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u.s. militarism
Yemen's Health Ministry Says Majority of 53 Killed in US Strikes 'Were Women and Children'
"All because Yemen refuses to let Israelis wipe Palestine out," said one critic.
Mar 17, 2025
The Yemeni Health Ministry said Sunday that most of the more than 50 people killed in U.S. airstrikes over the weekend were women and children as the war-torn Mideast nation braced for more "overwhelming lethal force" promised by President Donald Trump in retaliation for Houthi rebel attacks on American warships, international shipping, and Israel.
Anis al-Asbahi, a spokesperson for the Yemeni Health Ministry, said that the wave of dozens of U.S. strikes across eight provinces including the capital Sanaa killed 53 people, 31 of them civilians, and wounded more than 100 others.
"The majority of them were children and women," al-Asbhahi toldDrop Site News, adding that the death toll was likely to rise, as rescue workers were still finding victims amid the rubble.
Dozens of civilians, including children and women, were killed in U.S. bombings across Yemen as Trump vows to unleash “overwhelming lethal force” to stop the Houthi naval blockade targeting Israel’s war on Gaza. Read Shuaib Almosawa's report from Yemen: www.dropsitenews.com/p/trump-mass...
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— Jeremy Scahill ( @jeremyscahill.com) March 17, 2025 at 3:53 AM
Yemeni journalist Shuaib Almosawa wrote for Drop Site News:
Scenes filmed inside Saada hospital revealed a chaotic environment, with medical staff rushing injured people, including children and women, on stretchers into hospitals and through corridors. Severely injured children were screaming, some with faces bloodied and burned. Others were covered with dust and blood, suggesting they had been pulled from the rubble. A few small victims were charred beyond recognition.
Nasser Mohammed Saad told Almosawa that he was at a friend's home in Sanaa on Saturday evening celebrating iftar when four U.S. airstrikes directly hit the house next door.
"The house that was hit belongs to a citizen who has nothing to do with anything," Saad said, calling the strikes "a savage and barbaric aggression targeting civilians."
"It only targeted the innocent, terrifying children, women, and the elderly," he added.
The weekend strikes sparked protests in Yemen on Monday, including a massive demonstration in Sanaa attended by at least hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom believe the bombings were carried out on behalf of U.S. allies Israel and Saudi Arabia. Some of the demonstrators held placards with slogans including "Death to America, Death to Israel!"
The Trump administration said the strikes were ordered after Houthi rebels—who are officially known as Ansar Allah and who control Sanaa and most of western Yemen—resumed attacking ships including U.S. naval vessels in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. The Houthis began attacking commercial and military ships in the area in response to Israel's annihilation of Gaza.
Trump wrote on his Truth Social site Saturday that he "ordered the United States Military to launch decisive and powerful Military action" against the Houthis, who "have waged an unrelenting campaign of piracy, violence, and terrorism against American, and other, ships, aircraft, and drones."
"Joe Biden's response was pathetically weak, so the unrestrained Houthis just kept going," Trump continued, referring to the series of sustained strikes carried out by his Democratic predecessor along with Britain and Israel that reportedly killed at least dozens of Houthi fighters and at least one civilian. "It has been over a year since a U.S. flagged commercial ship safely sailed through the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, or the Gulf of Aden."
"The Houthi attack on American vessels will not be tolerated," the president said. "We will use overwhelming lethal force until we have achieved our objective."
Trump also had a message for Iran, which backs the Houthis: "Support for the Houthi terrorists must end IMMEDIATELY! Do NOT threaten the American People, their President, who has received one of the largest mandates in Presidential History, or Worldwide shipping lanes. If you do, BEWARE, because America will hold you fully accountable and, we won't be nice about it!"
In response to the U.S. strikes, the Houthis said they launched a barrage of drones and missiles at the USS Harry Truman, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, in the Red Sea, and other ships in its carrier group. The U.S. military said that none of its warships were hit and that U.S. warplanes shot down all of the incoming drones.
"We affirm that this aggression will not deter the Yemeni people from continuing to support Palestine and fulfilling their religious and humanitarian duties in supporting the people of Gaza, their resistance, and their heroic fighters," Ansar Allah said in a statement.
U.S. forces have launched drone and other airstrikes against Yemen since the George W. Bush administration. There have also been occasional U.S. ground raids in the Middle Eastern country, including one in January 2017 that killed Nawar al-Awlaki, an 8-year-old American girl whose father and brother were killed in separate U.S. drone strikes during the administration of former President Barack Obama.
According to the U.K.-based monitor Airwars, U.S. forces have killed an estimated 175-300 Yemeni civilians in 181 declared actions since 2002. Overall, hundreds of thousands of Yemenis have died during the civil war that began in 2014, with international experts attributing more than 150,000 Yemeni deaths to U.S.-backed, Saudi-led bombing and blockade.
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'WTF?' World Reacts to Trump's Vow of US Expansionism
One former Swedish prime minister called the Republican president's pledge to grow U.S. territory "a recipe for global instability."
Jan 20, 2025
While the global far-right cheered President Donald Trump's return to the White House on Monday, world leaders, elected officials, activists, and others from across the rest of the political spectrum reacted with trepidation as the Republican vowed to expand the nation's territory for the first time in nearly 80 years and threatened the sovereignty of a U.S. trade and security partner.
In his second inaugural address, Trump promised a foreign policy that "expands our territory," as well as the renewed pursuit of "Manifest Destiny"—the 19th-century belief that God intended the United States to control the continent from coast to coast—beyond Earth by "launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars."
"That's a dangerous statement in itself, but then others around the world might also be inspired to do the same."
In the United States, Monday's inauguration coincided with the federal holiday honoring the assassinated civil rights champion Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., whom Trump mentioned in his speech. Some observers noted the incongruity of Trump's message with King's anti-war ethos.
"How dare Donald Trump invoke Dr. King," pan-African studies professor and Black Lives Matter Los Angeles co-founder Melina Abdullah fumed on social media. "Trump IS the embodiment of the three evils that MLK warned of: racism, materialism, and militarism."
Indigenous voices reminded listeners that belief in Manifest Destiny fueled genocidal violence against Native Americans.
"Trump is really going after Native Americans with references to Manifest Destiny, the frontier, Wild West, and erasing Denali's name," attorney Brett Chapman, a direct descendant of the Ponca Cshief White Eagle, said on social media. "This anti-Indigenous inaugural address sounds like one from the 1800s when presidents deployed the U.S. military on Native Americans seeking rights."
In his speech, Trump falsely accused China of "running the Panama Canal," said that Panama—which was last invaded by American forces in 1989—is overcharging U.S. ships to use the crucial waterway, and warned that "we're taking it back."
As angry demonstrators rallied outside the U.S. Embassy in Panama City, right-wing Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino issued a statement refuting Trump's threats and accusations and declaring that "the canal is and will continue to be Panamanian."
Trump's threat follows his refusal earlier this month to rule out the use of military force in order to conquer the Panama Canal or Greenland, a territory of NATO ally Denmark.
South American progressives were left stunned by parts of Trump's address.
"In his inauguration speech, Donald Trump made it clear that reality surpasses fiction," Carol Dartora, a leftist lawmaker in the lower chamber of Brazil's National Congress, said in a video posted online. "Then the U.S. president exuded machismo, imperialism, and xenophobia, especially against immigrants."
Across the Atlantic, former center-right Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt said: "Now we know that President Trump wants to 'expand our territory.' That's a dangerous statement in itself, but then others around the world might also be inspired to do the same. It's a recipe for global instability."
German author, filmmaker, and journalist Annette Dittert
responded to Trump's expansionist pledge with a popular three-letter internet acronym: "'We will become a nation that expands our territory?' WTF?"
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US Bombs Over 75 Targets in Syria After Assad Falls
"The Western press are waxing lyrical about the new Syria being born—but not a word on the U.S. and Israeli bombs falling from the sky," said Yanis Varoufakis.
Dec 09, 2024
U.S. military forces launched dozens of airstrikes on more than 75 Islamic State targets in Syria on Sunday after the fall of longtime Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and amid ongoing Israeli and Turkish attacks on the war-torn Middle Eastern nation.
According to U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), warplanes including B-52 bombers, F-15 fighters, and A-10 ground attack aircraft "conducted dozens of precision airstrikes targeting known ISIS camps and operatives in central Syria."
CENTCOM called the strikes "part of the ongoing mission to disrupt, degrade, and defeat ISIS in order to prevent the terrorist group from conducting external operations and to ensure that ISIS does not seek to take advantage of the current situation to reconstitute in central Syria."
The U.S., "together with allies and partners in the region, will continue to carry out operations to degrade ISIS operational capabilities even during this dynamic period in Syria," CENTCOM added.
"The Biden administration ordering ongoing airstrikes is a disappointing sign that they have no intent on reversing their deadly policy of interventionism."
Responding Monday to the latest attacks on Syria by U.S. forces, Danaka Katovich, national co-director of the peace group CodePink, told Common Dreams: "We condemn the U.S. airstrikes in Syria. The U.S. has sowed chaos in Syria and the entire region for years and the Biden administration ordering ongoing airstrikes is a disappointing sign that they have no intent on reversing their deadly policy of interventionism."
U.S. and coalition forces have killed and maimed at least tens of thousands of Syrians and Iraqis during the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations as part of the anti-ISIS campaign and wider so-called War on Terror.
Commenting on the dearth of coverage of the strikes by the corporate media, prominent Greek leftist Yanis Varoufakis said on social media that "the Western press are waxing lyrical about the new Syria being born—but not a word on the U.S. and Israeli bombs falling from the sky."
"Is there no bottom to the moral void of the Western press?" he added.
Sunday's U.S. strikes came as al-Assad and relatives fled to Russia—where they have been granted asylum—amid the fall of the capital, Damascus, to rebel forces.
Also on Sunday, Israeli forces seized more territory in Syria's Golan Heights and ordered residents of five villages to "stay home and not go out until further notice" if they want to remain safe. Israel conquered the western two-thirds of the Golan Heights in 1967 and has unlawfully occupied it ever since. In 1981, Israel illegally annexed the occupied lands.
"We will not allow any hostile force to establish itself on our border," right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza—said in a video posted on social media.
Numerous Israelis celebrated the seizure on social media, while others cautioned against boasting about what is almost certainly an illegal conquest.
Meanwhile in northern Syria, Turkish airstrikes in support of Syrian National Army rebels—who are battling U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) fighters in and around the Kurdish-controlled city of Manbij—reportedly killed numerous civilians along with dozens of militants.
In what it called a "horrific massacre," the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Monday that 11 civilians from the same family, including women and six children, were killed in a Turkish drone strike on the SDF-controlled village of Al-Mustariha in northern Raqqa Governate.
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