US soldier killed in Yemen: Houthis
Citing evidence on the ground, Yemen’s Houthi Ansarullah movement says a US trooper has been killed in the war-battered country.
The movement’s news outlet, ansarullah.com, said on Friday that Yemen’s ‘War Media’ had published pictures proving American presence in the Arab country.
The pictures show an American passport and a birth certificate (seen below) belonging to Tyler Nathaniel Caldwell from Florida.
It is not clear under what circumstances the US soldier died in Yemen.
Back in May, Yemen’s al-Masirah television channel reported that US Special Forces had arrived in Yemen to fight alongside Emirati forces in alleged operations against al-Qaeda militants in the country’s south.
It cited Tom Bawman, the National Public Radio’s Pentagon reporter, as saying that the troops had arrived in Yemen on April 25.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE last year provided financial and military support to militants to confront Houthis and the Yemeni army units that had taken over the security of the country after Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi resigned as Yemen’s president.
The US’s deployment of troops came a year after the withdrawal of its forces from Yemen.
On March 21, 2015, the US evacuated its remaining forces out of al-Anad airbase in southern Yemen “due to the deteriorating security situation” a day after al-Qaeda captured the nearby city of al-Houta.
Al-Qaeda has, meanwhile, become stronger in Yemen by taking advantage of the chaos created by the Saudi war on the country, which started in March 2015.
Riyadh launched the war to reinstate Hadi, who is a staunch ally of Riyadh. About 10,000 people have been killed in the Saudi aggression.
Earlier in July, The Washington Post reported that the US had been playing a “quiet but lethal role” in Yemen through its persisting weapons sales to the Saudi regime, including globally-banned cluster bombs.
