It happened in Afghanistan in 2002, in Iraq in 2004, again in Afghanistan in 2008, then in Yemen last week. The United States just cannot stop bombing wedding parties. On July 1, 2002, 30 people were killed when a wedding party was bombed in the central Afghan province of Uruzgan. The Pentagon said one of its bombs was “errant”.
On May 19, 2004, the American military conducted a shooting and bombing campaign on a wedding in Mukaradeeb, an Iraqi village close to the Syrian border. The Americans believed it was a safe house for foreign fighters. On July 6, 2008, 47 people were killed when a bridal convoy made up mostly of women and children was making its way to the groom’s house in Nangarhar province, in Afghanistan. The bride survived the first two bombs but was not lucky enough to escape the third.
And last Thursday, 13 civilians were killed when a suspected US drone mistook a Yemeni wedding convoy for an Al Qaida one.
The United States’ semi-regular bombing of civilian targets, and its peculiar pre-occupation with wedding parties, has proven time and again that the US conducts its activities with weak intelligence, risking – and often taking, the lives of hundreds of innocent civilians. If international law, international pressure and the monetary and human cost of such operations are not enough to convince America that drone strikes are a bad option, then perhaps the embarrassment associated with the botched operations should.
While it is important to appreciate the gravity of the threat our region faces from Al Qaida, America cannot continue to treat the Middle East as a real-life video game in which young, trigger-happy soldiers can obliterate entire families at the press of a button thousands of kilometres away. Regional governments who give such operations a green light or its faulty intelligence are equally complicit. The resentment such acts create will haunt America in the region for generations to come.
