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 report 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 government, 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 told 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 28, 2025, strike on the facility in Sa’ada, in Yemen’s northwest, killed 61 detainees and injured another 56, 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,” said 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 15 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 report 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 15 survivors with whom Amnesty International spoke, 14 suffered significant injuries, including lost limbs, serious nerve damage, and head, spine, and chest trauma. Two of the 15 had their legs amputated, one had one of his hands amputated, and one lost one of his eyes.
“I saw 25 injured migrants in the Republican Hospital and nine in Al Talh General Hospital. … They suffered from different fractures and bruises. Some 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 Team 6, 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 investigating, takes reports of civilian harm seriously, and assesses them thoroughly. JSOC failed to respond to Amnesty’s request.
Four current and former U.S. officials told 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 many majority-Muslim nations — from Afghanistan and Iraq to Niger and Somalia — ravaged in the forever wars. More than 940,000 people have died in America’s post-9/11 conflicts due to direct violence, almost 4 million have died indirectly from causes like food insecurity and battered infrastructure, and as many as 60 million people have been displaced, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project.
The United States has conducted attacks in Yemen since 2002, 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 2017.
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 support” for the Saudi Arabia-led coalition’s war in Yemen — launched in support of Yemeni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who was overthrown by the Iran-backed Houthi rebels — from 2015 until 2021.
The Pentagon said it conducted strikes on more than 1,000 targets in Yemen between March 15 and April 29, 2025, 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 security adviser Mike Waltz, and Vice President JD Vance — revealed that in order to kill a Houthi official on or about March 15, 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 224 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 2002, meaning that almost as many civilians were reportedly killed in 52 days as the previous 23 years of airstrikes and commando raids. The Yemen Data Project put the death toll at 238 civilians, at a minimum, and another 467 civilians injured. After the U.S. burned through $1 billion and failed to even achieve air superiority in Yemen, Trump ended the stalemate. Despite having vowed the Houthis would be “completely annihilated,” Trump announced a cessation of hostilities with the Houthis on May 6.
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, said that the large number of strikes in such a short time during Operation Rough Rider stretched the capacity 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 potential targets in any theatre or active conflict zone, the ability to conduct updated intelligence vetting in such a short period of time for so many targets is implausible — especially considering the lack of partner forces on the ground and likely lack of any robust human intelligence network,” Bryant told The Intercept. “These limiting factors will also apply to the command’s ability to conduct collateral damage analysis and assessment on risk to civilians — to even properly characterize the civilian environment and pattern of activity in and around these target sets.” He continued, “From direct experience, I can say that there is no possible way these processes were effectively carried out on over a thousand targets.”
The attack on the immigrant detention center was one of the most lethal strikes on civilians of Trump’s 2025 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 told 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 — said Hegseth’s anti-CHMR efforts certainly contributed to the deaths. He pointed to “an incredible failure in civilian environment characterization that should have been blatantly well known by the prosecuting targeting teams and the command.” Bryant noted, along with Amnesty’s report, 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 2022 that killed more than 90 detainees. “These failures not only reflect the rapid dismantling at the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response program and architecture that the DoD had been building up until the Trump administration,” said 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 found that “U.S. authorities should have known that the building it hit on 28 April 2025 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 told 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 report. Amnesty called on the Pentagon to investigate the attack as a war crime and promptly make the results of the inquiry public. The group also called on the Pentagon to provide reparations to victims or their families.
Four current and former U.S. officials told The Intercept that JSOC conducted strikes in Yemen during Operation Rough Rider. One of the former defense officials who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity said 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 said.
The public generally thinks of JSOC’s special mission units as small teams conducting raids like the 2011 SEAL Team 6 mission that killed Osama bin Laden; the 2015 killing of Islamic State oil and gas “minister” Abu Sayyaf by Delta Force commandos; the 2017 SEAL Team 6 massacre of civilians in Yemen; and a 2019 massacre of North Korean civilians by members of SEAL Team 6. But elite operators have long been central to the U.S. military’s most consequential airstrikes. A JSOC unit, Task Force 48-4, carried out lethal airstrikes in Yemen and Somalia in the early 2010s. Later in the decade, Task Force 111, 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 2021 New York Times investigation of the air war in Iraq and Syria found it was plagued by flawed intelligence and imprecise targeting and led to the deaths of thousands of civilians, many of them children. A 2022 RAND report on the U.S. battle to retake Raqqa, Syria, from ISIS found “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 1,457 civilians were killed in the anti-ISIS campaign, Airwars found that the number could be as high as 13,340.
Recently, 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 said 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 some 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 told The Intercept. “These cases are still ongoing and under review.”
A 2020 study of post-9/11 civilian casualty incidents found most have gone uninvestigated. When they do come under official scrutiny, American military witnesses are interviewed while civilians — victims, 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 report. “SOCOM doesn’t have anything for you on this,” Col. Allie Weiskopf, the command’s director of public affairs, told The Intercept, in response to questions about JSOC’s role.
Bryant believed that the attack was most 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 investigation and response, and transparency both to the U.S. public and to U.S. policy makers,” he said. “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 told 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 egregious U.S. air strike in many years, since at least the campaign against ISIS,” said Brian Castner, the head of crisis research with Amnesty International’s Crisis Response Program. “If CENTCOM takes this seriously, as they said they do, they need to do a transparent investigation and provide compensation to the victims.”
