Qualla: 2013 Radda airstrike

2013 Radda airstrike: Introduction

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit M 93, CC BY-SA 3.0. They had stopped for a flat tire. That is the detail that stays with you. Fifty or sixty people, mostly adult men from the al-Amri and al-Tisi families, were carrying the bride to her groom's village in rural al-Bayda Governorate, driving in a convoy across the high plateau of central Yemen. A few of the men carried assault rifles - a common tribal tradition at weddings, not unlike firing guns in celebration. When one of the vehicles got a flat, the whole convoy stopped at a place called Aqabat Zaj, north-east of the city of Radda, and some of the passengers noticed an unfamiliar sound overhead. It was a drone. Four missiles launched from a US base in Djibouti, struck a Toyota Hilux at the head of the convoy and the cars immediately around it.

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Image: M 93 | CC BY-SA 3.0

2013 Radda airstrike: The Morning After

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit M 93, CC BY-SA 3.0. Twelve men died. Fifteen others were injured, six of them seriously. All of the dead were members of the wedding party - relatives of the bride and groom, not one of them listed by local authorities as a member of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which US officials had named as...

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2013 Radda airstrike: The Intended Target

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit M 93, CC BY-SA 3.0. On 20 December, eight days after the strike, US and Yemeni officials told the Associated Press that the target had been Shawqi Ali Ahmad al-Badani, a mid-level AQAP commander US officials said had masterminded a plot that forced the August 2013 closure of nineteen US diplomatic m...

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2013 Radda airstrike: The Investigations

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit M 93, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Obama administration conducted two investigations, one by the military and one by the federal government. Both concluded that no civilians had died. Later reporting contradicted both findings. The CIA, according to leaked internal assessments, believed the strike had likely c...

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Image: M 93 | CC BY-SA 3.0

2013 Radda airstrike: No Civilians

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit M 93, CC BY-SA 3.0. In May 2013, seven months before the strike, President Obama had delivered a major speech declaring a new drone policy. Drone strikes, he said, would only be launched against terrorists who pose a continuing and imminent threat to the American people, and only when there is near ...

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2013 Radda airstrike: Compensation and Denial

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit M 93, CC BY-SA 3.0. Hooria Mashhour, Yemen's Minister of Human Rights, wrote a Washington Post op-ed arguing that drone strikes like Radda inadvertently helped AQAP by traumatizing Yemenis and giving the group a recruiting issue. No leader, she wrote, can legitimately approve the extrajudicial killi...

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2013 Radda airstrike: A Wedding That Became a Funeral

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit M 93, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Human Rights Watch report released in February 2014 was titled A Wedding That Became a Funeral. That is what the strike looks like from the ground - from inside the family gathering, from the vantage point of the bride, from the burial ceremonies in the villages of al-Amri an...

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Image: M 93 | CC BY-SA 3.0