On December 12, 2013, a drone operated by Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), an elite United States military division, launched an airstrike on a convoy of vehicles Aqabat Zaj, an area near the city of Radda in al-Bayda Governorate, Yemen. The convoy was a wedding procession transporting the bride to the village of the groom. As it stopped for a vehicle with a flat tire, four missiles were launched at a Toyota Hilux carrying three people, who had escaped before the missiles struck. Four surrounding vehicles were additionally damaged.
The strike killed 12 men and injured 15 other people, six of them seriously. All were among the families of the bride and groom, and none were listed by local authorities as members of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the purported target of the strike. The US claimed it had conducted two investigations, one by the military and another by the federal government, both of which determined that no civilians had died. Later reports indicated internal doubts at the results, with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) believing that the strike had likely caused civilian casualties. The target of the operation according to American officials, who successfully escaped from the Hilux, was AQAP commander Shawqi Ali Ahmad al-Badani, the ringleader of a plot to attack a US diplomatic mission earlier in August. Witnesses and survivors rejected any linkage to him or AQAP, though some reports detail interviews in which they attest to another AQAP member, Nasser al-Hotami, being present and escaping the targeted vehicle.
The strikes provoked public outrage in Yemen and criticism from international organizations such as the United Nations and Amnesty International. The Yemeni government initially backed the US position on the strike, but later apologized for it and engaged in a tribal compensation process which allocated over $1 million to the families of the victims, which analysts believed was funded by the US. The Yemeni parliament passed a non-binding bill to ban drone strikes. While the Barack Obama administration suspended JSOC activities in Yemen for the next year, drone strikes continued unabated through a parallel campaign operated by the CIA, while JSOC had its restrictions lifted by 2015.
Background In a May 2013 speech, US President Barack Obama unveiled new policy regarding airstrikes conducted through unmanned aerial vehicles in countries including Yemen and Pakistan. He declared that responsibility for drone strikes would be gradually shifted from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), a component of the US Armed Forces and the Department of Defense, in an effort to increase transparency regarding the program. Obama assured that drone strikes would only be launched "against terrorists who pose a continuing and imminent threat to the American people," and with "near certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured." Prior to the Radda strike, at least seven other instances of US airstrikes targeting weddings were recorded during the war on terror, although all were by piloted aircraft in Iraq or Afghanistan.
The CIA and JSOC both run parallel but separate drone campaigns in Yemen. Operations against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and its local branch Ansar-al-Sharia increased substantially in 2012, but had declined in frequency the following year. The drone campaign had been facing increasing criticism among the local populace for frequent casualties involving civilians. Radda, which has been described as an AQAP stronghold, was the scene of a drone strike on September 2, 2012, which killed twelve civilians.
Yemeni officials suggested that the strike had come as a response to a high-profile attack on Yemen's Ministry of Defense compound in Sanaa earlier in December. AQAP claimed the attack, which killed 56 people, as a response to the killing of its leaders by US drones.
Attack CasualtiesKilled Hussein Muhammad Saleh al-Amri, 37 Muhammad Ali Mesad al-Amri, 34 Ali Abdullah Muhammad al-Tisi, 36 Zaidan Muhammad al-Amri, 34 Shaif Abdullah Mohsen Mabkhut al-Amri, 22 Hussein Muhammad al-Tomil al-Tisi, 65 Motlaq Hamoud Muhammad al-Tisi, 41 Saleh Abdullah Mabkhut al-Amri, 30 Aref Ahmad Muhammad al-Tisi, 28 Saleh Mesad Abdullah al-Amri, 30 Mes`ad Dhaifallah Hussein al-Amri, 25 Salem Muhammad Ali al-Tisi, 31
Seriously injured
Abdullah Muhammad al-Tisi, 52, multiple shrapnel wounds Muhammad Ali Abdullah al-Amri, 45, multiple shrapnel wounds Naif Abdullah Ali al-Tisi, 30, lost vision in one eye, broken leg Muhammad Ali Ahmad al-Amri, 40, lost body parts including part of one leg Nasser Ali Ahmad al-Amri, 36, wounded in the back, leg Abdullah Aziz Mabkhot, 30, broken hand and leg
The strike targeted an 11-vehicle procession escorting a newlywed bride from a luncheon at her family's home in Jishm to al-Abusereema, the village of the groom. The convoy was composed of various SUV's and pickup trucks fitted with simple ceremonious ribbons and bows. Participating in the procession were 50 to 60 people, mainly adult men, several of whom wielding assault rifles as a common tribal tradition, and a small number of women from the al-Amri and al-Tisi families. The convoy was travelling through a remote, single-lane dirt road winding through the mountainous highlands of Radda district, at a pace of less than 10 miles per hour. Some of the passengers had heard a drone flying prior the strike, but ignored it as a common occurrence in the area.
The convoy eventually stopped halfway towards the destination at Aqabat Zaj, northeast of the city of Radda, as it waited for a car with a flat tire. The area was a wide open dip near a hillside: a local villager described it as "very remote" with "no way to run". Some procession goers soon noted that the sound of the drone, which was being operated by JSOC and was launched from a US base in Djibouti, had stopped as it was stalling at their location.
At approximately 4:30 p.m. local time, as the convoy was close together, an AGM-114 Hellfire missile struck the passenger side of a 2005 Toyota Hilux's roof, the fourth vehicle in the procession, seconds before its three occupants abandoned it. The drone fired three more Hellfire missiles within seconds which landed in the area surrounding the Hilux between the other vehicles, seemingly targeting its passengers in particular. The targeted vehicle proceeded to explode while being set ablaze. Shrapnel from the missiles were launched through the bodies and windshields of four vehicles close to the Hilux, while three were also lit on fire. According to a survivor, "Anyone who was still alive jumped out of their cars."
Victims The drone strike killed 12 men and wounded 15 other people. The victims were taken by other survivors to a hospital in Radda city via a 90-minute drive, 35-kilometers away from the location of the strike. Three died of their wounds in care while six others were treated for significant injuries including broken and missing eyes, genitals, arms and legs. Of the men killed, seven were from the al-Amri family while five were from the al-Tisi family, both sub-branches of the larger Qayfah tribe. The victims included shepherds, khat farmers, and illegal migrant workers in Saudi Arabia between the ages of 20 to 65. None of them were recorded as wanted AQAP members by the Yemeni government.
Four people were killed and three were injured in the first car in the convoy, a Toyota Land Cruiser, while its driver escaped unharmed. The driver of the third car, a former soldier in the Yemeni Army, was killed, being "tossed to the side" and "struck in his face, neck, and chest" according to his father, who was injured as part of the procession. A son of the groom was killed, while the bride, Warda al-Sorimi, sustained a minor shrapnel injury to her face, and had her wedding dress destroyed. None of the those injured were questioned by government agents while in hospital care, as are most militants in similar situations.
Investigation Baraa Shiban, a local coordinator for human rights group Reprieve and a member of Yemen's National Dialogue Conference, interviewed local villagers and survivors of the strike two days afterwards. He sent his findings to NBC News, which published an investigative report into the incident on January 7, 2014. The report contained photography and video work by local activist Nasser al-Sane showing the victims being prepared for burial in Radda. After he sent his findings to the agency, Shiban said he received an anonymous phone message a day later threatening his life if he continued his investigation.
NBC News reported an investigation into the strike was being conducted by the US government. On February 20, anonymous officials stated that two investigations were carried out—one by a US Air Force general on the orders of Lieutenant General Joseph Votel, the commander of JSOC, and another by the National Counterterrorism Center on behalf of the Obama administration. Both investigations concluded that no civilians were killed and only AQAP targets were hit. According to Gregory D. Johnsen, the investigations were almost entirely based on JSOC strike footage and intelligence as investigators did not have the ability to visit the scene or interview survivors. He likened this to "trying to view the world through a soda straw", claiming that the investigations did not quell internal confusion over the results of the strike.
According a May 2014 report by the Los Angeles Times, a split had materialized between the CIA and JSOC in regards to the result of the strike. JSOC remained adamant that only AQAP militants were killed, meanwhile the CIA, and to an extent the National Counterterrorism Center, believed that some civilians were likely also killed. Prior to the strike, the CIA told JSOC that it "did not have confidence in the underlying intelligence" for the operation.
Target of the airstrike
A statement by Yemen's Supreme Security Committee said that the attack killed AQAP "members and leaders who masterminded armed forces, police, and vital institutions." On December 20, US and Yemeni officials told the Associated Press that the target of the attack was Shawqi Ali Ahmad al-Badani, a mid-level AQAP operational commander who was the mastermind of a major plot to attack an unspecified US embassy, which forced the closure of 19 diplomatic missions across the Middle East and North Africa in August of that year. An analyst from the Abaad Studies and Research Center said that Badani was being referred to on jihadist forums as an "emir [leader] of Sanaa", in the wake of the attack, but was effectively unheard of beforehand. Badani, who was listed as one of Yemen's most wanted militants several times, escaped the attack wounded according to the officials. By May 2014, US officials believed that he had escaped unharmed. He was added to the Specially Designated Global Terrorist list in July, and was killed by another drone strike in Radda on November 3, 2014.
Witnesses and relatives of the victims in the attack denied any relation to Badani or his presence in the convoy. Baraa Shiban reported no signs that Badani was in the vicinity of the attack. He said that, as a native of Ibb, it would have been improbable for Badani to be invited to a small tribal wedding celebration in a region he was foreign to. Shiban believed that perhaps the drone operators "saw a group of people waiting in trucks for a convoy and they assumed they were militants, so they made the decision to strike." The New York Times noted that the 11 vehicles comprising the procession was a noticeably larger number of vehicles than what AQAP usually uses in a convoy for clandestine traversal.