Controversy and confusion have surrounded the first US military raid approved by President Donald Trump.
As many as 16 women and children were killed during an intelligence-seeking mission targeting Al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in Yemen. However, the American Central Command (CENTCOM), which originally denied any civilian casualties, has admitted it still does not know how many non-combatants died.
Initially praised by the White House as a “successful operation”, details soon emerged of a disorganized assault which led to the death of one US serviceman. American military officials told Reuters that the new Commander-in-Chief had approved the raid on the AQAP propaganda and planning hub without sufficient intelligence, ground support or adequate backup preparations.
In the latest indication of the chaos surrounding the mission, the US authorities yesterday withdrew a video shared online, after it was outed as old footage.
The US Department of Defense website on Friday released a clip of a masked man explaining how to build bombs, celebrating it as “one example of the volumes of sensitive Al-Qaeda terror-planning information recovered during the operation.”
They were left red-faced, however, after it emerged that the footage had already been distributed online over nine years ago, undermining their attempt to use it to justify the deadly intelligence-gathering mission.
Adam Raisman, a senior analyst at SITE extremist monitoring organization, said that: “The video clip that was posted and abruptly taken down was one of 25 videos that appeared in 2007.”
Many expressed their anger over the incident on social media:
Fake News: Pentagon’s video from Yemen raid turned out to be 10 years old, already widely circulated https://t.co/fnmPZTqq5a #Yemen pic.twitter.com/RoXfQzBtJc
— David Icke (@davidicke) February 4, 2017
.@POTUS @WhiteHouse Thanks to our extra successful raid in Yemen, we found a terrorist training video that has been on YouTube since 2008
— Translation Conway (@realKellyanneC) February 3, 2017
Turns out the video the Trump administration claims was part of the "intel" the got in the failed Yemen raid is 10 years old & avail online.
— Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) February 3, 2017
Unbelievably, a Pentagon spokesman, Capt. Jeff Davis refused to back down over the significance of the video, despite the revelations.
“It does not matter when the video was made, that they had it is still illustrative of who they are and what their intentions are,” Davis said.
An eight-year-old American citizen, Nawar Al-Awlaki, was reportedly shot in the neck by US soldiers during the raid, dying several hours later from her injuries.
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