Houston Chronicle

SEALs kill 7 militants in Yemen raid

Members injured as team goes into deeper territory

- By Eric Schmitt and Helene Cooper

WASHINGTON — Members of the Navy’s elite SEAL Team 6 killed seven militants — but suffered combat wounds themselves — during an early Tuesday raid on a compound associated with al-Qaida in Yemen, the Pentagon said.

Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, declined to say how many members of the SEAL unit were wounded or to describe the extent of their injuries, citing rules for secrecy and operationa­l security. But he said the injured Americans were not in such serious condition that they required medical evacuation.

It was the first ground raid in Yemen that the military has acknowledg­ed since Navy SEALs carried out a similar attack in late January, the first such operation authorized by President Donald Trump. One Navy SEAL team member died and three others were injured in that mission, and as many as 25 civilians were killed.

Further into Yemen

Tuesday’s raid took the U.S. service members deeper into Yemeni territory than they had ever been before, Davis said.

The Americans, working in cooperatio­n with the Yemeni government, attacked an al-Qaida encampment in Marib province and then called in support from an AC-130 gunship after a firefight broke out.

In a statement after the operation, the U.S. Central Command said the raid targeted a compound that was linked to the al-Qaida affiliate in Yemen, known as al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula.

U.S. forces killed seven al-Qaida militants through small-arms fire and precision airstrikes, the statement said, referring to strikes by drones, helicopter­s or attack planes.

Col. John Thomas, a Central Command spokesman, said afterward that the raid was intended to seize potentiall­y important informatio­n from the compound — typically electronic devices such as computers, hard drives and cellphones — and was not an attempt to kill or capture a particular individual.

Too early to tell success

It was unclear why the Defense Department chose to disclose the details of this raid, since U.S. commandos, sometimes working in concert with Special Operations forces from the United Arab Emirates and local Yemeni allies on the ground, have carried out several clandestin­e raids since the ill-fated one on Jan. 29. The military has called the other raids “site exploitati­on” missions.

These missions are intended to provide the U.S. military with more informatio­n about the al-Qaida leadership and operations, as well as insights into other extremist groups in the country. The Central Command statement said the raid was conducted with the support of the beleaguere­d Yemeni government, which has been fighting a two-front war: one with Arab allies against Houthi rebels in the western part of the country, and another against al-Qaida militants in the country’s central and eastern regions.

Thomas said it was too early to tell if the raid Tuesday was successful.

Even after the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, U.S. counterter­rorism officials have said the al-Qaida franchise in Yemen poses the most direct threat to the United States, largely because of its proven ability to develop plots to smuggle hard-to-detect bombs aboard passenger airliners bound for the United States. So far, three such plots have been thwarted.

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