The United States Should Provide a Detailed Accounting of its Operations in Yemen

Last month, the New York Times published the Biden Administration’s October 2022 memorandum outlining new rules for counterterrorism operations outside “areas of active hostilities” and a national security memo describing its international counterterrorism strategy. The Times also cited a senior administration official who confirmed that the U.S. government currently only considers two countries to be areas of active hostilities – Syria and Iraq.

Understandably, much of the commentary following the Times story focused on U.S. strikes in Somalia. Although U.S. strikes in Somalia have declined from their peak under the Trump administration, the pace of strikes appears to be escalating compared to the beginning of the Biden administration. Moreover, the U.S. has labeled almost all of its operations under Biden as collective self-defense – a type of strike that falls under an exception in the recently released rules. However, far less attention has been placed on whether the United States is conducting strikes in Yemen, and if so, for what purpose.

The lack of attention regarding Yemen exists despite evidence suggesting there have been U.S. strikes in the country this year. On January 30, 2023, a mystery drone strike in Marib killed three suspected Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) militants. The strike appeared to have used a Hellfire R9X missile, a weapon that releases blades in place of explosive material and which is used by the United States to minimize casualties when targeting high value targets. Then on February 26, a drone strike in Marib killed Hamad Hammoud Al-Tamimi, who the United Nations Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team describes as “among the top AQAP leaders.” Notably these strikes hit al-Qaeda’s leadership cadre, with the UN team writing, “AQAP incurred serious leadership losses in their sharia, media and improvised explosive device production cadres.”

That a wide variety of media alleged these strikes were American, the likely use of a specialized technology in the January strike, and the targeting of the leadership cadre, all bolster the case that these were U.S. strikes - although the U.S. government has not acknowledged conducting the strikes, and CENTCOM denies that it conducted them.

It is possible that the U.S. is waging an even larger campaign of strikes extending far beyond the January and February strikes that killed senior al-Qaeda leaders. Airwars, using a broad inclusion criteria and relying heavily upon local Arabic social media and local journalism, records 12 alleged U.S. strikes between 2021 and June 22, 2023.

Yet, according to the Times report, the U.S. does not currently consider Yemen an area of active hostilities. It is likely that this change dates to the beginning of the Biden administration. As one of the authors of this piece noted in October 2022 (around the time the recently released rules were signed), the Department of Defense’s “Annual Report on Civilian Casualties in Connection With United States Military Operations in 2021” did not include Yemen as “a declared theater of active armed conflict,” only listing Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and Syria. In contrast, the department’s report covering 2020, did list Yemen as a “a declared theater of active armed conflict” for the purpose of the report.

Yemen’s exclusion from the list of areas of active armed combat and the promulgation of tightened rules regarding strikes raise questions about allegations of large numbers of direct U.S. strikes. It would be expected given the Biden administration’s tightened rules that any U.S. strikes would likely target senior leaders or occur in the context of a specific threat. In addition, the United States has not officially confirmed a strike in Yemen since 2020. Nor has any press report since 2020 cited American officials as anonymously confirming a strike.

However, the U.S. silence does not prove the absence of a larger campaign, as the United States has a history of maintaining secrecy or even simply lying about conducting strikes in Yemen. And the Somalia case illustrates that exceptions can sometimes allow for large numbers of strikes outside areas of active hostilities.

While skepticism surrounding the United States’ silence and denial is merited, there can also be a tendency to over-attribute strikes to the U.S. As Vivian Salama, Wall Street Journal national security reporter and former AP Bureau Chief in Baghdad, noted regarding her time reporting in Yemen, “people ... even if it was the Yemeni government bombing them, they still blamed American planes. They would constantly just refer to the planes as American planes.”

Conditions in Yemen further complicate efforts to reliably attribute and track U.S. strikes. Yemeni journalists face significant security threats from multiple parties to the conflict. Many media outlets closed, and much of what remains is “highly polarized.” Foreign journalists struggle to get access, and even just entering the country often requires permission from multiple sides of the civil war.

Moreover, there are a wide range of belligerents with drones and other capabilities to conduct strikes active in Yemen. The United Arab Emirates (UAE), for example, is capable of conducting drone strikes. In 2022, the Turkish defense firm Baykar reportedly delivered 20 of its TB2 drones to the Emirates. The UAE also possesses armed Chinese Wing Loong drones, and has reportedly conducted strikes in a variety of contexts in Yemen and elsewhere including in Libya.

Disentangling whether a strike was carried out by the United States or the Emiratis can be a challenge given the two countries have closely cooperated. Under the Obama and Trump administrations, the United States adopted an approach that supported and relied upon the UAE as a partner while carrying out direct U.S. strikes for particularly important targets or objectives. This approach played a significant role in pushing al-Qaeda out of the Yemeni port city of Mukalla. After reaching an unprecedented peak in 2017, the number of U.S. strikes declined over the remainder of the Trump administration.

A review of Airwars’ data illustrates the blurred line in local reporting between allegations of U.S. and Emirati strikes. For example, Airwars records a “likely strike” on November 30, 2022, listing only “US Forces” as the suspected attacker. Airwars writes, “The majority of the sources attributed the strikes to American drones to varying degrees of certainty, with only Yemen Days referring to the ‘high precision’ drone strikes as being with American or Emirati.” Yet, in addition to the Yemen Days article, which includes attributions potentially both to the U.S. and the UAE, the Arabic report from Al-Khabar al-Yemeni appears to attribute the strike to the United Arab Emirates. Meanwhile the listed English report from the same site attributes the strikes solely to the United States, but does so only by citing the Yemen Press Agency’s report.

Nor are the Emiratis the only source of potential attribution issues. Airwars records an alleged U.S. strike on March 16, 2021. Airwars codes this strike as “contested” - a classification meaning there are “competing claims of responsibility” - noting reports the strike might have been a Houthi ballistic missile strike. Even so, Airwars writes, “most sources blamed a US drone for the attack,” relying upon an Al Jazeera report for the possibility of a ballistic missile strike.

However, multiple major sources not cited by Airwars appear to support the attribution to a Houthi ballistic missile rather than a U.S. drone. Yemeni governmental sources attribute the incident to a Houthi missile, as does Human Rights Watch. A Civilian Impact Monitoring Project report casts further doubt on claims of a U.S. drone strike. Although the project does not attribute responsibility to armed parties for the incidents it examines, it describes a March 16 incident matching Airwars’ description as a case of “shellfire” rather than listing it as an air or drone strike. A Yemeni Archive investigation also points to evidence suggesting, though not conclusively demonstrating, that the strike was a Houthi missile.

In contrast, of the ten sources listed in Airwars’ sources box for the strike, eight link to social media posts. Only two sources link to a news article. Those two both resolve to “SABA.ye,” which is a state news site seized by the Houthis early in the latest bout of civil war and which remains “Houthi-run.” The site tagged the incident under a feed named “The U.S.-Saudi Aggression.” Indeed, the alternate SABA platform that continued as state news outside Houthi control attributed the incident to a Houthi strike.

March 16, 2021 also came in the midst of a week in which Marib was one of the “focal points” of clashes between Houthi and other forces. In contrast, allegations regarding a U.S. strike provide little clarity as to who the U.S. might have been targeting.

On the other hand, the New York Times’ report relying on data from the Long War Journal suggests the last strike in Yemen occurred in 2020. Despite strong reason to suspect a U.S. role in the aforementioned January and February 2023 strikes, they go unmentioned in the report.

In addition, the Long War Journal, which the Times relies upon, likely undercounts the number of U.S. strikes in Yemen in 2020 — seemingly only counting the strike that killed AQAP leader Qasim al-Raymi in January 2020. Yet the New York Times’ own reporting suggests there was at least one more CIA strike in 2020 against Abdullah al-Maliki, an AQAP operative who allegedly coordinated the deadly attack in Pensacola, Florida. In May 2020, the Times reported that “A senior U.S. official said Mr. al-Maliki was killed in a C.I.A. drone strike in Yemen in the past week or so.” A press statement by FBI Director Christopher Wray and then-Attorney General William Barr did not specify a drone strike but did state, “a counterterrorism operation targeting AQAP operative Abdullah al-Maliki, one of Alshamrani’s overseas associates, was recently conducted in Yemen.”

For its part, New America tracks four strikes between 2021 and the present. This count also reflects the challenges of identifying and attributing strikes in Yemen. New America counts the two aforementioned strikes in January and February 2023 – although there remains no confirmation (either official or anonymous) from within the U.S. government. In addition, New America includes two reported U.S. strikes in November 2021, although at least some reports raise the possibility that they were not U.S. strikes. In addition, some of the strikes recorded by Airwars’ more expansive inclusion criteria may have been U.S. strikes that escaped broader coverage.

The confusion and challenges described above emphasize the need for the United States government to commit to clear and public reporting of all of its strikes in Yemen. Where U.S. strikes are wrongly alleged, the United States should also make an effort to correct the record with evidence beyond inconclusive denials from specific parts of the bureaucracy that leave open the possibility of covert strikes by other parts of the government.

The government’s failure to provide a clear record of U.S. strikes in Yemen brings significant costs and risks. It challenges efforts to provide moral accountability for or even just a record of the impact of U.S. strikes upon Yemenis. Even if the U.S. is not conducting strikes, allowing the U.S. to remain as an ambiguous, spectral presence helps obscure the responsibility of other belligerents for their own violence. In addition, this spectral presence of American violence contributes to the sense of endless war that can fuel the very enmity and threats the U.S. seeks to counter. Finally, the lack of clarity regarding whether the U.S. is conducting strikes in Yemen and what objectives it seeks if it is, calls into question whether the U.S. has a strategy capable of achieving its ends let alone one that is sufficiently transparent to be meaningfully subject to public accountability.