HRW: US Officials Risk Complicity in War Crimes in Yemen

The HRW’s Yemen and Kuwait Researcher, Middle East and North Africa Division, pointed out to the remnants of US-supplied weapons at several Saudi-led attack scenes across Yemen.

She said that she had visited a site of an attack by Saudi-led coalition in a small Yemeni village and found a piece of a US-made munitions with markings indicating it was manufactured by Raytheon in October 2015. 

It was the 23rd time Human Rights Watch had identified remnants of US-supplied weapons at the site of an apparently unlawful coalition attack, the fourth time we identified a weapon made by Raytheon.”

She noted that the US administration is about to approve the sale of more weapons to Saudi Arabia, including Raytheon-made bombs, to the tune of $400 million.

According to the UN’s Human Rights office, at least 4,773 civilians were killed and another 8,272 wounded, mostly by Saudi coalition airstrikes, since the start of the conflict. 

In Yemen, 7 million people facing starvation and more than two-thirds of the population in need of humanitarian aid. 

She said: “International legal scholars and US lawmakers have warned that continued US support—including through weapons sales—to Saudi Arabia’s military campaign in Yemen may not only make the US government complicit in coalition violations of the laws of war, but also expose US officials to legal liability for war crimes.”

“There is no mystery here: The Saudi-led coalition has committed scores of unlawful attacks, many amounting to war crimes. Continued arms sales not only send a clear message to the coalition that it can kill civilians with impunity, but they increasingly put US officials at legal risk for aiding those crimes,” she concluded.