Yemen's Ministry of Defense complex in Sanaa was regarded as one of the country's most secure facilities. It housed the presidential office, the office of the minister of defense, and the military chief of staff. A month before the attack, two army vehicles had gone missing from unit inventory - a detail that mattered when, on 5 December, a vehicle convoy approached the main gate. Two weeks earlier, the compound's security chief had been replaced. A carefully prepared car bomb detonated at the gate, shaking buildings as far as the Bab al-Yemen district and destroying an armored military vehicle along with three other cars. Yemeni forces trapped the attackers near the gate before they could reach the defense ministry building, but the gunmen fell back into the hospital that was part of the compound.

Hospitals, under international humanitarian law, are supposed to be untouchable. The gunmen who forced their way inside this one killed soldiers, doctors, nurses, and patients indiscriminately. They walked the corridors. They entered the wards. Fifty-two people died across the whole assault; of 167 wounded, most were hospital staff and patients rather than ministry officials. Two workers from Germany's aid agency GIZ were among the dead. Some of the Filipino hospital workers survived by lying motionless on the floor and playing dead while the gunmen moved through the building. The fighting continued as security forces fought inside the compound; five attackers were ultimately killed by Yemeni commandos, with one commando also killed. Several sources said sporadic combat continued into the next day.

CCTV footage of the hospital killings was broadcast across Yemen within days. The reaction was immediate and furious - even some AQAP sympathizers condemned the attack, and the group's social media accounts initially denied the footage was real. Yemen Post editor-in-chief Hakim Almasmari said the broadcast did a great deal of damage to the group's image among ordinary Yemenis who may have been ambivalent about the group's goals. On 21 December, AQAP released a video. Senior leader Qasim al-Raymi publicly apologized. He said the operational plan had ordered the gunmen not to attack the hospital or the mosque inside the compound - but one gunman had done so anyway. We confess to this mistake, the group said. Raymi emphasized, however, that AQAP was continuing with our jihad, and defended the Ministry of Defense itself as a legitimate target because, he claimed, it housed drone control rooms and American military advisers.

The Philippine government responded within days by banning its citizens from traveling to work in Yemen, and by offering to repatriate the 1,500 to 2,000 Filipinos already employed there at government expense. Yemen's President Hadi declared the Filipino victims martyrs, the same designation given to the Yemeni dead. Twelve of the fifty-two were foreign - Filipino, German, and others - contracted into a hospital their families had expected to be the safest place they could work. The rest were Yemeni doctors, nurses, patients, soldiers, and administrative staff: people who had arrived at their jobs or their medical appointments that morning without any reason to think they might not leave. Families buried them in the following days while the Westgate mall attack in Kenya earlier that year hung in the background as a reference point - British Ambassador Jane Marriott specifically invoked it, writing of a collective breath of horror at the CCTV footage.

Four gunmen were captured at the compound on the day of the attack. By 8 December, Yemeni security had arrested two more AQAP members, including the commander of the cell and the person assigned to report its success. Three Saudis later arrested in Amran were charged with illegally entering the country to join AQAP. On 12 December, foreign embassies across Sanaa - including the UN office - closed their doors after Yemeni authorities warned of possible attacks. On the same day, a US drone strike hit a convoy in al-Bayda Governorate that the US identified as an AQAP target; Yemeni security officials said the strike had actually hit civilians heading to a wedding party. That strike is the subject of a separate article, and its trajectory, at least, became linked to the Ministry of Defense attack - Yemeni officials suggested the December 12 Radda strike had been partly a response to the MoD assault.

The lasting image of the attack was not the rubble at the gate or the list of the dead. It was the CCTV footage. The sight of gunmen in a hospital shooting medical staff and patients cut through the abstraction of Yemen's conflict in a way few attacks before it had managed. Even organizations sympathetic to AQAP's political grievances could not defend the footage. That the group eventually apologized - a rare and specific rhetorical act from an organization accustomed to claiming its violence as righteous - was perhaps the most honest assessment anyone rendered of what had happened that day: that fifty-two people had been killed, and that some of that killing, by any standard including the attackers' own, had been indefensible.