No Yemen escalation, U.S. says

Fired missiles at rebel-held areas in self-defense, officials state

The guided-missile destroyer USS Nitze launches a strike Thursday at Houthi-controlled territory on Yemen’s Red Sea coast.
The guided-missile destroyer USS Nitze launches a strike Thursday at Houthi-controlled territory on Yemen’s Red Sea coast.

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates -- The U.S. military directly entered Yemen's war for the first time, launching three strikes on areas controlled by Yemen's Houthi rebels after a U.S. Navy ship was targeted in two failed missile attacks this week.

photo

AP

U.S.-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles destroyed three radar sites early Thursday in Houthi-controlled territory on Yemen’s Red Sea coast, which officials said was a retaliatory action after missiles were fired this week at U.S. Navy ships.

photo

AP

A map showing the location of radar sites in Yemen targeted by U.S.

photo

AP

Yemen’s army spokesman Brig. Gen. Sharaf G. Loqman speaks to a reporter Thursday during an interview with The Associated Press in Sanaa, Yemen.

Officials from the White House, Pentagon and State Department all argued that Thursday's cruise missile strikes on radar sites controlled by Iranian-backed Houthi rebels were strictly a self-defense measure and not an escalation in military involvement.

The U.S. strikes from a guided-missile destroyer hit radar sites involved in "recent missile launches threatening USS Mason and other vessels" operating in international waters in the Red Sea and the Bab al-Mandeb strait, Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said in a statement. The Houthis denied they were behind the attacks on the ships, according to a news agency under their control.

"These strikes are not connected to the broader conflict in Yemen," Cook said. "We want to make crystal clear that if you threaten our forces, you threaten our ships, we will be prepared to respond, as we did in this case."

State Department deputy spokesman Mark Toner said the sites "were specifically targeted in order to take out or in some way limit the ability for the Houthis to carry out these strikes."

White House spokesman Eric Schultz called the military's strikes "purely a self-defense measure" and not an engagement in Yemen's "sectarian situation." But if attacked again, the U.S. is "prepared to respond if necessary," he said.

Cook said the operation was authorized by President Barack Obama. "These limited self-defense strikes were conducted to protect our personnel, our ships, and our freedom of navigation in this important maritime passageway," he said. "The United States will respond to any further threat to our ships and commercial traffic, as appropriate."

Initial assessments show the sites targeted in the strikes were destroyed, Cook said. At 4 a.m. Thursday in Yemen, the guided-missile destroyer USS Nitze "struck three coastal radar sites in Houthi-controlled territory on Yemen's Red Sea" coast, the Navy said in a statement. The sites were used in the "unprovoked attacks" on U.S. ships, including one Wednesday against the USS Mason.

"After thorough analysis and careful planning, the strikes were executed with precision," the Navy said.

Col. Walid Zeyad, a Yemeni naval official in the nearby Red Sea port of Hodeida, said the radar sites were Ras Eissa, Khoukha and Makha.

The radar installations, which were in Houthi-controlled territory, were active during the failed missile attacks against the Mason and other ships. They also were active Oct. 1, when Houthi forces were believed to have fired a missile that disabled a United Arab Emirates military logistics ship, the Swift, the U.S. official said.

No information on casualties from the U.S. missiles was provided by U.S. officials.

A senior U.S. military official stressed that the three radar installations were in remote areas. There was little risk of civilians being caught in the attacks, the official said, although there was no definitive declaration that civilians were unharmed in the strikes.

The official spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Rebel leader Abdulmalik al-Houthi condemned the U.S. strikes, saying they serve as a prelude to "an inimical operation targeting Hodeida." The Houthi leader called on fighters to be on high alert and prepare "to repel the criminal invaders," according to a statement carried by the rebel-controlled Saba news agency.

Sharaf Loqman, a spokesman for the part of the Yemeni army fighting alongside the Houthis, denied firing on the ships, saying the military never targets ships outside territorial waters. He called the accusations an "American farce to find a reason to interfere in Yemen directly after failure of the Saudis."

Yemen's state news agency Saba, which is under Houthis' control, also carried a denial, saying the accusations aim to create a pretext "to escalate assaults and cover up the continuous crimes committed by the aggression against the Yemeni people."

The U.S. strikes were prompted by two incidents of missile fire from Houthi-held territory toward the USS Mason and USS Ponce, one on Sunday and a second early Wednesday. The missiles fell harmlessly in the ocean in both cases. The missiles fired Sunday were variants of the so-called Silkworm missile, a type of coastal defense cruise missile that Iran has been known to use.

Iran Sends 2 Warships

In a sign of the regional scope of the Yemen conflict, Iran announced Thursday that it was deploying two warships in Bab el-Mandeb and the neighboring Gulf of Aden. The semiofficial Tasnim news agency said the Alvand and the Bushehr were being deployed as part of a regular anti-piracy patrol off Yemen and East Africa.

The conflict in Yemen is widely seen as a proxy confrontation between Middle East rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran. The conflict has so far pitted Shiite rebels and their allies against a government backed by a Saudi-led military coalition.

Iran says it backs the Yemeni rebels but denies arming them. U.S. officials have held open the possibility that the Houthis may have captured some missiles from Yemen's army but also have made clear Iran is supplying them as well. These missiles, State Department spokesman John Kirby said this week, "are provided by Iran to the Houthi rebels."

U.S. intelligence officials believe that the Houthis receive significantly less support from Iran than the Saudis and other Persian Gulf nations have alleged.

The U.S. said this month that it was reviewing its assistance to the Saudi coalition after an airstrike killed more than 140 people gathered at a funeral hall in the Yemeni capital, Sanaa.

Human Rights Watch said Thursday that the funeral bombing constitutes an apparent war crime. It also called on the United States and Britain to immediately suspend all arms sales to Saudi Arabia. The two countries have sold the kingdom billions of dollars in weapons for use in the Yemen campaign, and the U.S. military has provided logistical and intelligence support as well.

The Saudi-led campaign began in March 2015, about a year after the Houthis and army units loyal to Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen's former president, began battling to oust the country's current president, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi.

Despite skepticism in Washington about the wisdom of the campaign, the Obama administration threw its support behind the Saudis, in part because it needed support in Riyadh for the nuclear deal it was then negotiating with Iran, a rival of Saudi Arabia.

Besides providing intelligence and refueling help, the Pentagon sent a team of military personnel to Saudi Arabia to assist the planners of the air campaign.

Yet the Saudi campaign has failed to dislodge the Houthis from Sanaa. Much of Yemen is on the brink of famine, and reports of civilians' being killed in airstrikes by the Saudi-led coalition have become routine.

The U.S. military has refueled more than 5,700 aircraft involved in the Saudi-led bombing campaign since it began, according to the U.S. Central Command, which oversees U.S. military operations in the Middle East.

This U.S. role has drawn criticism from human-rights groups, which condemn the campaign as reckless. More than 4,000 civilians have been killed since the bombing began, according to the top U.N. human rights official, Zeid Raad al-Hussein.

The U.S. has conducted military operations in Yemen for years, launching drone attacks against al-Qaida targets. It blamed the jihadi group for an attack in 2000 on the USS Cole, which killed 17 sailors. Strikes against Houthi targets are the first of their kind.

Information for this article was contributed by Mohammed Hatem, Nafeesa Syeed, Zainab Fattah, Alaa Shahine and Justin Sink of Bloomberg News; by Matthew Lee, Lolita C. Baldor, Maggie Michael, Lolita C. Baldor, Jon Gambrell and Nasser Karimi of The Associated Press; and by Matthew Rosenberg and Mark Mazzetti of The New York Times.

A Section on 10/14/2016

Upcoming Events