War crime likely in coalition strike, rights group says
CAIRO — An air strike by the Saudi-led coalition fighting Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthi rebels in Yemen that killed dozens of people last month is an “apparent war crime,” an international rights group said Sunday.
The report came days after U.N. human rights experts said all sides in the fighting may have been responsible for committing war crimes in the 3½-year conflict.
The coalition backing Yemen’s internationally recognized government expressed regret Saturday and pledged to hold accountable those found to be responsible for the strike, which hit a bus carrying children in a busy market in the northern province of Saada. At least 51 people, including 40 children, were killed, and 79 others, including 56 children, were wounded.
Human Rights Watch said the attack adds to the coalition’s “already gruesome track record of killing civilians at weddings, funerals, hospitals and schools in Yemen.”
The New York organization said it spoke to 14 witnesses, including nine children, who said that shortly before 8:30 a.m. on Aug. 9, a bomb fell on the market in Dhahyan, a town north of Saada in Houthicontroled northwestern Yemen.
The bomb landed a few yards from a bus packed with boys on an excursion organized by a mosque to visit the graves of men who had been killed in fighting, the group said. The bus was parked outside a grocery store where the driver had gone to buy water for the children, HRW said.
“I saw bodies torn into pieces, pieces of my friends . ... Many of my friends died,” the group quoted Ahmad Hanash, 14, as saying. He and his brothers Hassan, 13, and Yahia, 11, were wounded in the attack.
Bill Van Esveld, senior children’s rights researcher for HRW, urged the U.S. and other countries to “immediately stop weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and support strengthening the independent U.N. inquiry into violations in Yemen, or risk being complicit in future atrocities.”
The coalition said it has accepted the conclusions of its investigative body, known as the Joint Incidents Assessments Team, which found that the air strike involved “mistakes,” including failing to take measures to minimize collateral damage.
The coalition said in its statement Saturday that “it will take all the legal measures to hold accountable those who were proven to have committed mistakes” once it officially receives the findings. It also pledged to coordinate with Yemen’s government to compensate civilians.
The U.S. State Department on Sunday welcomed the coalition’s statement as “an important first step toward full transparency and accountability.”