2013 Radda airstrike

On December 12, 2013, a drone operated by Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), an elite United States military division, launched an airstrike on a convoy of vehicles Aqabat Zaj, an area near the city of Radda in al-Bayda Governorate, Yemen. The convoy was a wedding procession transporting the bride to the village of the groom. As it stopped for a vehicle with a flat tire, four missiles were launched at a Toyota Hilux carrying three people, who had escaped before the missiles struck. Four surrounding vehicles were additionally damaged.

The strike killed 12 men and injured 15 other people, six of them seriously. All were among the families of the bride and groom, and none were listed by local authorities as members of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the purported target of the strike. The US claimed it had conducted two investigations, one by the military and another by the federal government, both of which determined that no civilians had died. Later reports indicated internal doubts at the results, with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) believing that the strike had likely caused civilian casualties. The target of the operation according to American officials, who successfully escaped from the Hilux, was AQAP commander Shawqi Ali Ahmad al-Badani, the ringleader of a plot to attack a US diplomatic mission earlier in August. Witnesses and survivors rejected any linkage to him or AQAP, though some reports detail interviews in which they attest to another AQAP member, Nasser al-Hotami, being present and escaping the targeted vehicle.

The strikes provoked public outrage in Yemen and criticism from international organizations such as the United Nations and Amnesty International. The Yemeni government initially backed the US position on the strike, but later apologized for it and engaged in a tribal compensation process which allocated over $1 million to the families of the victims, which analysts believed was funded by the US. The Yemeni parliament passed a non-binding bill to ban drone strikes. The Barack Obama administration suspended JSOC activities in Yemen for the next year.