Recently, news reached Republic of yemen that President Joe Biden opened a classified review into U.S. counterterrorism operations. My immediate response was relief: finally, someone was going to look into the harm drone strikes and raids have done. Finally someone was going to encounter my family members for what they are: innocent people killed by bad intelligence.

My hamlet was the target of former President Donald Trump's first deed equally president—a nighttime raid he chosen a "winning mission" that many agreed was a disaster. Nosotros awoke to gunfire and ran for our lives.

My sister-in-police, Fatim, was shot in the back with her 2-yr-old in her artillery. I will never forget the sight of her body the side by side morning, riddled with bullets, her arms still cradling her son Mohammed.

Mohammed survived, but x other children died that night along with 16 adults. Almost all of them were my family. Those who survived fled the hamlet.

Who can blame them? When death is so close at paw, the terror never leaves you. The drones buzz overhead, and in strike later on strike, my family has been taken. My cousin Ahmed was a farmer, out riding his motorcycle when the drone struck. Days afterwards, his younger brother, Salman, a 14-year-quondam child, was killed while disposed sheep for his female parent while she was in mourning. She was too grief-stricken over Ahmed'south expiry to tend the sheep herself.

Drones don't discriminate between adults and children, or between enemies and allies. My fellow tribesman, Salem, was a colonel in the Yemeni war machine. On September 18, 2018, he visited me in my firm. Hours later on a drone killed him and a boyfriend fellow member of the army—in theory, the USA's partner in the regional conflict trigger-happy Yemen apart.

My family lives in abiding fear of the next strike. The review President Biden proposed does nothing to alleviate this. A review aimed only at returning us to Obama assistants standards is no help at all. Having served as vice president nether former President Barack Obama, Biden must know this.

Yemen
A Yemeni boy walks past a mural depicting a U.Due south. drone that says, "Why did y'all impale my family?" on Dec 13, 2013, in the capital Sanaa. MOHAMMED HUWAIS/AFP via Getty Images

In Dec 2013, the Obama assistants launched hellfire missiles at my uncle'due south wedding in Bayda province. Weddings in Yemen are not and so unlike from those in the USA: joyous occasions, jubilant the wedlock of two families. The thought that this gathering was a threat to anyone, much less Americans thousands of miles away, is painfully cool.

I survived, but 12 others didn't. The bride and groom were injured merely survived. What should have been my uncle's happiest mean solar day was instead filled with carnage. This was my get-go encounter with America and its mortiferous drone program.

A review that returns u.s.a. to the Obama era wouldn't reassure me that the U.S. has learned from its mistakes, or that it understands how its intelligence is poor. Tightening targeting standards and seeking to put the blame on Trump would just show that the Biden assistants is unwilling to reckon with the damage caused by this surreptitious assassination program that has killed hundreds of innocent men, women and children.

A calendar month ago, my family filed accommodate before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, asking it to grant precautionary measures to protect united states from further attack. Our request is simple: Publish the targeting guidance and open up an independent, impartial and transparent investigation into the strikes and raid that killed my family. Information technology is the only thing that volition cease the side by side strike from killing me or another member of my family unit.

If President Biden is serious nigh reviewing the drone program, he tin start hither. He tin can recognize that more than than a decade after Obama made the drone his weapon of choice, it's time for a key reset, rather than a backward pace.

Until then, my family unit and I will live in fear of the drones in Republic of yemen's heaven: dark shadows that swallow up mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters and children.

America is the invisible controller who never answers the questions nosotros ask: Why? And why me?

Mohammed al-Ameri is a Yemeni tribesman seeking protection from U.S. drone strikes in a first-of-its-kind petition to the Inter-American Commission on Man Rights.

The views expressed in this article are the writer'south own.