For the past several months, the U.S. military has been carrying out a bombing campaign in Yemen ostensibly aimed at forcing the militant group Ansar Allah, also known as the Houthis, to stop their military intervention on behalf of Palestinians under Israeli assault in Gaza. This campaign has conducted strikes against more than 800 targets, as well as verified claims of civilian harm, including, most recently, a strike against a detention facility housing African migrants that killed dozens of people.
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[S]erious allegations have emerged that the U.S. military has been relying, in part, on anonymous X accounts who post coordinates that they dubiously claim contain military assets.
This week, U.S. warplanes bombed a location alleged by two such amateur open-source intelligence accounts to be a Houthi stronghold, killing innocent bystanders in the process.
A Twitter account—operated by an individual whose bio says they are based in the Netherlands, using the handle @VleckieHond—apologized this week after the U.S. struck coordinates she erroneously suggested, in early April, were the location of an underground Houthi military position; it was not a military site. “Allright, time for me to go through the mud,” Vleckie posted. “Based on satellite imagery I'd marked this quarry as an underground base, and tweeted is out as such. I'm fairly certain Centcom doesn't take their targeting data from Twitter, but this still is a very severe mistake.” Vleckie had highlighted the coordinates in a thread that claimed to have uncovered a Houthi base, and they had relied, in part, on a secondary account, @Galal_Alsalahi, whose bio suggests they are based in Houston. That account, which is hostile to the Houthis, claimed to have discovered a Houthi missile launcher at the coordinates.
The strike that took place on April 28 reportedly killed eight civilians in their homes on the outskirts of the capital of Sana’a. Vleckie’s reading of satellite imagery, the account later said, was incomplete—they said they had privately marked the target as only “possible”—and they would strive to do better in the future, while posting a screenshot of a 500 Euro donation to charity that she had made as penance. “I should never have posted it,” they added.
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To be sure, it may be a mere coincidence that the amateur sleuths identified the location before CENTCOM struck it, but the account used for the Sana’a strike is known to officials in the military, increasing the potential likelihood that it was relied on—at least, in part—for the tragic targeting.
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