SEAL Team 6 Kills an 8-Year-Old Girl, Dozens More in Yemen Attack

Pentagon Says Attack Targeted 'al-Qaeda Headquarters'

by Jason Ditz,

Pentagon officials confirmed that Navy SEAL Team 6 attacked what they described as an “al-Qaeda headquarters” in Yemen’s central Bayda Province, bragging of killing “about 14” al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula fighters and taking a cache of information.

Absent from the Pentagon’s account of what happened over the course of the raid, which supposedly lasted less than an hour, and left a large number of women and children riddled with bullets, including at least one eight-year-old girl named Nora, the daughter of Anwar al-Awlaki, a US cleric who was assassinated by the Obama Administration. The Cairo AP office reported receiving photographs showing the bodies of several young children who were shot multiple times during the raid.  Roughly 30 people were killed overall, meaning the 14 AQAP “fighters,” which is to say any fighting age men that were killed, amounted to less than half.

Awlaki’s 2011 assassination was hugely controversial, both because he was a US citizen killed on the orders of the Obama Administration and because the administration declined to charge him with any crimes beforehand, simply presenting his sermons as proof of terrorism. Awlaki’s 16-year-old son was assassinated, again on Obama’s order, two weeks later.

Officials say this raid had initially been proposed to President Obama but wasn’t approved until after President Trump took office and signed off on the plan. Even with the Pentagon ignoring all the slain children, the narrative isn’t exactly one of a super successful first ground raid into Yemen going off without a hitch.

Pentagon officials confirmed the death of at least one US soldier in the fighting, saying they were “deeply saddened” by it. Three other soldiers were wounded during the raid, and a fourth was wounded in the initial evacuation attempt, in which the V-22 Osprey crashed into the ground during a failed landing. The V-22 didn’t make it out either, as it was apparently so damaged from the crash that the troops had to intentionally destroy it and wait for another evacuation.