Trump’s Yemen Strike Killed 61 Immigrants and No Combatants

The U S military attacked an immigrant detention center in Yemen earlier this year killing and injuring dozens of Ethiopian civilians according to a new review by Amnesty International shared with The Intercept Conducted during the Trump administration s campaign of air and naval strikes codenamed Operation Rough Rider against Yemen s Houthi cabinet the strike constituted an indiscriminate attack under international humanitarian law and should be investigated as a war crime according to Amnesty I was buried under the rubble and after about one hour my brother came and pulled me out one of the survivors communicated Amnesty I was bleeding I had a head injury and I lost sight in one eye It is a miracle we survived and got out of that place The April strike on the facility in Sa ada in Yemen s northwest killed detainees and injured another according to Houthi records This was a lethal failure by the U S to comply with one of its core obligations under international humanitarian law to do everything feasible to verify whether the object attacked was a military objective mentioned Kristine Beckerle Amnesty International s deputy regional director for the Middle East and North Africa who called on the United States to investigate the attack as a war crime The harrowing testimonies from survivors paint a clear picture of a civilian building packed with detainees being bombed without distinction Amnesty International interviewed survivors of the attack on the Sa ada detention center and people who visited it and two nearby hospitals and their morgues in the immediate aftermath of the strike Their names are withheld from the document to protect them from reprisal Amnesty s researchers also analyzed satellite imagery and video footage including scenes showing bodies strewn across the compound rescuers pulling badly wounded survivors from rubble and the injured immigrants in hospitals Of the survivors with whom Amnesty International spoke suffered substantial injuries including lost limbs serious nerve damage and head spine and chest trauma Two of the had their legs amputated one had one of his hands amputated and one lost one of his eyes I saw injured foreigners in the Republican Hospital and nine in Al Talh General Hospital They suffered from different fractures and bruises Various were in critical condition and two had amputated legs one witness to the aftermath recalled The morgue in the Republican Hospital was overwhelmed and there was no place left for tens of corpses that were still left outside the morgue for the second day Amnesty International requested information about the strikes from Central Command which overseas military operations in the Middle East as well as from Joint Special Operations Command the secretive organization that controls the Navy s SEAL Organization the Army s Delta Force and other elite special mission units Central Command issued a boilerplate response stating that it is in the process of analyzing takes reports of civilian harm seriously and assesses them thoroughly JSOC failed to respond to Amnesty s request Four current and former U S agents notified The Intercept that JSOC which operates under Special Operations Command was responsible for strikes in Yemen during Operation Rough Rider SOCOM did not answer any of The Intercept s questions about the strikes or the attack on the Sa ada detention center An original battleground in the U S war on terror Yemen is one of a large number of majority-Muslim nations from Afghanistan and Iraq to Niger and Somalia ravaged in the forever wars More than people have died in America s post- conflicts due to direct violence almost million have died indirectly from causes like food insecurity and battered infrastructure and as multiple as million people have been displaced according to Brown University s Costs of War Project The United States has conducted attacks in Yemen since ranging from commando raids and drone assassinations to cruise missile attacks and conventional airstrikes U S drone strikes there repeatedly killed and maimed civilians Other Yemenis including women and children were massacred by Navy SEALs in a ground raid in For years the U S employed a low-profile proxy force to conduct secret counterterrorism missions in Yemen America also provided weapons combat training and logistical and intelligence sponsorship for the Saudi Arabia-led coalition s war in Yemen launched in encouragement of Yemeni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi who was overthrown by the Iran-backed Houthi rebels from until Related The Real Outrage About the Yemen Signal Group Is That It Called for Attack on Civilian Home The Pentagon disclosed it conducted strikes on more than targets in Yemen between March and April with notable attacks on civilians bookending the campaign The disclosure of classified Yemen attack plans in a Signal chat group earlier this year that included The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg along with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth then-national safety adviser Mike Waltz and Vice President JD Vance revealed that in order to kill a Houthi official on or about March the U S military destroyed a civilian apartment building The first target their top missile guy we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend s building and it s now collapsed wrote Waltz on Signal The airstrike monitoring group Airwars tracked reports of at least civilians in Yemen killed by U S airstrikes during Operation Rough Rider This nearly doubled the civilian casualty toll in Yemen from U S attacks since meaning that almost as countless civilians were reportedly killed in days as the previous years of airstrikes and commando raids The Yemen Facts Project put the death toll at civilians at a minimum and another civilians injured After the U S burned through billion and failed to even achieve air superiority in Yemen Trump ended the stalemate Despite having vowed the Houthis would be comprehensively annihilated Trump declared a cessation of hostilities with the Houthis on May Wes Bryant a former Pentagon official who previously worked as a Special Operations joint terminal attack controller and called in thousands of strikes against the Islamic State and other terrorist groups across the greater Middle East commented that the large number of strikes in such a short time during Operation Rough Rider stretched the maximum for U S forces to conduct adequate target vetting collateral damage analysis and civilian harm mitigation processes Although the U S military continuously targets and databases promising targets in any theatre or developing conflict zone the ability to conduct updated intelligence vetting in such a short period of time for so multiple targets is implausible especially considering the lack of partner forces on the ground and likely lack of any robust human intelligence configuration Bryant advised The Intercept These limiting factors will also apply to the command s ability to conduct collateral damage analysis and assessment on danger to civilians to even properly characterize the civilian ecosystem and pattern of activity in and around these target sets He continued From direct experience I can say that there is no feasible way these processes were effectively carried out on over a thousand targets The attack on the immigrant detention center was one of the the majority lethal strikes on civilians of Trump s Yemen campaign according to Airwars It notably came as the Trump administration was dismantling its Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response or CHMR efforts as it sought to eliminate or downsize offices programs and positions focused on preventing civilian casualties during U S combat operations Just days before the attack on the migrant detention facility one Pentagon official reported The Intercept that Hegseth s focus on lethality could lead to wanton killing and wholesale destruction and disregard for law Bryant who served until earlier this year as the senior analyst and adviser on precision warfare targeting and civilian harm mitigation at the Pentagon s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence disclosed Hegseth s anti-CHMR efforts certainly contributed to the deaths He pointed to an incredible failure in civilian context characterization that should have been blatantly well known by the prosecuting targeting teams and the command Bryant noted along with Amnesty s document that the U S should have had detailed knowledge of the facility because the Saudi-led coalition using U S -made munitions carried out an airstrike on another detention facility within the same prison compound in that killed more than detainees These failures not only reflect the rapid dismantling at the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response undertaking and architecture that the DoD had been building up until the Trump administration commented Bryant but reflect a failure in carrying out even basic targeting competency and collateral damage mitigation practices under existing DoD targeting doctrine and standards Amnesty located that U S government should have known that the building it hit on April was a migrant detention facility They noted that the facility had been used for years to detain immigrants and was regularly visited by the International Committee of the Red Cross Amnesty further noted that it could find no evidence that the detention center was a military objective or that it contained any military objectives Survivors notified Amnesty International that throughout their time in detention they were able to see everyone who was present in the building and never saw any Houthi fighters The USA does not seem to have complied with its obligation to do everything feasible to verify whether the object attacked was a military objective reads the account Amnesty called on the Pentagon to investigate the attack as a war crime and promptly make the results of the inquiry masses The group also called on the Pentagon to provide reparations to casualties or their families Four current and former U S officers informed The Intercept that JSOC conducted strikes in Yemen during Operation Rough Rider One of the former defense personnel who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity stated that CENTCOM and JSOC were both previously responsible for attacks in Yemen with CENTCOM acting as the overarching authority and JSOC given the prerogative of striking specific targets Prior to this operation however JSOC was given the primary authority for strikes in the region the official noted The citizens generally thinks of JSOC s special mission units as small teams conducting raids like the SEAL Crew mission that killed Osama bin Laden the killing of Islamic State oil and gas minister Abu Sayyaf by Delta Force commandos the SEAL Band massacre of civilians in Yemen and a massacre of North Korean civilians by members of SEAL Association But elite operators have long been central to the U S military s greater part consequential airstrikes A JSOC unit Task Force - carried out lethal airstrikes in Yemen and Somalia in the early s Later in the decade Task Force a JSOC-led unit was responsible for drone attacks in Somalia Libya and Yemen At the same time Delta Force commandos as part of a strike cell known as Talon Anvil were central to the air war against the Islamic State in Syria A New York Times examination of the air war in Iraq and Syria revealed it was plagued by flawed intelligence and imprecise targeting and led to the deaths of thousands of civilians numerous of them children A RAND description on the U S battle to retake Raqqa Syria from ISIS revealed military leaders too often lacked a complete picture of conditions on the ground too often waved off reports of civilian casualties and too rarely learned any lessons from strikes gone wrong While the U S estimated civilians were killed in the anti-ISIS campaign Airwars revealed that the number could be as high as In the past few days elite Special Operations forces have been responsible for strikes on boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean that have killed dozens of civilians It is very dangerous and telling of what may be to come especially taken together with the Iran strikes the narcoterrorism campaign and the deployment of the U S military domestically Amnesty International received a brief response from CENTCOM on the same day in August that it submitted a detailed request for information about the attack on the detention center in Yemen CENTCOM declared it was still assessing all reports of civilian harm resulting from operations during that time period and that it took all such reports seriously and assessed them thoroughly On Monday a defense official sent boilerplate language with specific of the exact same phrasing to The Intercept CENTCOM is assessing all reports of civilian harm resulting from operations during that time period the official communicated The Intercept These cases are still ongoing and under review A examination of post- civilian casualty incidents unveiled greater part have gone uninvestigated When they do come under official scrutiny American military bystanders are interviewed while civilians sufferers survivors and their family members are almost totally ignored severely compromising the effectiveness of investigations according to the Center for Civilians in Conflict and Columbia Law School s Human Rights Institute Amnesty International did not receive a response from JSOC prior to publication of the analysis SOCOM doesn t have anything for you on this Col Allie Weiskopf the command s director of population affairs explained The Intercept in response to questions about JSOC s role Related Pete Hegseth Is Gutting Pentagon Programs That Reduce Civilian Casualties Bryant supposed that the attack was the greater part likely a complete targeting mistake and called out Hegseth for a complete lack of transparency and accountability From my perspective the Yemen campaign was at the very least a gross devolution from U S best practices in targeting civilian harm mitigation civilian harm scrutiny and response and transparency both to the U S society and to U S framework makers he declared It is very dangerous and telling of what may be to come especially taken together with the Iran strikes the narcoterrorism campaign and the deployment of the U S military domestically CENTCOM described The Intercept that it adheres to the law of war and international humanitarian law in all its operations Any way you look at it whether from the scale of civilian harm or that the U S should have known this was not a military target this is the most of egregious U S air strike in several years since at least the campaign against ISIS disclosed Brian Castner the head of emergency research with Amnesty International s Problem Response Initiative If CENTCOM takes this seriously as they stated they do they need to do a transparent examination and provide compensation to the casualties The post Trump s Yemen Strike Killed Immigrants and No Combatants appeared first on The Intercept