(REPORT) — The Trump Administration’s claims that a January 29 ground raid in Yemen was a “success” appear to be on increasingly flimsy ground, with the Yemeni government today announcing it has revoked permission for all future US ground operations on their soil.
Though US officials downplayed the move, saying it doesn’t apply to drone strikes, it is still a nasty black eye for the administration, as the US has long managed to keep the Yemeni government unquestioningly supportive, irrespective of a string of fairly plain blunders.
The January 29 raid was particularly bad, with officials saying everything that could’ve gone wrong did, and that the raid was carried out without sufficient intelligence. Though the Pentagon says 14 “combatants” were killed, so were dozens of civilians, including a substantial number of children, and the raid destroyed most of a village.
The large number of slain children, including eight-year-old American Nora Awlaki, fueled a lot of anger at the US, and virtually obliged the Yemeni government to put the kibosh on future such raids. Officials later suggested intelligence acquired might have justified the raid, though so far this amounted to a single, decade-old video that was already publicly available.