SANA'A: HOOD, Yemen's most prominent human rights organization officially condemned in a press release on Monday the air strikes conducted by the US in the country's southern provinces. It said the raids had led to the death of scores of innocent civilians and could not be justified, not even if it meant fending off al-Qaeda's advances. HOOD and the Transitional Justice Center (TJC) both condemned Sunday's Drone campaign in Azza, a district of the southern province of Abyan, which led to the death of 6 civilians and the destruction of a great many properties. Both organizations stressed that by allowing Americans to expand their military intervention, Yemen was losing its sovereignty, permitting a foreign power to exact criminal acts against its civilian population, adding that it was this very “meddling which al-Qaeda was using to recruit more partisans to its cause. “The persistence of the US military crimes on the Yemeni grounds and people and the continuance of the official Yemeni collusion are considered the strongest material excuse of Ansar al-Sharia, an al-Qaida affiliate group in Yemen, that justifies all their crimes and operations,” read the statement. HOOD and TJC urged the government and President Abu Rabbo Mansour Hadi to reconsider his position in regards to Yemen's fight against al-Qaeda, demanding that he immediately end the US's intrusions of the nation's air space and clearly oppose the arrival of American soldiers, as proposed by the Pentagon.
