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Incident Date
Location
Geolocation
Geolocation
Airwars Assessment
(Previous Incident Code: YEMT029)
Some sources suggested that US naval artillery and possibly airstrikes targeted the Mojan and Mudiyah areas of Abyan governorate early on the morning of March 3rd. There were no known reports of civilian harm.
According to Xinhua, an anonymous Yemeni military official reported that a “heavy navy bombardment” had taken place in the morning, alongside airstrikes. One Twitter source also reported US naval action in the area.
A number of news agencies reported that, according to Reuters, US ground forces clashed with AQAP militants in the Mojan area of Abyan governorate, alongside reported air strikes, on the morning of March 3rd – though this was edited out of Reuters’ report hours after posting. As only Reuters reported ground clashes on Friday 3rd March in Mojan, and appeared to later retract this, it is likely that this report refers instead to an earlier alleged US ground action at dawn on March 2nd, detailed in the USYEMTr015 and USYEMTr016 entries.
This event took place amid a dramatic intensification of US operations against AQAP in March 2017. On March 3rd, Pentagon spokesman Captain Jeff Davies announced that more than thirty strikes had been conducted since March 2nd in Yemen. On the same day, Associated Press reported that Yemeni officials and residents said that the US had conducted “dozens of airstrikes on al-Qaida targets in Yemen overnight and in the past 48 hours in one of the lengthiest, sustained operations inside this conflict-torn Arab country”.
A US military intelligence source told NBC News that the strikes beginning March 2nd were “part of ‘new directives’ to aggressively pursue the Dhahab and Qayfa clans”.
Key Information
Geolocation Notes
Reports of the incident mention the village of Mojan (موجان), for which the coordinates are: 13.425116, 46.171369. Due to limited satellite imagery and information available to Airwars, we were unable to verify the location further.