Local Editor
A weekend attack on a funeral gathering in Yemen widely blamed on Saudi-led warplanes was "egregious," a senior US official said on Friday in one of Washington’s strongest condemnations of the incident.
The White House said it was reviewing its support for the 18-month-old Arab campaign against Yemen after the attack on Saturday, which martyred 140 people according to one UN estimate.
The United States had gradually reduced its support for the Saudi-led campaign, in part because of its unhappiness with the hundreds of civilian deaths that had resulted from what rights groups had described as indiscriminate attacks.
A second US official who briefed reporters in a telephone conference call made clear that all US assistance to the Saudi-led coalition was under review. He said this included intelligence, logistics and refueling but did not give details.
Sources in the coalition initially denied any role in Saturday’s attack that martyred mourners at a community hall in Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, but Saudi Arabia later promised an investigation of the "regrettable and painful" incident.
"The strike on the funeral was really, really hard to swallow ... We thought that was particularly egregious," said one of the US officials briefing reporters about US policy toward Yemen.
"We just thought there was absolutely no justification for the strike," the second official said. "It pales next to anything else that had been done ... As a result there was a consensus that we needed to look at the full scope of the assistance that we provide to the coalition that impacts the war, and so that’s what we have under way."
The funeral wake was for the father of the Yemeni Interior Minister, Jalal al-Roweishan, who died of natural causes on Friday. Yemenis say the Roweishan family is widely respected and has good ties with many groups and tribes across Yemen’s political spectrum.
"A number of important figures who are part of the reconciliation process were killed ... That is unfortunate," said the first US official.
Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team
