The Yemeni Contractor Who Says Americans Tried to Kill Him — A Story That Reframes the War on Terror

A Yemeni lawmaker suing former US military members says they were hired to kill him in 2015. Here is why this case challenges the entire accountability framework for private military operations.

The Anssaf Ali Mayo lawsuit against former US military personnel — reported by NPR — raises accountability questions that the privatisation of military operations has been creating for three decades without the legal system fully resolving them. Mayo, a Yemeni lawmaker who says he was targeted for assassination in 2015 by former US military members operating in a private capacity, is attempting to use American civil courts to achieve accountability for actions that occurred in a foreign war zone conducted by American citizens in private, not official, capacity.

The legal theory involves several elements that each have historical precedent but that in combination create novel territory. The Alien Tort Statute — a 1789 law that allows foreign citizens to sue in US federal courts for violations of international law — has been used successfully in cases involving human rights abuses by corporations and individuals. The specific applicability to former military personnel operating in Yemen in 2015, in the context of a civil war with multiple foreign actor involvement, requires the court to resolve several threshold questions before the merits can be addressed.

Is Yemen's civil war context one in which targeting specific political figures constitutes an international law violation that the ATS covers? Do former US military personnel operating as private contractors retain the US connection that gives federal courts jurisdiction over their actions abroad? And — the evidentiary question that may prove most difficult — can Mayo establish through discoverable evidence that the specific individuals named in his suit were indeed involved in the attempt?

For the broader discussion of accountability for private military operations — which has been ongoing since the expansion of contractor use in Iraq and Afghanistan — the Mayo case provides a potential test of whether civil law accountability is achievable where criminal accountability has been elusive. The answers will matter far beyond this specific case.