Small Wars Journal

Saudi Role in Devastating Yemen War Comes Under New Scrutiny After Khashoggi Killing

Thu, 11/01/2018 - 2:40am

Saudi Role in Devastating Yemen War Comes Under New Scrutiny After Khashoggi Killing by Sudarsan Raghavan – Washington Post

In Saudi Arabia’s version of its war in neighboring Yemen, the Saudi-led coalition carefully chooses targets for its airstrikes. The rapidly rising civilian death counts reported by the United Nations and humanitarian groups are highly exaggerated. So are the accounts of an impending famine caused by war. And the coalition is in no way interfering with humanitarian aid or with assistance to Yemen’s beleaguered economy.

But now that narrative is wearing thin, critics say.

The killing in Istanbul of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi on Oct. 2 by Saudi agents — and Saudi Arabia’s repeated initial denials of any knowledge of his fate — is raising new concerns about the Saudi account of how the kingdom is waging its military campaign in Yemen.

“It’s thrown open the doors of doubt to the entire Saudi version of the war in Yemen,” said Elisabeth Kendall, a Yemen scholar at Oxford University. “It is no longer able to just tell the world what it wants it to think without the world now being suspicious and skeptical.”

As doubts multiply, they are raising questions anew about whether the Trump administration can trust what Saudi Arabia is telling U.S. officials about its conduct of the war in Yemen, especially its role in civilian casualties and human rights violations…

Read on.