Saudi pilots have launched yet another airstrike on a school in the Yemeni province of Ta’izz, with no information immediately available on possible casualties.
According to Yemen’s al-Masirah television, the air raid hit the al-Rawd school in the district of Dabab in western Ta’izz early on Monday.
In the war Saudi Arabia has launched on Yemen, the Saudi forces have been targeting schools, hospitals, residential buildings, roads, markets and refugee camps.
Reports by media outlets in the United States — which has offered intelligence support for the Saudi war by helping Saudi forces acquire “targets” — have pointed to the incompetence as well as cowardice on the part of the Saudi pilots conducting airstrikes as some of the reasons why indiscriminate bombing occurs in Yemen.
A March 13 article on The New York Times cited “American officials” as pointing to “the ability of Saudi pilots, who were inexperienced in flying missions… and fearful of enemy ground fire.”
“As a result,” the article read, “they (the pilots) flew at high altitudes to avoid the threat below. But flying high also reduced the accuracy of their bombing and increased civilian casualties, American officials said.”
“American advisers suggested how the pilots could safely fly lower, among other tactics. But the airstrikes still landed on markets, homes, hospitals, factories and ports, and are responsible for the majority of the [then] 3,000 civilian deaths during the yearlong war, according to the United Nations,” the Times article further read.
In the previous instance of indiscriminate bombing, scores of students were killed and injured in a Saudi airstrike against an elementary school in the province of Sa’ada less than a week ago.
On Friday, the US military said it had sharply reduced the number of its forces working with Saudi Arabia in the war on Yemen.
While some US officials have sought to distance the decision to downgrade military cooperation with Saudi Arabia from the rising outcry over the mounting civilian deaths caused in Yemen, Pentagon spokesman Adam Stump said on Friday that the US military support for the Saudi war on Yemen “does not mean that we will refrain from expressing our concern about the war in Yemen and how it has been waged.”
Source: Websites
