies and impunity must stop here,” she Tweeted on October 19th. “We have heard the same excuses time and again from Saudi Arabia on Yemen, and now on Khashoggi: when disgraceful atrocities are committed, they call them unintended mistakes, and the world does nothing,” she said.
Those voices of dissent are unfortunately likely to fall on deaf ears. Trump has already made it clear in an interview on October 11 his intent for the US to solve this problem with methods which entirely exclude the canceling of arms deals with the Saudi Kingdom. Can't be stopping a genocide in Yemen because there's too much money to be lost, and "that would be unacceptable," says Trump.
"Again, this took place in Turkey, and to the best of our knowledge Khashoggi is not a U.S. citizen, is that right? He’s a permanent resident, okay . . . As to whether or not we should stop $110 billion from being spent in this country . . . that would not be acceptable to me." - President Donald Trump, ThinkProgress, VanityFair
At the same time, Houthis and Yemen army continue to respond to civilian bombings with retaliatory strikes and attacks.
In response to the Riyadh regime’s air strikes against residential areas, Yemen’s army and Ansarullah [Houthi] artillery shelled mercenary hideouts in the pay of the Saudi regime on the night of Friday, 19 October to Saturday, 20 October, south of Jabal al-Dud and east of the Juhfan Mountains in Jizan Province, located in southwestern Saudi Arabia. Yemeni forces also destroyed a tank of the Saudi army. - VOP
According to an official statement of the Yemen Missile Force on Monday October 21, the attacks inflicted casualties upon the Saudi mercenaries:
“The missiles force of the Mujahedeen of the army and the popular committees [the armed wing of the Houthis] targeted a gathering of Saudi soldiers in the camp of Ain al-Hara with rockets, causing fatal injuries in their ranks,” a source in the Yemeni Missiles Force told the al-Masirah TV. - SouthFront
SouthFront goes on to point out that:
The Houthis use of the Grad rockets, which have the range of less than 20km, indicates that the Yemeni group is holding advanced positions south of Jizan. This is very possible because the last few weeks witnessed several attacks by Houthi fighters on positions of the Saudi military in the province.
The Houthis have indeed showed themselves to be capable fighters against the Saudi coalition invasion, having in the past both launched retaliatory missile and drone attacks deep inside Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and carried out numerous successful ambushes of Saudi coalition convoys and mercenaries in southern Saudi Arabia near the border. Much more on the Houthis in following SouthFront documentary, The Houthis and War in Yemen:
In my estimation, this is a war the Saudi coalition can never win short of slaughtering the entire Yemeni population - similar to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and US war effort in Vietnam, both of which failed miserably.
The US should use this Khashoggi debacle as an opportunity to stop funding the genocidal war on Yemen. The murderous Crown Prince MBS should take this opportunity to quickly end this futile war on Yemen as Hezbollah recommended, or it might just eventually come back around to bite him - particularly if the Turks release any evidence linking him directly to the planning and ordering of the assassination, which it looks like it indeed was, with a 15-man hit squad and quite a few Riyadh gangsters getting in trouble with the Crown Prince.
No doubt they are getting in trouble not because MBS didn't approve, but because they got caught and the Riyadh regime needed them to take the fall. It will be interesting to see what further evidence Turkey releases and whether or not this one murder reshapes the future of the Saudi war on Yemen in any way. One thing is for sure, the government leaders at the top and all the Deep State players are doing their best to make sure nothing really changes as far as US policy towards Saudi Arabia goes, including the support of their genocidal war on Yemen, particularly when it comes to those arms deals. Meanwhile Trump is still very much seeming like just another puppet president.
