A Saudi-led military coalition said Saturday it made mistakes in an airstrike last month that killed dozens of Yemeni schoolchildren, a rare admission of guilt for the U.S.-backed alliance.
The coalition, which is fighting a war against Yemen’s Iran-supported Houthi rebels, apologized for the strike and promised to hold accountable those responsible, pending the official findings from a Saudi-based investigatory body, according to a statement.
The coalition would also revise its rules of engagement “in a manner that guarantees non-recurrence of such incidents,” it said.
Saudi Arabia and its mainly Arab allies have carried out airstrikes and a ground campaign in Yemen for more than three years in a bid to oust the Houthis, who hold power in the capital San’a. They want to restore the internationally backed government of President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi.
But as the human toll mounts, the U.S.-backed coalition’s airstrikes have come under intensifying scrutiny from human-rights groups, the United Nations and Washington. The conflict overall has killed more than 6,660 civilians, according to the U.N., a large portion of them allegedly by coalition strikes.
The coalition has admitted fault following investigations before, as it did in 2017 when it said a “technical mistake” was responsible for a strike that killed over a dozen people in San’a. But such admissions are unusual.
The one on Saturday followed growing political pressure on the coalition from political figures in the U.S., which sells many of the precision weapons the coalition uses in its strikes and provides vital aerial refueling to coalition warplanes.
Several congressional efforts to stop or reduce that support have sprung up in the past year. Sen. Chris Murphy (D., Conn.) last week repeated a call for an end to U.S. support for the coalition.
“There is simply no way our participation in this cataclysm of civilian deaths is making our country more safer,” he said. “The world is seeing what we are doing in Yemen, and they wonder what America stands for anymore.”
The strike on Aug. 9 that hit a school bus in Yemen’s northern Saada province, a Houthi stronghold that borders Saudi Arabia, drew a particularly virulent response from critics. Some 40 children were killed in the attack as their bus drove through a market in the town of Dhahyan, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Adding to the furor over the coalition’s handling of the war, a U.N. report found last week that members of the coalition and its allied forces may be guilty of war crimes due to alleged torture, child-soldier recruitment and attacks on civilians.
The coalition dismissed the report Wednesday, calling it biased and saying allegations of the coalition’s targeting of civilians were false.
Defense Secretary James Mattis said last week that the U.S. hadn’t seen Saudi Arabia showing “callous disregard” for Yemeni civilians. Yet he also said U.S. support wasn’t unconditional.
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