(Previous Incident Code: YEM218 )

The Pentagon said “50 [AQAP fighters] were removed from the battlefield” in an airstrike on a training camp being used by more than 70 al Qaeda members.

AFP initially reported 40 people died in the strike however an unnamed Yemeni officials told the agency on March 25 that “the toll from Tuesday’s US strike has risen to 71 dead and 28 wounded.”

Local medics and an unnamed local official told Reuters on March 23 the death toll stood at 50 with around 30 injured. The jets struck “as al Qaeda people stood in line to receive their dinner meal,” the unnamed local official added.

Early reports erroneously said the strike was conducted by jets from the Saudi-led coalition that has been bombing Yemen since March 2015.

This was the sixth US attack in Yemen in 2016. It hit a training camp on Yemen’s south coast – near the city of Mukalla in the eastern province of Hadramout.

AQAP announced the men killed in the strike were not being trained to fight the US. In a statement released on March 30, the group said it was using the camp to train a volunteer militia to fight the Houthis.

This attack came 17 days after US Air Force warplanes killed at least 150 al Shabaab fighters in a strike on a training camp in central Somalia.

“The Somalia and Yemen strikes suggest that the White House has authorized a significant opening of the aperture to target gatherings of suspected terror groups, rather than named individuals who pose imminent threats,” Micah Zenko, a foreign policy expert on the Council on Foreign Relations, told the Guardian.

The mass-casualty attack in Yemen did not constitute a new policy direction, Pentagon spokesman Major Ben Sakrisson told the Guardian. “This strike was conducted consistent with the policy for counter-terrorism direct action announced by the president in May 2013,” he said.

CIA and US military drones and jets have been targeting Yemen since 2002 but always under a veil of secrecy. This was the first time the US Department of Defense has announced it carried out a strike in Yemen.

The US has declared its responsibility for strikes in Yemen in the past but they have always either come via off-the-record comments by unnamed officials to journalists or in US government documents released under freedom of information rules.

We have not recorded a higher death toll from a US attack in Yemen since at least 55 civilians were killed in December 2009 by US Navy cruise missiles. One or two missiles hit a nomadic camp in the small hours of December 17 – each missile was loaded with hundreds of cluster munitions; each bomblet packed with incendiary material.