If you live in Yemen, the golden rule is to expect anything any time. That, however, does not include expecting your hometown village — one of the most peaceful and beautiful places in Yemen — to be bombed. The peacefulness of such a place makes you believe that no one has ever heard of it, let alone that it is bombed by a US drone strike at night.

That, however, is the reason that I received many messages from villagers on my two cell phones last night. They informed and asked me about a strike that had just taken place, and targeted a man named Hammed al-Masea Meftah, also known as Hammed al-Radmi — a name I wasn't familiar with as I have been away from the village over the last few years and have only returned for short visits once a year.

I was stunned by both the news of the drones and the fact that someone in Wessab, the Yemeni capital of misery with its beautiful mountains no one from outside remembers, had connections with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). The last time high-level governmental officials visited the village was in 2003, when the governor of the province attended an election rally and engaged in electoral fraud to help the ruling party candidate win.

The strike was the first in over three months and the first in the entire Dhammar province, which Wessab is part of. In the past, I had celebrated this respite, but it seems that the unwise US policy of drone strikes in Yemen has resumed, and in my village this time.