With Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth temporarily safe from impeachment, a dozen humanitarian groups are calling on Congress to investigate one of the eight shelved charges lodged against him: his role in the deaths of hundreds of people during the “unauthorized war in Yemen.”
“We urge members of Congress to conduct robust oversight into Operation Rough Rider and the resulting human toll,” reads a new letter shared exclusively with The Intercept, using the Pentagon’s term for its war against Yemen’s Houthi government. The 12 groups — including Airwars, Amnesty International USA, the Center for Civilians in Conflict, and Mwatana for Human Rights — seize on civilian harm prevention efforts that Hegseth’s War Department slashed, demanding “more information about how and why civilian harm incidents occurred, what lessons the Department learned from these operations, and the status of ongoing civilian harm assessments and investigations.”
The push for accountability follows last week’s electoral rout of the GOP and immediate calls by top Democrats for scrutiny of war powers abuses by the Trump administration. But with Democrats taking the gavel in both chambers next year, a defense official told The Intercept that the Trump administration’s failed 2025 conflict in Yemen risks becoming a “forgotten war” amid a push for accountability focused on higher profile conflicts.
Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., the House Armed Services Committee’s incoming chair, announced last week that the committee’s “top priority will be to conduct vigorous oversight of the Department of Defense and the Trump Administration,” specifically singling out “the illegal war against Iran” and “unauthorized military strikes in the Caribbean and Latin America.” Smith did not mention Yemen, and his office did not respond to repeated queries about whether Yemen would also be a priority. The office of Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., who is slated to head the Senate Armed Services Committee, also did not immediately respond to questions about whether oversight of Rough Rider would be a focus.
Over just 52 days, from March to May 2025, Rough Rider caused “extraordinarily high numbers of civilian casualties,” the groups noted. As The Intercept first reported in August, the Pentagon’s annual report to Congress on civilian harm acknowledged almost 400 civilian casualties — 153 deaths and 243 injuries — from just three attacks in Yemen: a strike in Sanaa on April 6, a strike on the Ras Isa Port on April 17, and a strike on a migrant detention center in Saada on April 28.
Amnesty, one of the signatories, spoke with five survivors of the strike in Saada who cannot work because of their injuries. “If I don’t take a painkiller, I feel hopeless and wish to die,” said a 22-year-old Ethiopian man who sustained a serious arm injury in the U.S. attack. “I think about how at such a young age I can’t even support myself and still rely on help from others. The metal rod inside me is very painful and uncomfortable. It drives you insane.”
A U.S. official called the Pentagon’s civilian casualty count “lowball numbers.” According to the Yemen Data Project, the estimated toll was higher: at least 238 civilians killed and 467 injured.
“It’s striking that the Department acknowledged nearly 400 civilian casualties from just three incidents — a staggeringly high rate — without any explanation whatsoever about what happened and why, how they’ll respond to victims and their families, and how they’ll prevent it from happening again,” Annie Shiel, the U.S. director of Center for Civilians in Conflict, told The Intercept.
“How will they get through hundreds of cases for Iran if their one civilian harm person still hasn’t finished Yemen?”
More than a year after Operation Rough Rider ended, 15 additional attacks were still under assessment, according to the civilian harm report. One official told The Intercept in August that the backlog would likely carry over several years. Under Hegseth, the 10-person civilian harm mitigation team at Central Command, or CENTCOM, has been reduced to just one individual.
This lack of attention doesn’t bode well for understanding civilian harm in Hegseth’s longer-running and even more destructive war efforts, officials said.
“How will they get through hundreds of cases for Iran if their one civilian harm person still hasn’t finished Yemen?” a U.S. official asked in August.
At present, CENTCOM claims that the U.S. attack on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, Iran – that killed more than 150 people, most of them children — is the lone civilian harm incident of that burgeoning forever war. For months, CENTCOM has failed to answer questions about that attack and additional Iranian civilian casualties, including eight members of a family — the youngest, a 20-day-old infant — killed in a strike documented in an investigation by The Intercept.
Shiel highlighted the connections between the civilian casualties during Rough Rider and those in Iran.
“There is a through-line here from Yemen. We’ll never know if the devastation of Minab would have been prevented through a fully staffed civilian protection program and a more robust inquiry into what happened in Yemen, but it’s clear that important reckoning didn’t happen,” she said. “This is part of a broader trend of focusing on ‘lethality’ over civilian lives, ignoring hard-learned lessons in the process.”
A group of Democratic lawmakers told Hegseth in a July letter that his “gutting” of Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response efforts has left the Pentagon unable to “comply with the law and its congressionally-mandated CHMR responsibilities.” Sent by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and nine other lawmakers, the letter echoed concerns raised by a War Department inspector general report that described civilian protection efforts as largely “inactive.” The May missive by the Pentagon’s top watchdog says cuts to civilian harm mitigation and response efforts have been so severe under Hegseth that the United States cannot adequately protect civilians in conflict zones or track harm when it occurs.
These criticisms were echoed in an another report, first revealed by The Intercept in July, that found Hegseth’s Pentagon gutted its premier center devoted to preventing civilian casualties in war zones. The War Department’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence slashed its staff from 40 personnel in January 2025 to just nine by the end of the year, according to the report.
Last week, The Intercept published an exposé quoting six current and former defense officials under Hegseth who called for his ouster, including a former senior adviser at that center. “He is conducting state terrorism. He is 100 percent a war criminal. He needs to be prosecuted,” said Wes J. Bryant, who was pushed out of his job for blowing the whistle on Hegseth’s efforts to undermine protections for civilians.
The 12 humanitarian groups called on Congress to “fully restore” the Pentagon’s civilian harm mitigation program, “including by mandating minimum staffing levels and earmarking funding in annual appropriations and maintaining robust oversight over DoD implementation of congressionally-mandated policies.” The groups also specifically requested the release of the Civilian Protection Center’s lessons-learned study on Operation Rough Rider, which has been bottled up for months.
During a rare Pentagon press conference on Tuesday, ahead of the impeachment vote, Hegseth celebrated Rough Rider, claiming the Houthis “cried uncle.” But a post-mortem of the operation in the CTC Sentinel — published by the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point — said that because of Rough Rider, the Houthi leadership “will have the confidence that, like the Taliban in Afghanistan, it can simply outlast the United States.”
The U.S. has, to date, failed to come to the aid of its staunch ally Saudi Arabia as the Houthis have battered that country’s airports and energy infrastructure for weeks. On Monday, an attack on the financial district in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, damaged an office of Aramco, the state oil giant.
The White House failed to respond to questions about the Yemen war from The Intercept. CENTCOM did not reply to a request for information on the status of civilian harm assessments or formal investigations stemming from Rough Rider.
Shiel was emphatic about the necessity of accountability, telling The Intercept, “Congress needs to step in and force that reckoning through oversight over civilian harm incidents and by mandating and funding the restoration of the civilian harm mitigation program.”
In their letter, the 12 humanitarian organizations urged the U.S. to make amends to survivors and the families of victims.
“The Department’s 2025 report also stated that ex gratia or condolence payments to victims and survivors were ‘determined to not be appropriate’ in the three Yemen incidents. This decision is premature and seemingly arbitrary,” they wrote. “Rather than dismissing amends out of hand, the Department should undertake a good-faith effort to understand families’ needs and preferences for responses.”
Source: Iwpost.com
