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The U.S. military<\/span> 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.\u00a0Conducted during the Trump administration\u2019s campaign of air and naval strikes \u2014 codenamed Operation Rough Rider \u2014 against Yemen\u2019s Houthi government, the strike constituted an indiscriminate attack under international humanitarian law and should be investigated as a war crime, according to Amnesty.<\/p>\n \u201cI was buried under the rubble and after about one hour my brother came and pulled me out,\u201d one of the survivors told Amnesty. \u201cI was bleeding. \u2026 I had a head injury and I lost sight in one eye. \u2026 It is a miracle we survived and got out of that place.\u201d The April 28, 2025, strike on the facility in Sa\u2019ada, in Yemen\u2019s northwest, killed 61 detainees and injured another 56, according to Houthi records.<\/p>\n \u201cThis 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,\u201d said Kristine Beckerle, Amnesty International\u2019s deputy regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, who called on the United States to investigate the attack as a war crime. \u201cThe harrowing testimonies from survivors paint a clear picture of a civilian building, packed with detainees, being bombed without distinction.\u201d<\/p>\n Amnesty International interviewed 15 survivors of the attack on the Sa\u2019ada 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cI saw 25 injured migrants in the Republican Hospital and nine in Al Talh General Hospital. \u2026 They suffered from different fractures and bruises. Some were in critical condition and two had amputated legs,\u201d one witness to the aftermath recalled. \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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<\/a>, the secretive organization that controls the Navy\u2019s SEAL Team 6<\/a>, the Army\u2019s 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\u2019s request.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s questions about the strikes or the attack on the Sa\u2019ada detention center.<\/p>\n An original\u00a0battleground<\/span> in the U.S. war on terror, Yemen is one of many majority-Muslim nations \u2014 from Afghanistan <\/a>and Iraq<\/a>\u00a0to\u00a0Niger<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Somalia<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 ravaged in the forever wars. More than 940,000<\/a> people have died in America\u2019s 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\u00a060 million people<\/a>\u00a0have been displaced, according to Brown University\u2019s Costs of War Project.<\/p>\n The United States has conducted attacks<\/a>\u00a0in Yemen since 2002, ranging from\u00a0commando raids and drone assassinations<\/a>\u00a0to cruise missile attacks and conventional airstrikes. U.S. drone strikes<\/a> there repeatedly killed <\/a>and\u00a0maimed<\/a>\u00a0civilians<\/a>.\u00a0Other Yemenis, including women and children, were\u00a0massacred by Navy SEALs<\/a>\u00a0in a ground raid in 2017.<\/p>\n For years, the U.S. employed a low-profile\u00a0proxy force<\/a>\u00a0to conduct secret counterterrorism missions in Yemen. America also provided weapons<\/a>, combat training<\/a>, and \u201clogistical and intelligence support\u201d for the Saudi Arabia-led coalition\u2019s war in Yemen \u2014 launched in support of Yemeni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who was\u00a0overthrown<\/a>\u00a0by the Iran-backed Houthi rebels \u2014 from\u00a02015 until 2021<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Pentagon said<\/a> 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.\u00a0The disclosure of classified Yemen attack plans in a Signal chat group earlier this year \u2014 that included The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, along with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, then-national security adviser Mike Waltz, and Vice President JD Vance \u2014 revealed that in order to kill a Houthi official on or about March 15, the U.S. military destroyed\u00a0a civilian apartment building. \u201cThe first target \u2014 their top missile guy \u2014 we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend\u2019s building and it\u2019s now collapsed,\u201d wrote Waltz on Signal<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n The airstrike monitoring group Airwars tracked reports of at least 224 civilians in Yemen killed<\/a> 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\u00a052 days\u00a0as the previous\u00a023 years\u00a0of airstrikes and commando raids. The Yemen Data Project<\/a> 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 \u201ccompletely annihilated,\u201d Trump announced<\/a> a cessation of hostilities with the Houthis on May 6.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cAlthough 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 \u2014 especially considering the lack of partner forces on the ground and likely lack of any robust human intelligence network,\u201d Bryant told The Intercept. \u201cThese limiting factors will also apply to the command\u2019s ability to conduct collateral damage analysis and assessment on risk to civilians \u2014 to even properly characterize the civilian environment and pattern of activity in and around these target sets.\u201d He continued, \u201cFrom direct experience, I can say that there is no possible way these processes were effectively carried out on over a thousand targets.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n The attack on the immigrant detention center was one of the most lethal strikes on civilians of Trump\u2019s 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<\/a> The Intercept that Hegseth\u2019s focus on \u201clethality\u201d could lead to \u201cwanton killing and wholesale destruction and disregard for law.\u201d<\/p>\n Bryant \u2014 who served until earlier this year as the senior analyst and adviser on precision warfare, targeting, and civilian harm mitigation at the Pentagon\u2019s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence \u2014 said Hegseth\u2019s anti-CHMR efforts certainly contributed to the deaths. He pointed to \u201can incredible failure in civilian environment characterization that should have been blatantly well known by the prosecuting targeting teams and the command.\u201d Bryant noted, along with Amnesty\u2019s 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. \u201cThese 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,\u201d said Bryant, \u201cbut reflect a failure in carrying out even basic targeting competency and collateral damage mitigation practices under existing DoD targeting doctrine and standards.\u201d<\/p>\n Amnesty found that \u201cU.S. authorities should have known that the building it hit on 28 April 2025 was a migrant detention facility.\u201d\u00a0They 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.<\/p>\n \u201cThe USA does not seem to have complied with its obligation to do everything feasible to verify whether the object attacked was a military objective,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n