“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.

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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.

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.

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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.”

The post Trump’s Yemen Strike Killed 61 Immigrants and No Combatants appeared first on The Intercept.

The strikes, predominantly by Iranian-backed militias and the Houthi government in Yemen, include a mix of one-way attack drones, rockets, mortars, and ballistic missiles fired at fixed bases and U.S. warships across the region. These groups ramped up attacks on U.S. targets in October 2023, in response to the U.S.-supported Israeli war on Gaza.

The casualty revelations come as President Donald Trump announced a ceasefire with the Houthis, claiming they had “capitulated” to the United States. “The Houthis have announced — to us, at least — that they don’t want to fight anymore,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday. “We will stop the bombings,” he continued, noting that U.S. attacks would end “immediately.”

Mohammed Ali al-Houthi, a member of the Houthi Supreme Political Council, said the Houthis had not immediately agreed to the U.S.-proposed ceasefire. The Houthis would “evaluate” the U.S. proposal “on the ground first,” he posted on Tuesday.

When asked for clarification regarding Trump’s claims, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said Trump’s remarks were “clear.”

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Houthi strikes on U.S. forces, which began during the Biden administration, continued during Trump’s second term, despite threats that continued attacks would be met with overwhelming force. “To all Houthi terrorists, YOUR TIME IS UP, AND YOUR ATTACKS MUST STOP, STARTING TODAY. IF THEY DON’T, HELL WILL RAIN DOWN UPON YOU LIKE NOTHING YOU HAVE EVER SEEN BEFORE!” Trump ranted on TruthSocial on March 15. Trump then decreed that the Houthis would be “completely annihilated.” In what Trump described as “large-scale strikes in Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen,” the U.S. targeted civilian infrastructure and, according to local reports, killed scores of innocent people.

The attacks on Yemen have continued with Israel and the United Kingdom joining in the bombardment. More than a month after Trump’s bellicose boasts, however, the Houthis have continued to strike at U.S. military personnel, just as they and militant groups across the Middle East have done hundreds of times since the beginning of the Gaza war.

U.S. Navy vessels in the region have been the most frequent target, coming under attack 174 times since October 2023, Central Command told The Intercept. There have also been “about 200” attacks on U.S. bases in the region since the Gaza war began, according to Pentagon spokesperson Patricia Kreuzberger. This amounts to roughly one attack every 1.5 days, on average. This includes more than 100 attacks on U.S. outposts in Syria and a lesser number in Iraq and Jordan. A January 2024 drone attack on Tower 22, a facility in the latter country, killed three U.S. troops. 

The Pentagon recently bragged that it had attacked more than 1,000 Houthi targets since March 15, as part of Operation Rough Rider, while denigrating the Houthis’ ability to strike back at the U.S. military. 

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Just last week, a $60 million U.S. Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter was lost at sea when it fell overboard from the USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier. The Truman reportedly made a sharp turn to evade a Houthi attack, which caused the jet to plunge overboard. One sailor was injured in the chaos.

“After a month of Trump’s empty threats to annihilate us, I am responding to you, not from the afterlife, but from this worldly life, specifically from Al-Sab’een Square in the capital, Sana’a,” Nasruddin Amer, a Houthi spokesman, told The Intercept by direct message, calling Trump a laughingstock ahead of the announced ceasefire. 

Amer said that Houthi attacks had actually destroyed two F/A-18s. CENTCOM pushed back on this. “Houthis continue to communicate lies and disinformation,” an unnamed “defense official” told The Intercept. “Their messaging depends on lies.”

Amid the rising death toll in Yemen, some lawmakers have been pressing for an end to U.S. attacks. “We cannot bomb our way to peace. As someone who’s seen the human cost of war and displacement. I know we need a foreign policy rooted in human rights,” said Rep. Ilhan Omar on Tuesday as feminist leaders gathered on Capitol Hill to unveil the Feminist Peace Playbook, a foreign policy strategy that runs counter to Trump’s antagonistic approach.

Although he wasted little time in launching his own bombing campaign in Yemen this year, as a presidential candidate, Trump was critical of Biden administration attacks on the Houthis. “It’s crazy. You can solve problems over the telephone. Instead, they start dropping bombs. I see, recently, they’re dropping bombs all over Yemen. You don’t have to do that. You can talk in such a way where they respect you and they listen to you,” Trump said in a May 2024 interview with podcaster Tim Pool.

America’s enemies, specifically Iranian-backed militias, have been striking U.S. bases, intermittently, since the late 2010s. Regular tit-for-tat attacks began in January 2020 when Iran’s top general, Qassim Suleimani, was killed near the Baghdad airport in a U.S. drone strike authorized by Trump. Trump said the U.S. was “totally prepared” for Iran to retaliate — which it did by firing 22 ballistic missiles at two American bases in Iraq. “All is well!” Trump proclaimed in the wake of the attack, as the U.S. claimed no U.S. troops were killed or wounded. Weeks later, the Pentagon admitted that there were actually 109 U.S. casualties.

Recently, U.S. Central Command, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the White House have orchestrated a casualty cover-up, refusing to disclose the number of U.S. troops killed or wounded in Houthi attacks. 

Under the Biden administration, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and CENTCOM provided detailed data on attacks on military bases across the Middle East — including to this reporter. CENTCOM provided the total number of attacks, breakdowns by country, and the total number injured. The Pentagon offered even more granular data, providing individual synopses of more than 150 attacks, including information on deaths and injuries not only to U.S. troops but even civilian contractors working on U.S. bases.

The post U.S. Troops Are Being Attacked Every Other Day in the Middle East appeared first on The Intercept.

A U.S. official said that Al Udeid Air Base, the largest American installation in the Middle East, was attacked by short-range and medium-range ballistic missiles. “At this time, there are no reports of U.S. casualties,” a U.S. defense official told The Intercept. “We are monitoring this situation closely and will provide more information as it becomes available.”

A Qatari official confirmed that no casualties occurred due to the attack.

The Qatari official said that Al Udeid Air Base, which it shares with the United States, had been “evacuated” prior to the attack and that all “necessary measures were taken to ensure the safety of the base’s personnel, including members of the Qatari Armed Forces, friendly forces, and others.”

Iran said the strikes in Qatar matched the number of bombs dropped by the United States on its nuclear sites over the weekend, signaling its likely desire to save face at home and deescalate abroad.

Iran announced the attack on state television. A caption on screen called it “a mighty and successful response” to “America’s aggression,” according to The Associated Press.

The Qatari official denounced the Iranian attack and blamed Israel for setting off the cycle of violence in the region. Trump joined Israel’s war against Iran on Saturday, attacking Iranian nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan — a decision that experts say may lead to a new U.S. forever war in the Middle East.

“We express the State of Qatar’s strong condemnation of the attack on Al Udeid Air Base by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and consider it a flagrant violation of the State of Qatar’s sovereignty and airspace, as well as of international law and the United Nations Charter,” the official told The Intercept, adding that Qatar was “among the first countries to warn against the consequences of Israeli escalation in the region.”

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More than 40,000 U.S. active-duty military personnel and civilians working for the Pentagon are deployed across the Middle East. In recent years, the U.S. has used more than 60 bases, garrisons, or shared foreign facilities in the region. These sites range from small combat outposts to massive air bases in 13 countries: Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. 

U.S. troops in the Middle East have come under attack close to 400 times, at a minimum, since October 2023 in response to the U.S.-supported Israeli war on Gaza.

U.S. Navy vessels in the region have been the most frequent target, coming under attack 174 times since October 2023, Central Command told The Intercept. There have also been “about 200” attacks on U.S. bases in the region since the Gaza war began, Pentagon spokesperson Patricia Kreuzberger told The Intercept last month. This amounted to roughly one attack every 1.5 days. This includes more than 100 attacks on U.S. outposts in Syria and a lesser number in Iraq and Jordan. A January 2024 drone attack on Tower 22, a facility in the latter country, killed three U.S. troops. 

Predominantly led by Iranian-backed militias and the Iranian-allied Houthi government in Yemen, the strikes include a mix of one-way attack drones, rockets, mortars, and ballistic missiles fired at fixed bases and U.S. warships across the region.

Trump struck a ceasefire deal with the Houthis in May. Prior to the U.S. attacks on Saturday, the Houthis threatened to again target U.S. ships in the Red Sea if Washington joined Israel’s attacks on Iran.

The post U.S. Military Under Attack Again for Joining Israel’s Wars appeared first on The Intercept.

The U.S. responded on Tuesday with an airstrike on a “Houthi missile system” that the U.S. claimed “presented an imminent threat to U.S. and coalition forces, and merchant vessels in the region.”

The Saudi-flagged Amjad and the Panama-flagged Blue Lagoon 1 struck on Monday are just the latest ships to be damaged by the Houthi rebels, who have attacked more than 80 merchant vessels since the war in Gaza began in October 2023, and have said the attacks will continue until Israel’s war on Gaza ends.

The Houthi campaign has led to a 90 percent decline in shipping activity through the Red Sea, according to a report from the Defense Intelligence Agency, and shows little sign of stopping, even though two U.S. aircraft carriers are now deployed in the region.

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For more than two decades, the United States has been at war in Yemen. In these years, U.S. leaders have talked endlessly about fostering peace, stability, and prosperity in that Middle Eastern nation. “Ultimately, peace in Yemen serves the interest of all Yemenis, just as it does those of our regional partners,” said U.S. Special Envoy for Yemen Timothy A. Lenderking earlier this year. “The United States stands ready to support.” 

Despite the rhetoric, the Yemeni people have suffered immensely — and the central target of U.S. military action in the country, the Houthi rebel group, is exerting more influence on the world stage than ever before.

One of the original battlegrounds in the U.S. war on terror, Yemen is just 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 collection of 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. 

Since 2002, the United States has conducted nearly 400 attacks in Yemen, 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. In the last week, the U.S. military has repeatedly struck targets there.

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.

A recent investigation by The Intercept revealed that the kingdom of Saudi Arabia has repeatedly stiffed the Defense Department on a bill for support of that Saudi war that killed hundreds of thousands of Yemenis and sparked a humanitarian catastrophe. For months — up to and since publication — the Pentagon has ducked The Intercept’s requests for comment on the unpaid bill.

Despite the unpaid debt of $15 million — the remaining balance of a $300 million bill for aerial refueling missions which the Pentagon has repeatedly attempted to collect — the Biden administration recently lifted its ban on selling offensive weapons to Saudi Arabia, authorizing an initial shipment of air-to-ground munitions to the kingdom. The restriction did not apply to sales of so-called defensive arms and military services. Those sales have amounted to almost $10 billion over the past four years.

“For decades the United States has supported and partnered with autocrats in the region, arguing that these security relationships and assistance would lead to regional security and stability,” said Seth Binder of the Washington-based Middle East Democracy Center. “Instead, as we’ve seen in Yemen, it has too often brought conflict and immense suffering.” While Binder stressed that the U.S. does not bear most of the blame for the toll suffered by Yemenis, he said “it is undeniable that its policies have had a significant and destabilizing effect.”

The long-running humanitarian crisis in Yemen, despite a cessation in the conflict between the Houthis and Saudi Arabia, is growing worse. Yemen now finds itself on the edge of socioeconomic collapse, its health care system barely functions, and it’s beset by climate shocks and outbreaks of preventable diseases. The Fund for Peace ranks Yemen sixth out of 179 nations on its Fragile States Index, second only to Syria in the Middle East.

At least 17 million Yemenis are now food insecure, including 3.5 million who are acutely malnourished. Around 4.5 million are internally displaced, many of whom have suffered multiple displacements over several years. More than 18 million people, over half of Yemen’s population, require humanitarian assistance.

Fears of a wider regional conflict, stemming from the Gaza war, threaten to worsen an already catastrophic situation. “The regional dimension of the conflict in Yemen is getting more and more pronounced,” Hans Grundberg, U.N. special envoy for that country, advised the U.N. Security Council in July. “I reiterate my warning to the Council that we risk a return to full-scale war and all the predictable human suffering and regional implications this entails.”

Since November 2023, the Houthis have attacked U.S. military forces in the Middle East, including ships and aircraft, as well as commercial shipping in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden in reaction to the U.S.-supported Israeli war in Gaza. In response, the U.S. has carried out many strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen, reportedly killing civilians. 

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Israel and the Houthis have also engaged in tit-for-tat attacks, further widening the Gaza war. Israel is already fighting Hamas on its southern front in Gaza and is regularly trading fire with Hezbollah, another Iran-backed militia, in Lebanon to the north.

After a Houthi one-way drone hit Tel Aviv in late July, the Israeli military attacked Yemen — with U.S.-made F-15 and F-35 fighter jets — hitting the Red Sea port city of Hudaydah and reportedly killing three people and injuring 87. A local official said the attack — the first ever by Israel in Yemen — caused at least $20 million in damage to a port that serves as a key entry point for food, fuel, and aid to already impoverished northern Yemen.

“Yemenis have suffered from war and conflict for far too long,” Binder told The Intercept. “Moments of optimism and hope have often been short lived and sadly, the Houthi response to the Gaza war again risks putting Yemenis through more violence and suffering.”

The post The U.S. Has Been at War in Yemen for 20 Years, but Houthis Can Still Choke the Red Sea appeared first on The Intercept.

The injured aviators are the latest in a growing number of casualties in the Middle East that the Trump White House prefers to ignore. As The Intercept reported last week, CENTCOM, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the White House are keeping the total number of U.S. casualties from the war secret.

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“The refusal to provide the casualty data for U.S. troops in the Middle East is another example of the gross incompetence of this administration,” Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., told The Intercept. “Transparency in the casualties sustained through every military operation should be a cornerstone of every administration. The refusal to provide the public with basic information should be deeply alarming to every American.”

Omar is the third lawmaker in the last week to call for accountability from the White House and the Pentagon, joining Reps. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash.

The total number of military personnel who have been killed or wounded in the broader U.S. campaign against the Houthis, which began under the Biden administration, is being withheld from the American people. But since last Monday, there have been at least three casualties. That day, a sailor was injured when a different F/A-18 Super Hornet was lost at sea, falling off the Truman after the ship made a sharp turn to evade a Houthi attack. 

When The Intercept asked the Office of the Secretary of Defense last week for the number of casualties sustained by U.S. forces in the campaign against the Houthis, the Pentagon balked at providing a number and referred questions to Central Command, which referred questions to the White House. Repeated requests to White House assistant press secretary Taylor Rogers have gone unanswered for more than a week.

This is not standard operating procedure. Under the Biden administration, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and CENTCOM provided detailed data on attacks on military bases across the Middle East — including to this reporter. CENTCOM provided the total number of attacks, breakdowns by country, and the total number injured. The Pentagon offered even more granular data, providing individual synopses of attacks, including information on deaths and injuries not only to U.S. troops but even civilian contractors working on U.S. bases.

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U.S. Troops Are Being Attacked Every Other Day in the Middle East

The Intercept found that U.S. troops in the Middle East have come under attack close to 400 times, at a minimum, since the outbreak of the Israel–Hamas war. U.S. Navy vessels in the region have been the most frequent target, coming under attack 174 times since October 2023, according to Central Command. There have also been “about 200” attacks on U.S. bases in the region since the Gaza war began, according to Pentagon spokesperson Patricia Kreuzberger. This amounts to roughly one attack every 1.5 days, on average.

The strikes, predominantly by Iranian-backed militias and the Houthi government in Yemen, include a mix of one-way attack drones, rockets, mortars, and ballistic missiles. These groups ramped up attacks on U.S. targets in October 2023, in response to the U.S.-supported Israeli war on Gaza.

Despite Trump’s claims that the Houthis “capitulated” and “don’t want to fight anymore,” it remains unclear whether America’s billion-dollar, seven-week campaign of strikes that targeted civilian infrastructure and, according to local reports, killed scores of innocent people, has achieved its objective of stopping the Houthis from impeding international shipping.

Nasruddin Amer, a Houthi spokesperson, dismissed Trump’s “fallacies and bravado” and directed The Intercept to a statement by Oman’s foreign minister, Badr Albusaidi, who said that mediation by his country had “resulted in a ceasefire agreement” in which “neither side will target the other, including American vessels, in the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandab Strait.” A senior Houthi leader had already told Drop Site in April that the group would cease attacks if the Trump administration halted bombings. Amer also told The Intercept that the Houthis will continue fighting Israel.

Houthi officials and supporters portrayed the ceasefire as a triumph over Trump and a U.S. defeat. “America attacked our country in service of Israel and in support of the continuation of the crimes of genocide in Gaza. We defended ourselves against the American aggression and continued our support for Gaza,” Amer told The Intercept by text message. “What happened now is that America announced the cessation of its aggression against Yemen after failing to achieve any of its goals.”

The White House did not reply to repeated requests for comment on the statement.

The post More Troops Injured as U.S. Planes Keep Plunging Into Red Sea appeared first on The Intercept.

The December 24 drone strike hit a dock that U.S. officials believe was used by members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang. No people were on the dock at the time of the attack and no one was killed, according to the official. The details of the strike, which were first reported by CNN, offer a clearer picture of an attack first disclosed by President Donald Trump in a series of vague statements over several days.

“Now we’re going after the land,” Trump said during a Christmas Eve phone call to troops aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford, which is deployed to the Caribbean Sea as part of the campaign against Maduro. “They have a big plant or a big facility where the ships come from,” Trump then told John Catsimatidis, a billionaire and Trump donor who owns New York’s WABC radio station, on Friday. “Two nights ago, we knocked that out. We hit them very hard.”

On Monday, Trump provided more detail, explaining that the United States had “hit” an “implementation area” in Venezuela. “There was a major explosion in the dock area where they load the boats up with drugs,” Trump told reporters at his residence in Mar-a-Lago, Florida. “That’s where they implement, and that is no longer around.”

Trump has publicly acknowledged he authorized CIA operations in Venezuela. Asked if the CIA had carried out the Christmas Eve attack, Trump said: “I don’t want to say that.”

The government official, who spoke with The Intercept on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified information, said they had been briefed on the CIA’s role in the attack.

A spokesperson writing from a CIA email and identified only as Ryan declined to comment on the Christmas Eve strike in an email to The Intercept.

“Days after it took place, the U.S. public is finally learning about a CIA airstrike on foreign soil for which there is no legal justification or congressional authorization. This is the lawless Trump administration in action,” Win Without War policy director Sam Ratner told The Intercept. “The only way forward is for Congress to stop Trump’s illegal strikes and hold those in the administration who have so flagrantly broken the law to account.”

The CIA regularly conducted drone strikes during the early years of the war on terror, beginning in Yemen in 2002 and in Pakistan in 2004. During the Obama administration, the U.S. military largely took over such attacks, and since then, the armed forces have conducted the overwhelming majority of drone strikes. Heavily armed MQ-9 Reaper drones have recently been spotted in the region as part of a ramp-up of U.S. forces.

The CIA also has a long tradition of fanning violence, fomenting regime change, and conducting acts of sabotage in Latin America. A 2023 analysis of the effects of CIA-sponsored regime change in five Latin American countries found the interventions caused “large declines in democracy scores, rule of law, freedom of speech, and civil liberties.”

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The United States has been attacking boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific since September, killing at least 107 civilians in 30 attacks. Experts in the laws of war and members of Congress, from both parties, have said the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence.

The Intercept was the first outlet to report that the U.S. military killed survivors of the September 2 boat attack in a follow-up strike. That attack, Trump wrote at the time, killed “Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists.” Most boat attacks since have targeted members or affiliates of unspecified “designated terrorist organizations,” but the CIA dock attack specifically aimed to weaken the Venezuelan gang, according to the U.S. official.

The Trump administration has made outlandish claims about Tren de Aragua throughout 2025. Earlier this year, the administration claimed the gang had invaded the United States, which it cited as justification to use the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to fast-track deportation of people the government says belong to the gang. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals eventually blocked the government from using the wartime law. “We conclude that the findings do not support that an invasion or a predatory incursion has occurred,” wrote Judge Leslie Southwick.

In September, Trump claimed that U.S. troops engaged in combat with members of Tren de Aragua on the streets of Washington, D.C., during the summer or early fall — an apparent fiction that the White House press office refuses to address.

While the Trump administration claims that Tren de Aragua is acting as “a de facto arm of” Maduro’s government, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence determined earlier this year that the “Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States.”

The U.S. also maintains that Tren de Aragua is both engaging in irregular warfare against and in a non-international armed conflict with the United States. These are, however, mutually exclusive designations which cannot occur simultaneously.

The Trump administration also claims that another criminal organization, Cártel de los Soles, is “headed by Nicolás Maduro and other high-ranking Venezuelan individuals,” despite little evidence that such a group exists. Maduro denies that he heads a cartel.

The Trump administration’s current campaign against Maduro is an extension of long-running efforts to topple the Venezuelan president which failed during Trump’s first term. Maduro and close allies were indicted in a New York federal court in 2020 on federal charges of narco-terrorism and conspiracy to import cocaine. Earlier this year, the U.S. doubled its reward for information leading to Maduro’s arrest to $50 million.

Trump told Politico this month that Maduro’s “days are numbered.” When asked if he might order an invasion of Venezuela, Trump replied, “I wouldn’t say that one way or the other.”

Experts say that regime change in Venezuela would be complex and problematic. A 2023 study by the RAND Corporation warned that “overt military intervention in Venezuela is likely to become messy very quickly and is likely to become protracted.”

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The U.S. intervened to oust governments in Latin America a total of at least 41 times — about once every 28 months from 1898 to 1994 — including 17 cases of direct intervention by the U.S. armed forces, intelligence agencies, or locals employed by U.S. government agencies, according to ReVista, the Harvard Review of Latin America. Washington attempted at least 18 covert regime changes in the region during the Cold War alone, Foreign Affairs noted earlier this year, which included deposing nine governments that fell to military rulers in the 1960s, about one every 13 months.

In 1954, the U.S. helped overthrow Guatemala’s democratically elected government, ushering in a military junta that jailed political opponents, igniting an almost two-decade long civil war that killed hundreds of thousands of people. In 1973, a U.S.-backed coup in Chile, led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, ousted and led to the death of Salvador Allende, that country’s democratically elected president. A brutal, 17-year dictatorship marked by state torture, enforced disappearances, and killing followed, leaving a toll of more than 40,000 victims. In 1961, the U.S. also backed the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and fomented a coup in the Dominican Republic, which sparked years of unrest and U.S. election meddling. This, in turn, led to a 1965 invasion of the island nation by U.S. Marines. The U.S. also supported coups in Brazil in 1964, Bolivia in 1971, and funded the Contra rebels in Nicaragua throughout the 1980s. None of these interventions produced a stable, pro-American democracy and often, instead, installed authoritarian regimes that set off cycles of violence.

A 2025 study of all U.S.-led coups d’état and regime change operations from 1893 to 2011 found that that “while short-term strategic objectives were occasionally achieved, the majority of interventions resulted in regional instability, anti-American sentiment, and failed democratic transitions.” Earlier investigations have shown that foreign regime change schemes either fail to reduce or actually increase the likelihood of military disputes between interveners and targets; result in more human rights violations and declines in democracy; lead to a greater likelihood of civil war; and increase the chances of igniting an international armed conflict.

Even regime-change schemes that appeared successful at the time often sets off long-term blowback. The 1953 ouster of Iran’s Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh fueled anti-American sentiment that contributed to the 1979 revolution and set in motion decades of turmoil and conflict. America’s “mission accomplished” moment, just after the 2003 invasion of Iraq to remove autocrat Saddam Hussein from power devolved into a endless spiral of violence and suffering. That conflict — which eventually spilled into neighboring Syria — has killed more than half a million people directly, and three or four times that number due to indirect causes such as displacement, a lack of potable water, health care, and preventable diseases, according to calculations by Brown University’s Costs of War Project. The costs to U.S. taxpayers are expected to exceed $2.89 trillion by 2050.

The post CIA Was Behind Venezuela Drone Strike, Source Says appeared first on The Intercept.

Tri-state area Democratic Sens. Cory Booker, Andy Kim, Chuck Schumer, and Kirsten Gillibrand sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and Federal Aviation Administration head Michael Whitaker requesting a briefing on the supposed drones.

And, last week Rep. Jeff Van Drew, R-N.J., initially suggested that the unidentified flying objects might hail from an “Iranian drone mothership” operating off the East Coast.

“Whether this is a foreign adversary or even just a group of drone hobbyists,” he said, “we cannot allow unidentified drones to operate freely in our airspace with no consequences and it is time we eliminate the threat they pose and shoot them down.”

After beginning in New Jersey, drone hysteria is spreading like wildfire, with sightings popping up from Massachusetts to California, prompting widespread outcry and the temporary closure of an airport in New York state and, in Ohio, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base’s airspace.

The widespread anxiety, especially among lawmakers, about living beneath potentially malign mystery drones is striking, given America’s proclivity for employing drones to spy on people across the world without their consent — and, in many cases, kill them. The irony is not lost on experts.

“Americans are finally seeing how uncomfortable it is to have unknown aircraft buzzing overhead.”

“After decades of the U.S. government flying armed military drones over cities and villages around the world, Americans are finally seeing how uncomfortable it is to have unknown aircraft buzzing overhead,” said Erik Sperling of Just Foreign Policy, an advocacy group critical of mainstream Washington foreign policy. “Even when drones are not killing people, it shouldn’t be hard to imagine that having an unknown aircraft hovering above your head is not something most people are comfortable with.”

“American politicians aren’t known for walking a mile in someone else’s shoes,” he said. “Hopefully, these incidents will help them realize that monitoring people this way in other countries isn’t going to win hearts and minds.”

No Explanation

For more than two decades, the United States has been flying drones over the heads of millions of people in foreign lands — remotely watching, recording, and even killing some of them. Since its first drone strikes in Afghanistan in 2001 and Yemen in 2002, U.S. drones have killed thousands of people in those countries and others, including civilians in Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen.

Last year, an investigation by The Intercept determined that an April 2018 drone attack in Somalia killed at least three, and possibly five, civilians, including 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter Mariam Shilow Muse. For more than six years, the family has tried to contact the U.S. government, including through an online civilian casualty reporting portal run by U.S. Africa Command, but they have never received a response.

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“They know innocent people were killed, but they’ve never told us a reason or apologized,” Abdi Dahir Mohamed, one of Luul’s brothers, told me last year. “No one has been held accountable.”

The entire family has been traumatized. When Luul’s nephew saw a “normal airplane” flying over their farm, he began running around, trying to hide, convinced it might kill him. The family told Luul’s son, Mohamed Shilow Muse, the truth about his mother’s death and since then, when he sees or hears a drone, they said, “he rushes under a tree to hide.”

For decades, people around the world have lived with drone-induced anxieties and resounding silence from U.S. officials. Before the U.S. military was expelled from Niger by the U.S.-trained ruling junta earlier this year, it hosted U.S. drone bases whose purpose was murky and kept secret from the Nigeriens who lived beneath the unblinking gaze of America’s eyes in the sky.

In the hard-scrabble Tadress neighborhood, on the outskirts of America’s drone outpost in the northern town of Agadez, people were apprehensive when talking about “le drone” when The Intercept visited last year. Women in the neighborhood, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, complained of the noise and the fumes coming from the base — and concern about the small aircraft that took off in the dead of night.

“No one knows what they are doing. We see the red and blue blinking lights above us.”

“We’re scared,” complained a woman in a pink hijab, who had lived in the area since before the base was built. “No one knows what they are doing. We see the red and blue blinking lights above us. We don’t know what they’re looking at.”

Maria Laminou Garba, who runs a recycling collective in Tadress that pays unemployed youth to gather recyclables, expressed similar concerns of living under an American microscope. “They are always flying overhead — often in the night or early morning,” she said last year. “It’s scary. We think they are watching us.”

The reactions are justified. In Somalia, the U.S. continues to fly surveillance missions and conduct lethal airstrikes.

In Niger, drones not only searched for militants in rural areas and neighboring countries, but also provided overwatch for the Agadez outpost and troops coming and going from the base in Tadress — putting the civilians there under their gaze.

Everyone in the Village

Americans like Van Drew, of “Iranian drone mothership” fame, are learning what people around the world, including Luul and Mariam’s family, have been saying for years: The prospect of living beneath another country’s drones — especially lethal robot aircraft — is terrible. (Van Drew has walked back his “mothership” fearmongering but continues to express unease.)

A September 2012 study of civilians in Pakistan by Stanford Law’s International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic and the Global Justice Clinic at NYU School of Law reported, “U.S. drone strike policies cause considerable and under-accounted-for harm to the daily lives of ordinary civilians, beyond death and physical injury.”

The researchers found the constant presence of drones, the fear that a strike might occur at any time, and the inability of people to protect themselves “terrorize[d] men, women, and children, giving rise to anxiety and psychological trauma among civilian communities.”

Following a series of attacks by the U.S. — six drones strikes and one raid — that killed 36 members of two large, intermarried Yemeni families between 2013 and 2018, one family member, Abdullah Abdurabuh Obad al Taisy, told me about the psychological fallout among survivors, especially children.

“Everyone in the village is affected,” he said. “They usually can’t sleep properly because of the fear. They can’t even eat properly. Even the children are afraid to go out and play. Some of them are mentally sick right now, because of this constant feeling of fear.”

A 2015 study by the Alkarama Foundation, a human rights group, found that among Yemenis living in two villages where U.S. drones operated, post-traumatic stress disorder was “extremely prevalent,” with many suffering from constant worry and sleep disorders including nightmares or insomnia. Ninety-six percent of children interviewed said they were afraid that a drone attack might harm them, their family, or their community — with “the feeling of fear,” the study said, “further exacerbated among children when they hear sounds that resemble the buzzing of drones.” 

The fear and anxiety induced by the distinctive “buzz” of drone engines is hardly confined to children. “The drones were terrifying,” wrote David Rohde, a journalist kidnapped by the Afghan Taliban in 2008 and held in the tribal areas of Pakistan. “From the ground, it is impossible to determine who or what they are tracking as they circle overhead. The buzz of a distant propeller is a constant reminder of imminent death.”

Populations subjected to constant drone activity report “exaggerated startle responses, fleeing indoors and hiding when seeing or hearing drones, fainting, poor appetite, psychosomatic symptoms, insomnia, and startled awakening at night with hallucinations about drones,” according to a 2017 study in Current Psychology. “Civilians’ fear appears to cripple their daily activities, such as leaving their homes, working, attending social functions, and sending children to school.”

“There is a reason that privacy is regarded as a human right — because nobody wants to feel like they’re living under the Eye of Sauron.”

The psychological toll exists even when the perceived threat is merely aerial surveillance from on high.

“There is a reason that privacy is regarded as a human right — because nobody wants to feel like they’re living under the Eye of Sauron, an eye in the sky that’s monitoring things that they’re doing,” said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, referencing the imposing symbol of malign omniscience in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” books. “That’s something that the U.S. shouldn’t be imposing on people abroad. And it’s something that we shouldn’t tolerate in our own communities.”

The Truth Is Out There

Stanley thinks there is a good chance that many of the “drones” seen over New Jersey are conventional aircraft and, perhaps, some experimental models. The panic surrounding the sightings, however, reveals something fundamental about Americans’ anxieties.

“In my experience — working on privacy issues from internet tracking to data mining — I find aerial surveillance has a special electricity for people,” he said. “Someone tracking my financial transactions and building a profile of me is very abstract, but a flying robotic video camera hovering over my community — that’s very concrete. And it freaks people out.”

In the meantime, neither people like Luul and Mariam’s family in Somalia nor Garba, the recycling organizer in Niger, will ever get what Americans panicking over skyward objects are: reasonable assurances from the authorities that they’re perfectly safe.

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Last Thursday, national security communications adviser John Kirby dismissed concerns over the drone panic.

“We have no evidence at this time that the reported drone sightings pose a national security or a public safety threat or have a foreign nexus,” he said.

An FBI official reported that government investigators overlaid the locations of the reported drone sightings and found that “the density of reported sightings matches the approach pattern” of New York and New Jersey’s busiest airports. The FBI has received 5,000 tips about drones but fewer than 100 have led to legitimate leads, according to a joint statement by the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the FAA, and the Pentagon released on Monday.

After observing the unidentified flying objects alongside local police in New Jersey, Kim, the senator, initially expressed concern. After discussions with civilian experts, however, he walked back some of his worries about the “possible drones.”

“I don’t discount others may have seen actual drone activity, and not all I saw is fully explained by flight paths, but much of it was,” he announced on X, taking federal authorities to task for not adequately addressing public fears and providing detailed explanations. “Federal experts should provide information and guidance to the public including local police departments like the one that took me out to help them decipher what they are seeing.”

Kim pointed to anxieties across America that he believes are fueling the drone panic. “I think this situation in some ways reflects this moment in our country. People have a lot [of] anxiety right now about the economy, health, security etc.,” he wrote. “And too often we find that those charged with working on these issues don’t engage the public with the respect and depth needed.”

A founding member of the Protection of Civilians in Conflict Caucus, Kim has been outspoken on U.S. drone strikes in the past. His office, however, refused to engage on the disconnect between American drone policy abroad and the drone hysteria exhibited by officials in the United States. (“We’re not going to comment at this time,” Anna Connole, Kim’s press secretary, told The Intercept.)

“Members of Congress like Andy Kim have been rightly concerned about civilian casualties, but drones aren’t just a problem when they kill civilians,” said Sperling.

“It’s just a profoundly disturbing climate to live in, when you have an unknown, unaccountable drone hovering over your head. Members of Congress should understand that monitoring people with futuristic unmanned aircraft is not a normal state of affairs for people beneath the drones. And they should apply that realization when it comes to U.S. foreign policy.”

The post America Gets a Taste of Its Own Medicine: Drone Terror appeared first on The Intercept.

“As global power dynamics are being profoundly reshaped, Nick’s work has never been more essential. The Intercept has always questioned mainstream coverage about American military power, and there is no one better than Nick to provide the kind of nuanced, incisive coverage that our readers want and deserve right now,” said CEO Annie Chabel. 

“Nick is a thoughtful, thorough, and curious journalist with deep expertise reporting on U.S. military and national security,” said editor-in-chief Ben Muessig. “I look forward to working with him more closely in 2025.”

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Turse, who is also a fellow at Type Media Center, has written for The Intercept for a decade, publishing more than 150 articles. He was part of the award-winning team that produced “The Drone Papers,” a cache of secret documents detailing the inner workings of the U.S. military’s assassination program in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia. He received the 2022 Military Reporters & Editors Association Award for Best Overseas Coverage for “The AFRICOM Files,” which revealed how the Pentagon undercounts and ignores military sexual assault in Africa. In 2023, The Intercept published a searing four-article exposé about former U.S. diplomat Henry Kissinger’s direct role in U.S. attacks on Cambodian villages in the 1970s that were previously unknown to the outside world, based on decades of reporting by Turse, who was the first person to interview victims and survivors in 13 villages that suffered relentless attacks. He received the 2024 Deadline Club Award for Reporting by Independent Digital Media for “Kissinger’s Killing Fields.” 

In 2023 and 2024, Turse reported that a 2018 U.S. drone strike in Somalia killed up to five civilians, including a mother and her 4-year-old daughter, and that the Pentagon found no one at fault. Following Turse’s investigation, two dozen human rights organizations and several members of Congress urged then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to compensate the family for the deaths. Turse is a finalist for the 2025 Fetisov Journalism Award for Outstanding Contribution to Peace for this article and several follow-up pieces published this year.

“I am thrilled to be joining The Intercept in this expanded role. Watchdog journalism is more necessary than ever and I can’t think of an outlet more committed to holding power to account,” said Turse. “I’m excited to get started.”

Turse has received a number of honors for his work including a Ridenhour Prize for Investigative Reporting, a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, and an I.F. Stone “Izzy” Award for Outstanding Achievement in Independent Journalism. He is a two-time finalist for the American Society of Magazine Editors’ National Magazine Award for Excellence in Reporting.​​ He has a Ph.D. in sociomedical sciences from Columbia University.

The post Nick Turse Joins The Intercept as Inaugural National Security Reporting Fellow appeared first on The Intercept.

On October 16, an unusual warning went out on Trinidadian airwaves. “Fishermen are being warned to slow down and stay close to shore amid fears of being bombed by the United States military,” the anchor on CNC3 began, “which continues its anti-narcotics operations in the Caribbean Sea.” Two Trinidadian fishermen, Chad Joseph and Richie Samaroo, had been killed in a U.S. Navy airstrike targeting their boat as they left Venezuela for Trinidad, a short 6-mile trip that Joseph had told his family about. President Donald Trump had claimed the boat was a “vessel affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization,” without naming the drug cartel it was supposedly affiliated with, and that “intelligence confirmed the vessel was trafficking narcotics” along a known “DTO route.”

The killing of a friendly country’s nationals, in America’s backyard, in a targeted American airstrike, should have been news alone. But it has been only a brick in the wall of a war that is being constructed in the southern Caribbean, one that is being built up in ways both overt and disturbingly covert.

As of the time of this writing, eight American warships, manned by more than 4,500 Marines and sailors, have been placed just outside of Venezuelan waters. The New York Times has identified guided-missile cruisers moving close to Venezuelan shores, as well as Reaper drones stationed nearby in Puerto Rico, alongside a number of stealth fighter jets. On Wednesday, War Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed on X that the military escalated this campaign by conducting a lethal airstrike on a vessel in the Pacific Ocean for the first time, off of Colombia’s waters, just days after Trump accused its president, Gustavo Petro, of being an “illegal drug dealer” after he criticized the American campaign in the Caribbean.

Some of the ships identified by CNN, like the USS San Antonio and the USS Gravely, have gained combat experience fighting the Houthi movement in Yemen, attempting to break their blockade in the Red Sea against Israel-bound cargo ships. Now, such U.S. military resources have been moved to the Caribbean, to deal with the next American enemy.

The target is clear: Nicolás Maduro, president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. But the United States government is not saying that, at least outright.

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Since the beginning of September, the American military has begun striking alleged “drug boats” in the Caribbean, extrajudicially executing accused drug runners after declaring a multitude of drug cartels to be terrorist organizations, on par with the Islamic State. Drug trafficking is not an executable offense, but by designating them as terrorists, and claiming, according to Trump, to be saving “25,000 people” with every boat struck, all could be justified. This became even more true with the declaration that the United States is in a “non-international armed conflict” with drug cartels, the same declaration issued regarding the war in Afghanistan; cartel members were designated as “unlawful combatants,” the same designation given to those in Al Qaeda.

Maduro’s name, and the spurious accusation that he is a drug kingpin, have been mentioned by the Department of Justice (joining with the State Department to put a $50 million bounty on his head), and Venezuela has been on the president’s lips whenever asked, even saying outright that he had greenlit covert CIA action in Venezuela and potentially even strikes on land inside the country. But news about the growing air of potential war with Venezuela has taken a backseat to the news of occasional strikes on boats in the Caribbean, which have now become so routine over the past two months that they barely register as noise. Still surprising, sure, but on the road to being as unworthy of note as individual strikes would be in Yemen earlier this year, their legal implications becoming as un-noteworthy as the strikes in the 2010s that killed young American citizens under the justification that their parent was a terrorist, so spilling their blood was permissible.

Mainstream media organizations are covering the strikes and the massive military buildup outside of Venezuela’s borders, but the gravity of the situation, with the dubiousness of the accusations levied and a potential major invasion of a country with the world’s largest oil reserves looming, is strangely unfelt, especially by the government that is spearheading it.

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The major stage of the buildup to the Iraq War was a process that took more than a year, with congressional authorizations of force, speeches made to the U.N., extensive laundering of faulty intelligence through numerous media organizations at the highest of levels, with stories of leaks and whistleblowers and weapons of mass destruction and a threat growing in Baghdad that not only threatened Kuwait but also the entire world. Major news outlets ran countdown timers to the invasion and placed the entire country of Iraq in crosshairs in their graphics packages. Massive protests of millions preceded the invasion, attempting in vain to halt its march, but still showing in great numbers that opposition to the war would not go quietly. By contrast, a potential invasion of Venezuela is being treated as almost a foregone conclusion.

Venezuela has for years been demonized in the media, becoming a favorite bogeyman of American political thrillers and rousing people’s interest whenever anti-government protests rock the country. But Venezuela threatens no American interests militarily, has no ballistic missile program with which to strike the American heartland, no weapons of mass destruction program, nor even accusations of such a program. There are barely any leakers, zero claims of a global threat, no media laundering of intelligence. The narrative, however, has been set in stone from the beginning — and without strong opposition to it, there was no need to justify it.

Maduro and his government have been deemed terrorists retroactively, with a myriad number of drug cartels designated as terrorist organizations, connections then drawn by the U.S. from those cartels to the Venezuelan state, and Maduro then named as a cartel head himself. By calling them terrorists, the most violent manner of carnage can be wrought against Venezuela and its people, and conversely, not much attention need be paid to it, as attacking “terrorists” has become mundane to both the U.S. government and the news media.

We already know a potential invasion of Venezuela would be a disaster. Estimates from 2019 predicted up to 200,000 U.S. troops would be needed to maintain order, to say nothing of the mountainous terrain that soldiers would need to traverse, and a nightmarish insurgency that would make Iraq look like a cakewalk.

But the potential risks of intervention are no longer an object to the government, just as state-building, stabilization, and producing a functioning democracy are no longer the stated priorities they may have been to past presidents. Trump’s military doctrine has focused squarely on death, destruction, terror, and destabilization as the aim — unconcerned by consequences, uncaring of justification, and desperate to create failed states where there had been functioning ones. This cavalier attitude toward the future can be seen in public statements from administration officials, with one unnamed adviser telling Axios, “Leaving Maduro in power in Venezuela is like making Jeffrey Epstein the head of a daycare.”

War abroad for nonsensical reasons has existed since time immemorial, but the age of the justified war — as in war that a government takes time to justify to the public, regardless of whether it’s based on a truth or a lie — is nearing its demise. Joe Biden justified bombing Yemen to the public by saying it needed to preserve “product shipping times.” Trump justifies bombing Venezuela because “300 million people died of drug overdoses last year,” a number that no one finds credible, but it’s just as well, a blatantly false claim no one is perturbed by any longer.

When asked by a reporter on October 15 if the CIA will be authorized to “take out” Maduro, Trump gave an answer that inadvertently summed up the absurdity of the war the United States is being slow-walked into against its will: “That’s a ridiculous question. Not really a ridiculous question, but wouldn’t it be a ridiculous question for me to answer?”

The post The U.S. Isn’t Even Bothering With Its Usual Lies to Sell Its Regime Change War in Venezuela appeared first on The Intercept.

So far, however, there has been little focus on the specifics of the attack, much less discussion of the fact that one of the targets of the March 15 strike was a civilian residence.

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After revealing on Monday that its top editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, had been invited to the Signal chat group, The Atlantic published on Wednesday the actual messages in which top Trump administration officials laid out minute-by-minute operational details and specific weapons to be used in strikes against the Houthi rebels in Yemen. The Atlantic opted to publish the chats — which included Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, national security adviser Mike Waltz, and Vice President JD Vance — only after the White House tried to deny classified details were shared.

Before the “Houthi PC small group channel” Signal messages were released, Waltz announced that recent attacks had “taken out key Houthi leadership, including their head missileer.” 

“We’ve hit their headquarters,” Waltz told CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, prior to Goldberg’s revelations. “We’ve hit communications nodes, weapons factories, and even some of their over-the-water drone production facilities.” 

In the group chat, however, Waltz indicated that in order to kill a Houthi official, the U.S. military destroyed a civilian home or 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.

“Excellent,” Vance replied.

The attack was another in a long-running war — by the U.S. and its proxies — against the Houthis. For years, the United States backed an atrocity-filled air campaign led by Saudi Arabia against the militant group. Just after entering office, President Joe Biden formally delisted the Houthis as a terrorist group. After the Houthis began attacking ships — including U.S. warships — in the Red Sea and in the Gulf of Aden in retaliation for the U.S.-backed Israeli war on Gaza, Biden reclassified them as terrorists and began launching attacks.

President Donald Trump began his own campaign of strikes targeting the Houthis earlier this month, after the Yemeni militants threatened to attack “Israeli” ships again over Israel’s blockade preventing aid entering the Gaza Strip. (The rebels have had an expansive definition of what constitutes an Israeli ship, targeting vessels of various nations.) Trump’s air campaign has already killed more than 50 people since March 15.

“Too often the news coverage of the Signal chat leak has lacked any real discussion of the actual act of war itself — the fact that the U.S. is bombing people in Yemen,” Stephanie Savell, the director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University, told The Intercept. “Fifty-three people have died in this latest wave of U.S. airstrikes, five of them children. These are just the latest deaths in a long track record of U.S. killing in Yemen, and the research shows that U.S. airstrikes in many countries have a history of killing and traumatizing innocent civilians and wreaking havoc on people’s lives and livelihoods.”

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Over the last century, the U.S. military has shown a consistent disregard for civilian lives. It has repeatedly cast or misidentified ordinary people as enemies; failed to investigate civilian harm allegations; excused casualties as regrettable but unavoidable; and failed to prevent their recurrence or to hold troops accountable. These long-standing practices sit in stark contrast to the U.S. government’s public campaigns to sell its wars as benign, its air campaigns as precise, its concern for civilians as overriding, and the deaths of innocent people as “tragic” anomalies.

Last year, The Intercept drew attention to a racist and dehumanizing “morale patch” on the uniform of Lt. Kyle Festa, a pilot involved in the Biden administration’s war on the Houthis. Festa’s patch featured crosshairs over likenesses of the Tusken Raiders, the fictional “sand people” who attacked Luke Skywalker in the 1977 movie “Star Wars.” The patch read “Houthi Hunting Club. Red Sea 2023-2024.”

The Pentagon did not answer questions about the Trump administration’s targeting of the Houthi official’s “girlfriend’s building” or reports of civilian casualties resulting from the March 15 attack prior to publication. “Please direct your questions to the NSC,” an unnamed spokesperson replied by email, using the acronym for the National Security Council.

The White House told The Intercept that press secretary Karoline Leavitt addressed the issues during a briefing on Wednesday. She did not mention civilian casualties and only referenced attacks on “Houthi terrorists.”

“At the very least this should prompt Americans to raise some serious, urgent questions about why and for what goals the U.S. military is killing Yemeni civilians,” said Savell. 

The post The Real Outrage About the Yemen Signal Group Is That It Called for Attack on Civilian Home appeared first on The Intercept.

“He does not see his actions on 2 SEP as a ‘double tap,’” Col. Allie Weiskopf, a Special Operations Command spokesperson told The Intercept on Tuesday in response to questions about the follow-up attack.

In military jargon, the term “double tap” — which has no legal or doctrinal meaning — typically refers to a follow-on strike to kill rescuers or first responders. Such attacks have been carried out by U.S. forces in conflicts including the drone wars in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. Israel has carried out double-tap strikes in its most recent war on Gaza, targeting journalists and rescue efforts.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth acknowledged U.S. forces conducted a follow-up strike on the alleged drug boat during a Cabinet meeting at the White House on Tuesday, but distanced himself from the killing of individuals clinging to the wreckage. “I didn’t personally see survivors,” Hegseth told reporters, noting that he watched live footage of the attack. “The thing was on fire. It was exploded in fire and smoke. You can’t see it.” He added, “This is called the fog of war.”

Hegseth said Bradley — then the commander of Joint Special Operations Command and now head of Special Operations Command — “made the right call” in ordering the second strike after Hegseth allegedly left the room.

The statements from Hegseth and Special Operations Command on Tuesday mark an evolution in the Pentagon’s response to the killings. But several government officials and experts on the laws of war said messaging focusing on technical definitions misses the reason this strike has drawn widespread condemnation.

“Quibbling over the semantics of ‘double-tap’ doesn’t change the reality that the strike was a summary execution of men clinging to the remains of a boat,” Sarah Harrison, who advised Pentagon policymakers on issues related to human rights and the law of war in her former role as associate general counsel at the Pentagon’s Office of General Counsel, International Affairs, told The Intercept.

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The military has carried out 21 known attacks, destroying 22 boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean since September, killing at least 83 civilians. Since the attacks began, experts in the laws of war and members of Congress, from both parties, say the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat. In the long-running U.S. war on drugs, suspected smugglers have been arrested by law enforcement rather than subjected to summary execution.

The multiple strikes on September 2 added a second layer of illegality to attacks that experts and lawmakers say are already tantamount to murder. “Persons who have been incapacitated by wounds, sickness, or shipwreck are in a helpless state, and it would be dishonorable and inhumane to make them the object of attack,” reads the Pentagon’s Law of War Manual.

Weiskopf did not respond to other questions by The Intercept. “ADM Bradley looks forward to briefing Congress on your questions. He will do this on Thursday,” she wrote in an email.

Capitol Hill staffers say that Bradley is currently slated to only meet with the House Armed Services Committee Chair Mike Rogers, R-Ala., and ranking member Adam Smith, D-Wash., and the Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Roger Wicker, R-Miss., and ranking member Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I.

The post Department of War Disputes Second Attack on Boat Strike Survivors Was a “Double-Tap” appeared first on The Intercept.

The White House and Pentagon won’t tell the American people where the U.S. is at war, and Trump has never gone to Congress for war authorization. But an analysis by The Intercept reveals that Trump has embroiled the U.S. in more than 20 military interventions, armed conflicts, and wars during his five-plus years in the White House. Due to a lack of government transparency, obscure security cooperation, and carveouts baked into the U.S. Code — like the 127e authority enacted in the wake of the September 11 attacks, and the covert action statute that enables the CIA to conduct secret wars — the actual number could be markedly higher.

During his two terms in office, Trump has overseen armed interventions and military operations — including drone strikes, ground raids, proxy wars, 127e programs, and full-scale conflicts — in Afghanistan, Central African Republic, Cameroon, Ecuador, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Kenya, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia, Syria, Tunisia, Venezuela, Yemen, and an unspecified country in the Indo-Pacific region, as well as attacks on civilians in boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. More than 6,500 U.S. Special Operations forces’ “operators and enablers” are currently deployed in more than 80 countries around the world. And during its second term, the Trump administration has also bullied Panama and threatened Canada, Colombia, Cuba, Greenland (perhaps also Iceland), and Mexico.

Under the U.S. Constitution, it’s Congress that has the authority to declare war, not the president, pointed out Katherine Yon Ebright, counsel in the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program.

“Congress has not authorized conflicts in this wide array of contexts, and indeed many lawmakers — to say nothing of members of the public — would be surprised to learn that hostilities have taken place in many of these countries,” Ebright said. “Congressional authorization isn’t just a box-checking exercise: It’s a means of ensuring that the solemn decision to go to war is made democratically and accountably, with a clear purpose and goal that the American people can support.”

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Despite the fact that the U.S. has not declared war since 1941, its military has fought near-constant wars from Korea to Vietnam from the 1950s through the 1970s to Afghanistan and Iraq in the 21st century, as the executive branch has come to dominate the government and Congress has abdicated its constitutional duty to declare war.

For years, the Pentagon has even attempted to define war out of existence, claiming that it does not treat 127e and similar authorities as authorizations for the use of military force. In practice, however, Special Operations forces have used these authorities to create and control proxy forces and sometimes engage in combat alongside them. Recent presidents have also consistently claimed broad rights to act in self-defense, not only of U.S. forces but also for partner forces.

The Trump administration has even claimed the full-scale conflict in Iran is something other than what it is. Earlier this month, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby refused to call it a war. “I think we’re in a military action at this point,” he told lawmakers.

Trump routinely refers to the conflict with Iran as a war, but he has also cast it as an “excursion.” Trump has also erroneously claimed that if he doesn’t call the conflict with Iran a “war,” it circumvents Congress’s constitutional authority.

“We have a thing called a war, or as they would rather say, a military operation. It’s for legal reasons,” he said on Friday. “I don’t need any approvals. As a war you’re supposed to get approval from Congress. Something like that.”

EArlier This month, Special Operations Command chief Adm. Frank M. Bradley told the House Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations that secret-war capabilities were key for the United States.

“This environment places a premium on forces capable of operating persistently inside contested spaces, below the threshold of armed conflict,” he said. “Small footprints are necessary to enable denial strategies, strengthen allied resilience, and contribute to deterrence without triggering escalation, and to counter illicit and malign activity without large-scale military presence.”

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Bradley claimed America’s enemies “blur the lines between competition and conflict,” but this is precisely what America has done for decades, including numerous secret wars during both Trump terms. The United States has waged unconstitutional and clandestine conflicts through a variety of mechanisms. The covert action statute, for example, provides the authority for secret, unattributed, and primarily CIA-led operations that can involve the use of force. It has been used during the forever wars, including under Trump, to conduct drone strikes outside areas of active hostilities. It was apparently employed in the first U.S. strike on Venezuela in late 2025 — a prelude to a war, days later, that led to the kidnapping of that country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, by U.S. Special Operations forces.

The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, which was enacted in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and has been stretched by successive administrations to cover a broad assortment of terrorist groups — most of which did not exist on September 11 — has been used to justify counterterrorism operations, including ground combat, airstrikes, and support of partner militaries, in at least 22 countries, according to a 2021 report by Brown University’s Costs of War Project.

Under Trump, even this signature post-9/11 workaround for war has been eschewed for something more clandestine. Top Pentagon leadership wanted to keep so-called “advise, assist and accompany” or “AAA” missions — which can be indistinguishable from combat — under wraps during Trump’s first term. This led then-Defense Secretary James Mattis to order U.S. operations in Africa to be kept “off the front page,” a former senior U.S. official told the International Crisis Group.

But the bid to keep Trump’s other African wars secret imploded during a May 2017 AAA mission when Navy SEAL Kyle Milliken was killed and two other Americans were wounded in a raid on an al-Shabab camp in Somalia. The Pentagon initially claimed that Somali forces were out ahead of Milliken — U.S. troops are supposed to remain at the last position of cover and concealment where they remain out of sight and protected — but that fiction fell apart, and the truth emerged that he was, in fact, alongside them.

This was followed by an October 2017 debacle in Tongo Tongo, Niger, where ISIS fighters ambushed American troops, killing four U.S. soldiers and wounding two others. The U.S. initially claimed troops were providing “advice and assistance” to local counterparts. In truth, until bad weather prevented it, the ambushed team was slated to support another group of American and Nigerien commandos attempting to kill or capture an ISIS leader as part of Obsidian Nomad II, another 127e program.

Under 127e, U.S. commandoes — including Army Green Berets, Navy SEALs, and Marine Raiders — arm, train, and provide intelligence to foreign forces. Unlike traditional foreign assistance programs, which are primarily intended to build local capacity, 127e partners are then dispatched on U.S.-directed missions, targeting U.S. enemies to achieve U.S. aims.

During Trump’s first term, U.S. Special Operations forces conducted at least 23 separate 127e programs across the world. Previous reporting by The Intercept has documented many 127e efforts in Africa and the Middle East, including a partnership with a notoriously abusive unit of the Cameroonian military, also during Trump’s first term, that continued long after its members were connected to mass atrocities. In addition to Cameroon, Niger, and Somalia, the U.S. has conducted 127e programs in Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Mali, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen, and an undisclosed country in the Indo-Pacific region.

“During the global war on terror, the Department of Defense built out its capacity, and secured legal authorities, to operate ‘by, with, and through’ foreign militaries and paramilitaries,” Ebright said, noting that these authorities had been designed for countering al-Qaeda but had led to led to combat against groups that had not been debated and approved by Congress. “These smaller-scale, unauthorized hostilities through or alongside foreign partners may seem quaint compared to the Iran War and other recent public and persistent hostilities, but for years they deepened the perception that the president may use force whenever and wherever he pleases, even without specific congressional authorization.”

For almost one year, the White House has failed to respond to repeated requests from The Intercept for information about past and current 127e programs.

“While Trump claims to be the president of peace, he is actually the conflict-in-chief, waging many pointless and deadly wars, ensuring generational animosity towards a rogue U.S.,” said Sarah Harrison, an associate general counsel at the Pentagon’s Office of General Counsel, International Affairs during Trump’s first term. “His actions are not just unconstitutional and in violation of international law, they make Americans less safe and their wallets less full.”

During his second term, Trump has made overt war across the African continent, conducting airstrikes from Nigeria to Somalia. In the Middle East, Trump has left a trail of civilians dead, from a migrant detention facility in Yemen to an elementary school in Iran.

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America’s punishing war on Iran has ground on for over a month without a clear definition of victory, a plan for the aftermath, or coherent strategy behind bellicose rhetoric and shifting claims, most recently that the U.S. is fighting a regime change war and will possibly seize Iran’s oil.

“We’ve had regime change if you look already because the one regime was decimated, destroyed, they’re all dead,” Trump said on Sunday, referring to top ranking officials killed in the war including the late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “The next regime is mostly dead.”

Additional U.S. forces are now being sped to the Middle East to augment more than 40,000 troops already stationed in the region. This included dozens of fighter jets, bombers, and other aircraft, as well as two carrier strike groups. (The USS Gerald R. Ford had to since abandon the fight and travel to port, following a fire on the ship.)

More than 2,000 additional Marines arrived in the region over the weekend, and 2,000 more are on their way by ship. A similar number of paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division are expected to arrive soon. The influx of troops comes as Trump has threatened to seize Iran’s oilfields.

“To be honest with you, my favorite thing is to take the oil in Iran but some stupid people back in the U.S. say: ‘why are you doing that?’ But they’re stupid people,” he told the Financial Times on Sunday. In a Monday Truth Social post, Trump threatened to commit war crimes by “blowing up and completely obliterating all of [Iran’s] Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinization plants!)”

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The Pentagon has already requested $200 billion in supplemental funds to pay for the Iran war, and the ultimate cost is expected to run into the trillions of dollars.

The U.S. is also ramping up conflicts in the Western hemisphere. Since attacking Venezuela and abducting its president in January, the U.S. has reportedly undertaken a regime-change operation in Cuba, attempting to push out President Miguel Díaz-Canel. Trump has also repeatedly spoken of “taking” Cuba. He has also threatened to annex Greenland (and possibly Iceland), turn Canada into a U.S. state, and carry out military strikes in Mexico.

The chief of U.S. Special Operations Command recently referenced the “perceived increase of U.S. support to counter-cartel operations in Mexico” and said his elite troops “remain postured to provide… support to Mexican military and security forces to dismantle narco-terrorist organizations.”  The U.S. claims to be currently at war with at least 24 cartels and criminal gangs it will not name.

Under Operation Southern Spear, the U.S. has conducted an illegal campaign of strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific Ocean, destroying 49 vessels and killing more than 160 civilians. The latest strike, on March 25 in the Caribbean, killed four people.

“Trump wants to call DoD’s summary executions on the high seas a war because he thinks that will allow him to kill civilians. And he wants to call the war in Iran a military operation so he doesn’t have to go to Congress for approval,” explained Harrison, who also previously served in the White House Office of Legislative Affairs. “It doesn’t matter what imaginary legal constructs Trump comes up with, it won’t protect him or his officials from accountability for these undeniably illegal uses of force.”

The boat strikes recently moved to land as so-called “bilateral kinetic actions against cartel targets along the Colombia-Ecuador border” on unnamed “designated terrorist organizations.” “The joint effort, named ‘Operation Total Extermination,’ is the start of a military offensive by Ecuador against transnational criminal organizations with the support of the U.S.,” Joseph Humire, the acting assistant secretary of war for homeland defense and Americas security affairs, announced earlier this month. That U.S.–Ecuadorian campaign has already strayed into Colombia after a farm was bombed or hit by “ricochet effect” on March 3, leaving an unexploded 500-pound bomb lying in Colombia’s border region.

Harrison drew attention to the human costs of the raft of conflicts being waged by the Trump administration, remarking on “all the people who are needlessly dying because of one man’s ego and how it makes the U.S. much less safe.”

Successive White Houses and the Pentagon have also kept secret the full list of groups with which the U.S. is in conflict. In 2015, The Intercept asked the Pentagon for “a complete and exhaustive list of the groups and individuals, including affiliates and/or associated forces, against which the U.S. military is authorized to take direct action” — a Pentagon euphemism for attacks. Eleven years later, we’re still waiting for an answer. Asked more recently for a simple count — just the number — of wars, conflicts, interventions, and kinetic operations, the Office of the Secretary of Defense offered no answers. “Your queries have been received and sent to the appropriate department,” a spokesperson told The Intercept weeks ago before ghosting this reporter.

“The proliferation of unauthorized, presidentially initiated conflicts raises profound challenges for our rule of law, democracy, and accountability around matters of war and peace,” said Ebright. “This is true, too, of secret wars that government officials may refer to as ‘light-footprint warfare’ or ‘low-intensity conflict,’ not the least because we’ve repeatedly seen intermittent strikes or raids give way to protracted military engagements and larger-scale operations.”

Bradley — perhaps best known for ordering the double-tap strike that killed two shipwrecked men last fall — recently offered a murky catalogue of “state adversaries, terrorists, and transnational criminal networks” aligned against the United States, including China, Russia, “Iran, its proxy forces, and terrorist organizations,” and other unnamed “state adversaries”; transnational criminal organizations that “continue to attempt to exploit the southern approaches to the United States”; ISIS and Al Qaeda affiliates; as well as “terrorists” and “extremist groups” in Africa. The State Department currently counts 94 foreign terrorist organizations around the world, including 13 that were designated back in 1997. Thirty-seven groups, about 40 percent of the list, were added under Trump — 27 during his second term. The most recent addition, the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood, was designated earlier this month. The administration also maintains a secret list of domestic terrorist organizations which it will not disclose.

For weeks, The Intercept has asked if the White House even knows how many wars, conflicts, kinetic operations, and military interventions the U.S. is currently involved in. We have never received a response.

The post Trump’s Secret Wars on the World Keep Expanding appeared first on The Intercept.

But now, under the control of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, the Department of Defense is reversing course.

The Intercept spoke with five current and former Defense Department officials familiar with its Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response, or CHMR, efforts, who say that the Pentagon is in the process of eliminating or downsizing offices, programs, and positions focused on preventing civilian casualties during U.S. combat operations.

On the chopping block are the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response office, which handles policies that reduce dangers to noncombatants, and the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, which is focused on training and tools for preventing civilian casualties.

The Army also recently announced it will make law of war training — which covers basic battlefield ethics, prohibited acts, and rules of engagement — optional, in an effort to remove “unnecessary distractions” and increase focus on “decisive action in combat.” 

This comes as Hegseth trumpets an overwhelming emphasis on “lethality” and cuts to programs that run afoul of Trump administration priorities. Hegseth also reportedly plans to overhaul the entire JAG Corps, which is essential to ensuring adherence to the rule of law and upholding the Uniform Code of Military Justice, after firing the judge advocates general of the Army, Navy, and Air Force.

Trump has also rolled back constraints on American commanders to authorize airstrikes and Special Operations raids outside conventional battlefields, broadening the range of people who can be targeted. After Trump relaxed targeting principles during his first term, attacks and reports of civilian casualties in war zones like Somalia and Yemen spiked.

“There is an overt and ongoing effort to completely shut the Center down and to remove CHMR across all the commands,” said Wes Bryant, who until recently served as the chief of civilian harm assessments and senior analyst and adviser on precision warfare, targeting, and civilian harm mitigation at the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence. “Basically, they are wiping DoD of anything related to Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response.”

The four other officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution or to preserve their ability to lobby behind the scenes, expressed varying levels of concern over how the demise of CHMR would affect combat operations and what Hegseth’s priorities might mean for the world. One of them mused that “lethality” might prove to be only meaningless jargon, but worried that it could indicate something far worse: eschewing military professionalism in favor of “wanton killing and wholesale destruction and disregard for law.”

CHMR-oriented personnel at combatant commands around the world will be shuffled into new roles, according to some of the officials. Central Command, or CENTCOM, which oversees military operations across the Middle East, pushed back on this when contacted by The Intercept, stating that the “CHMR team at CENTCOM will continue to provide civilian harm mitigation and assessment support to the command for the foreseeable future.”

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Several officials were hopeful that a concerted effort by advocates to preserve some CHMR work at the Pentagon and at combatant commands would allow harm mitigation efforts to endure within different structures and under different names. But even one of those former officials said that the CHMR enterprise was likely to end up “stillborn,” unable to even complete the phased implementation first laid out in the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan — written at the direction of then-Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin — that was released in 2022.

One official emphasized that CHMR’s core principles provide more benefits to the military than an overriding focus on lethality. “Shrinking or perverting it beyond recognition or getting rid of it altogether does a disservice to the men and women of the DoD and the institution itself, not to mention the American public,” that official said.

The Pentagon refuses to say whether Hegseth will rescind the CHMR instruction, which established the Pentagon’s policies, responsibilities, and procedures for mitigating and responding to noncombatant casualties. “We have no new announcements to make regarding office closures or changes to policy at this time,” an unnamed Pentagon spokesperson replied, by email, to repeated detailed questions.

“Dismantling these efforts would undermine years of work to learn from past mistakes and improve how the U.S. prevents and responds to civilian harm from its operations — work that actually began under the first Trump administration,” said Annie Shiel, the U.S. advocacy director at the Center for Civilians in Conflict. “Congress mandated many of these efforts through bipartisan legislation, and it must ensure that the programs it authorized and funded are not abandoned.”

Hegseth has made it clear that enhancing his department’s capacity to kill people is his number one priority. “Your job [as secretary] is to make sure that it’s lethality, lethality, lethality. Everything else is gone. Everything else that distracts from that shouldn’t be happening,” he said during his confirmation process. Since taking the helm at the Pentagon, Hegseth has doubled down. “We will revive the warrior ethos,” he announced. “We will remain the strongest and most lethal force in the world.”

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As a Fox News personality, Hegseth — a former Army National Guard officer who served in Afghanistan and Iraq — cast troops charged with war crimes as “heroes.” During Trump’s first term in office, Hegseth lobbied for pardons of Army Lt. Clint Lorance and Army Maj. Mathew Golsteyn, and championed Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher, each of whom was charged or convicted of war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Trump granted pardons to Lorance and Golsteyn, and reversed a demotion of Gallagher, tagging Hegseth in a tweet announcing the review of one of the cases.

Hegseth takes a dim view of the Geneva Conventions, which form the foundation of the law of armed conflict, or LOAC, and remain the most important rules limiting the barbarity of war by protecting civilians, wounded combatants, and prisoners of war, among others. In his 2024 book, “The War on Warriors,” Hegseth asked, “Should we follow the Geneva conventions? … Aren’t we just better off in winning our wars according to our own rules?”

At his Senate confirmation hearing, Hegseth said that during his time in the military, “restrictive rules of engagement” briefed to him by a military lawyer, known as a JAG, made war-fighting more difficult. But rules of engagement, which provide instructions for the use of deadly force in military operations, are issued by a senior commander — not a JAG officer.

Bryant — who worked as a Special Operations joint terminal attack controller, or JTAC, and called in thousands of strikes against the Islamic State and other terrorist groups across the greater Middle East before serving as chief of civilian harm assessment — said that Hegseth has little grasp of the laws of war.

“In Hegseth, you have a Secretary of Defense who really does not understand LOAC. Every time I’ve heard him talking about his time in Afghanistan and the law of armed conflict, he’s talking about things that were not actually LOAC but policy,” said Bryant. “So, Hegseth blames all his experiences of being overly restricted in combat on military lawyers and LOAC — when the types of operational restrictions he has cited have nothing to do with lawyers, the law of armed conflict, or international law.”

the Signal Chat among senior Trump administration officials (and a journalist) discussing military strikes in Yemen revealed that the attack targeted a civilian residence in an effort to kill a Houthi target. It is one of more than 200 strikes conducted in Yemen by the Trump administration since the beginning of March, carried out in an attempt to force Houthi fighters to halt attacks on ships in the Red Sea, which the Houthis say is in response to Israel’s war in Gaza. Local Yemeni authorities say more than 50 civilians have been killed in the attacks.

(Hegseth is currently under investigation for his use of Signal, the end-to-end encrypted messaging app. That inquiry is being conducted by Acting Inspector General Steven Stebbins because Trump fired Robert Storch from his Senate-confirmed Pentagon inspector general role as part of his firings of 17 inspectors general across the government in January.)

Fifteen civilians were reportedly killed and at least 20 injured in strikes on March 15 and 16, alone, according to Airwars, the U.K.-based airstrike monitoring group. “In just two days of strikes under the new Trump administration, U.S. forces reportedly killed half the number of civilians killed in a full year of strikes under Biden,” the group reported.

These strikes were conducted with CENTCOM’s civilian harm mitigation and response officers still on the job. “The CHMR team at U.S. CENTCOM continues to be focused on their assigned tasks. There has been no change to their status or work focus,” a nameless “defense official” told The Intercept by email. “We do not anticipate the DoD CHMR effort at CENTCOM being shutdown at this point.”

Trump also recently posted a black-and-white video showing more than 70 people gathered in a circle. An explosion occurs during the 25-second video, leaving a massive crater. “These Houthis gathered for instructions on an attack,” Trump claimed, without offering a location or any other details about the strike. “Oops, there will be no attack by these Houthis!”

A former U.S. drone pilot and strike cell analyst, who served in the CENTCOM and Africa Command regions during the first Trump administration was skeptical of the vetting process that identified the targets in Trump’s video. “My suspicion is that it is very low. NAI — names, area of interest — and gatherings would be all that is required. This is not proper vetting, if this is what they are doing,” he told The Intercept on the condition of anonymity due to his nondisclosure agreements with the government. “Remember in his first term the whole of AFRICOM was shut down due to negligent strikes. They had multiple ‘missed’ strikes that killed civilians.”

After Trump relaxed targeting principles during his first term, attacks in Somalia tripled and U.S. military and independent counts of civilian casualties across U.S. war zones — including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen — increased. Since taking office a second time, Trump again rolled back constraints on American commanders to authorize airstrikes and Special Operations raids outside conventional war zones.

During his first overseas trip as defense secretary, Hegseth met with senior AFRICOM leaders and signed a directive easing policy constraints and executive oversight on airstrikes. “The president and the secretary of defense have given me expanded authorities,” Gen. Michael Langley, the chief of AFRICOM recently told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “We’re hitting them hard. I now have the capability to hit them harder.”

A 2023 investigation by The Intercept found that one April 2018 attack on al-Shabaab militants in Somalia — conducted under Trump’s loosened rules — killed three, and possibly five, civilians, including 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter, Mariam Shilow Muse. At the time, AFRICOM announced it had killed “five terrorists” and that “no civilians were killed in this airstrike.”

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The Pentagon’s inquiry into the attack that killed Luul and Mariam found that the Americans who conducted the strike were confused and inexperienced and that they argued about basic details, like how many passengers were in the targeted vehicle. The U.S. strike cell members mistook a woman and a child for an adult male, killing Luul and Mariam in a follow-up attack as they ran from the truck in which they had hitched a ride to visit relatives. Despite this, the investigation — by the unit that conducted the strike — concluded that standard operating procedures and the rules of engagement were followed. No one was ever held accountable for the deaths. For more than six years, Luul and Mariam’s family has tried to contact the U.S. government, including through an online civilian casualty reporting portal run by AFRICOM, but did not receive a response.

When asked how the demise of CHMR would affect AFRICOM operations, spokesperson Kelly Cahalan punted. “CHMR is an OSD policy,” she told The Intercept, referring to the Office of the Secretary of Defense. “We aren’t going to speculate about potential policy changes.”

Multiple sources, speaking on background, said that CENTCOM chief Gen. Michael “Erik” Kurilla had specifically advocated for civilian harm mitigation efforts, which the Washington Post previously reported, purportedly telling others that his CHMR officers were an integral part of the command’s operations. CENTCOM refused to offer comment. “We have nothing to provide you on this,” a “defense official” wrote in an email.

Some experts worry that the pending demise of CHMR, the firings of the judge advocates general, and loosened rules of engagement for drone strikes and commando raids is part of a broader push to shunt aside ethics and accountability across the military.

“We’re seeing a dramatic reversal of progress across the armed forces, which will ultimately undermine the United States’ strategic goals. Military success isn’t measured by the number of people the armed forces kill; it’s measured by winning carefully-planned battles designed to achieve a strategic military goal without causing needless destruction,” Daphne Eviatar, the director of the Security With Human Rights program at Amnesty International USA, told The Intercept. “By emphasizing lethality and eliminating training on the laws of war, loosening rules of engagement and firing anyone with power to exercise oversight over U.S. armed forces, the U.S. is setting up its own warfighters to fail.”

Bryant voiced similar concerns about where the potential demise of CHMR efforts would ultimately lead. “I do worry about the direction that Hegseth and the Trump administration are going after this first step of dissolving the CHMR enterprise. Is this administration now going to try to change the warfighting culture and doctrinal standards of the U.S. military, and have us executing our next conflict more like Israel has carried out in Gaza?” he asked. “If we do get into a large-scale conflict — whether in Europe or China or elsewhere — will we not care one way or another about the civilian populace? Will our current low tolerance for civilian casualties and historically conservative application of ‘proportionality’ under international law be completely reversed?”

The post Pete Hegseth Is Gutting Pentagon Programs That Reduce Civilian Casualties appeared first on The Intercept.

America’s latest gunboat diplomacy gambit comes as Trump’s two main envoys, his friend Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner, have engaged in indirect talks with Iranian diplomats in Geneva. The talks are taking place even though Trump previously said no agreement with Iran was necessary. “I don’t care if I have an agreement or not,” he announced last June. “I could get a statement that they’re not going to go nuclear.” Trump added: “They’re not going to be doing it anyway.”

Trump reversed himself late last month imploring Iran to “quickly ‘Come to the Table’” or face more strikes. On Thursday, at a gathering of his self-styled Board of Peace in Washington, Trump reiterated his call for a deal. “Now is the time for Iran to join us on a path that will complete what we’re doing,” he said. “If it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen. But bad things will happen if it doesn’t.”

“A massive Armada is heading to Iran,” Trump announced on Truth Social.

The United States has, in fact, spent weeks moving military assets into place for a potential resumption of the war on Iran. The Ford alone can carry more than 75 aircraft, including F-35 Lightning II stealth fighters and F/A-18 Super Hornets, as well as EA-18 Growler radar-jamming jets. The Lincoln is accompanied by three warships that are equipped with Tomahawk missiles, which were used to strike two of Iran’s nuclear facilities last June. In addition to destroyers, cruisers, and submarines at sea, the U.S. has moved additional air assets needed for sustained conflict across the Atlantic including a U-2 Dragon Lady spy plane, dozens of refueling tankers, scores of additional fighter jets, and critical E-3 Sentry Airborne Warning and Control System jets, which can provide advanced radar, communications, and sensors to track and thwart planes, drones, and cruise missiles.

The massive accumulation of military forces in preparation for a potential war with Iran dwarfs even the monthslong build-up that proceeded the U.S. coup in Venezuela that saw its leader Nicolás Maduro deposed and power transferred to a U.S.-backed puppet regime.

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Three U.S. officials with long experience in the Middle East told The Intercept that they do not believe Trump has made a final decision to launch a new attack on Iran but the chances of it are high. All said that the U.S. attacks could possibly destabilize the Iranian regime, spur a grave humanitarian crisis, and have major impacts across the region. None thought the Trump administration had anything but vague plans to deal with such blowback.

All three officials believed that sufficient U.S. military assets were in place for a sustained military campaign. One said that Tehran may see the second major U.S. attack in a year as an existential crisis and respond by launching a more formidable counterattack than its ineffectual strikes on America’s Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar in 2025.

Over the past month, the U.S. military has moved critical air defense equipment — including Patriot missile batteries and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense systems, also known as THAAD — to the region to protect U.S. troops and allies from Iranian ballistic missiles.

Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., said he believes reports that Trump administration officials think there’s a 90 percent chance the president will order strikes on Iran. He said that such a war would be “catastrophic” and lead to counterattacks that put U.S. troops in the region at risk.

Iran has repeatedly warned of retaliatory strikes on U.S. troops and allies in response to any American attack. Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz earlier this week to conduct military exercises. 

Khanna announced on Thursday that he and Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., would attempt to force a vote on a war powers resolution regarding Iran next week. “I am confident we can win this vote and assemble a bipartisan coalition,” Khanna told The Intercept. Khanna believes they can force the vote before Trump attacks Iran, but one of the government officials expressed concern that strikes could come as early as Sunday or Monday. Another speculated that Trump might be convinced not to conduct an attack during Ramadan — the Muslim holy month that began Wednesday — or at least wait for a “decent interval” in deference to other U.S. allies in the Middle East.

Trump is also delivering his annual State of the Union address on Tuesday with a reported focus on messaging around domestic issues ahead of fall midterm elections, which may impact his decision. The conclusion of the Winter Olympics on Sunday might also play a role in the timing of the attacks as the notion of an Olympic truce, or “Ekecheiria,” dates back millennia.

The White House did not reply to a request for comment.

For a president who ran for office promising to keep the United States out of wars, came into office claiming to be a “peacemaker, and has consistently campaigned for a Nobel Peace Prize, Trump has proven to be a warmonger. During his second term Trump has already launched attacks on Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, Yemen, and on civilians in boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. The Trump administration also claims to be at war with at least 24 cartels and criminal gangs it will not name and has also threatened Colombia, Cuba, Greenland, Iceland, and Mexico.

The post Trump Menaces Iran With Massive Armada Capable of Prolonged War appeared first on The Intercept.

In August 2023, the Defense Department unveiled Replicator, its initiative to field thousands of “all-domain, attritable autonomous (ADA2) systems”: Pentagon-speak for low-cost (and potentially AI-driven) machines — in the form of self-piloting ships, large robot aircraft, and swarms of smaller kamikaze drones — that they can use and lose en masse to overwhelm Chinese forces.

Earlier this month, two Pentagon offices leading this charge announced that four nontraditional weapons makers had been chosen for another drone program, with test flights planned for later this year. The companies building this “Enterprise Test Vehicle,” or ETV, will have to prove that their drone can fly over 500 miles and deliver a “kinetic payload,” with a focus on weapons that are low-cost, quick to build, and modular, according to a 2023 solicitation for proposals and a recent announcement from the Air Force Armament Directorate and the Defense Innovation Unit, the Pentagon’s off-the-shelf acceleration arm. Many analysts believe that the ETV initiative may be connected to the Replicator program. DIU did not return a request for clarification prior to publication.

The new robot planes will mark a shift from the Defense Department’s “legacy” drones which DIU says are “over-engineered” and “labor-intensive” to produce. The four contractors chosen for the program are Anduril Industries, Integrated Solutions for Systems, Leidos Dynetics, and Zone 5 Technologies, which were selected from a field of more than 100 applicants.

The goal is to choose one or more variants of what look to be suicide drones (weapon-makers prefer “loitering munitions”) that can be mass produced through “on-call” manufacturing and churned out in quantity as needed. (DIU did not offer clarification on whether all prototypes are expected to be strictly kamikaze aircraft.) These drones will likely be smaller than the MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper drones — which were used extensively as ground-launched, reusable, missile-firing assassination weapons during the first decades of the war on terror — and more versatile, since the new ETVs must include an air-delivered variant that can be dropped or launched from cargo aircraft.

For the last 25 years, uncrewed Predators and Reapers, piloted by military personnel on the ground, have been killing civilians across the planet, from Afghanistan and Libya to Syria and Yemen.

To highlight just one instance, a 2018 U.S. drone strike in Somalia killed at least three, and possibly five, civilians — including 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter Mariam Shilow Muse — as revealed by a 2023 investigation by The Intercept, prompting two dozen human rights organizations and five members of Congress to call for the Pentagon to compensate Luul and Mariam’s family for the deaths. 

Experts worry that mass production of new low-cost, deadly drones will lead to even more civilian casualties. “The clear danger is that these drones will be used at a greater scale, raising questions about the possibility of civilian harm,” Priyanka Motaparthy, the director of the Project on Counterterrorism, Armed Conflict and Human Rights at Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute, told The Intercept. “We need to know if these drones might be used in situations that put civilians at risk. We need to know how risks will be assessed.”

While U.S. drones have relied on human operators to conduct lethal strikes — many times with disastrous results — advances in artificial intelligence have increasingly raised the possibility of robot planes, in various nations’ arsenals, selecting their own targets. 

Electronic jamming by Russia in the Ukraine war has spurred a shift to autonomous drones that lock on a target and continue their mission even when communications with a human operator have been severed. Last year, the Ukrainian drone company Saker claimed its fully autonomous Saker Scout was using AI to identify and attack 64 different types of Russian “military objects.”

Ukraine has employed as many as 10,000 low-cost drones per month to counter the Russian military’s advantage in forces. Pentagon officials see Ukraine’s drone force as a model for countering the larger military of the People’s Republic of China. “Replicator is meant to help us overcome the PRC’s biggest advantage, which is mass,” said Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, one of the officials overseeing that program.

Last month, the Pentagon announced it would “accelerate fielding of the Switchblade-600 loitering munition” — a kamikaze anti-armor drone from contractor AeroVironment that flies overhead until it finds a target — that has been used extensively in Ukraine. “This is a critical step in delivering the capabilities we need, at the scale and speed we need,” said Adm. Samuel Paparo, commander of Indo-Pacific Command, or INDOPACOM.

At a recent NATO conference, Alex Bornyakov, Ukraine’s deputy minister of digital transformation, discussed the potential for using AI and a network of acoustic sensors to target a Russian “war criminal” for assassination by autonomous drone. “Computer vision works,” he said. “It’s already proven.”

The use of autonomous weapons has been subject to debate for over a decade. Since 2013, the Stop Killer Robots campaign, which has grown to a coalition of more than 250 nongovernmental organizations including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, has called for a legally binding treaty banning autonomous weapons. 

Pentagon regulations released last year state that fully- and semi-autonomous weapons systems must be used “in accordance with the law of war” and “DoD AI Ethical Principles.” The latter, released in 2020, only stipulate, however, that personnel will exercise “appropriate” levels of “judgment and care” when it comes to developing and deploying AI.

But “care” has never been an American hallmark. For the last century, the U.S. military has conducted airstrikes demonstrating a consistent disregard for civilians: casting or misidentifying ordinary people as enemies; failing to investigate civilian harm allegations; excusing casualties as regrettable but unavoidable; and failing to prevent their recurrence or to hold troops accountable.

During the first 20 years of the war on terror, the U.S. conducted more than 91,000 airstrikes across seven major conflict zones — Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen — and killed up to 48,308 civilians, according to a 2021 analysis by Airwars, a U.K.-based airstrike monitoring group.

The Defense Department repeatedly misses its deadline for reporting the number of civilians that U.S. operations kill each year, the lowest bar for accountability for its actions. Its 2022 report was issued this April, a year late. The Pentagon blew its congressionally mandated deadline for the 2023 report on May 1 of this year. Last month, The Intercept asked Lisa Lawrence, the Pentagon spokesperson who handles civilian harm issues, why the 2023 report was late and when to expect it. A return receipt indicates that she read the email, but she failed to offer an answer.

At least one of the new drone prototypes will go into full production for the military, based on how Special Operations Command, INDOPACOM, and others evaluate their performance. The winner, or winners, of the competition will be chosen to “continue development toward a production variant capable of rapidly scalable manufacture,” according to DIU.

A drone scale-up in the absence of accountability worries Columbia Law’s Motaparthy. “The Pentagon has yet to come up with a reliable way to account for past civilian harm caused by U.S. military operations,” she said. “So the question becomes, ‘With the potential rapid increase in the use of drones, what safeguards potentially fall by the wayside? How can they possibly hope to reckon with future civilian harm when the scale becomes so much larger?’”

The post Cheap and Lethal: The Pentagon’s Plan for the Next Drone War appeared first on The Intercept.

The regional war in the Middle East now involves at least 16 different countries and includes the first strikes from Iranian territory on Israel, but the United States continues to insist that there is no broader war, hiding the extent of American military involvement. And yet in response to Iran’s drone and missile attacks Saturday, the U.S. flew aircraft and launched air defense missiles from at least eight countries, while Iran and its proxies fired weapons from Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.

The news media has been complicit in its portrayal of the regional war as nonexistent. “Biden Seeks to Head Off Escalation After Israel’s Successful Defense,” the New York Times blared this morning, ignoring that the conflict had already spread. “Iran attacks Israel, risking a full-blown regional war,” says The Economist. “Some top U.S. officials are worried that Israel may respond hastily to Iran’s unprecedented drone and missile attacks and provoke a wider regional conflict that the U.S. could get dragged into,” says NBC, parroting the White House’s deception.

The Washington-based reporting follows repeated Biden administration statements that none of this amounts to a regional war. “So far, there is not … a wider regional conflict,” Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said on Thursday, in response to a question about Israel’s strike on the Iranian Embassy. Ryder’s statement followed repeated assertions by Iranian leadership that retaliation would follow — and even a private message from the Iranians to the U.S. that if it helped defend Israel, the U.S. would also be a viable target — after which the White House reiterated its “ironclad” support for Israel.

While the world has been focused on — and the Pentagon has been stressing — the comings and goings of aircraft carriers and fighter jets to serve as a “deterrent” against Iran, the U.S. has quietly built a network of air defenses to fight its regional war. “At my direction, to support the defense of Israel, the U.S. military moved aircraft and ballistic missile defense destroyers to the region over the course of the past week,” President Joe Biden said in a statement Saturday. “Thanks to these deployments and the extraordinary skill of our servicemembers, we helped Israel take down nearly all of the incoming drones and missiles.”

As part of that network, Army long-range Patriot and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense surface-to-air missile batteries have been deployed in Iraq, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and at the secretive Site 512 base in Israel. These assets — plus American aircraft based in Kuwait, Jordan, the UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia — are knitted together in order to communicate and cooperate with each other to provide a dome over Israel (and its own regional bases). The United Kingdom is also intimately tied into the regional war network, while additional countries such as Bahrain have purchased Patriot missiles to be part of the network.

Despite this unambiguous regional network, and even after Israel’s attack on Iran’s embassy in Syria earlier this month, the Biden administration has consistently denied that the Hamas war has spread beyond Gaza. It is a policy stance — and a deception — that has held since Hamas’s October 7 attack. “The Middle East region is quieter than it has been in two decades,” Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan said in an ill-timed remark eight days before October 7. “We don’t see this conflict widening as it still remains contained to Gaza,” deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh said the day after three U.S. troops were killed by a kamikaze drone launched by an Iran-backed militia at a U.S. base in Jordan. Since then (and even before this weekend), the fighting has spread to Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and Yemen.

As part of the regional war network, four American ships, part of the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN 69) battle group, have played a central role in thwarting Iran-backed attacks. The ships are equipped with long-range Standard surface-to-air missiles and the Phalanx close-in weapon system, a Gatling gun that serves as the ship’s last lines of defense against attack. All of the ships have been conducting offensive and defensive operations in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, focused on Houthi attacks (they all shot Tomahawk sea-launched cruise missiles at targets in Yemen on January 12).

According to maritime spotters and the Navy, the destroyer USS Gravely (DDG 107) has been conducting defensive and offensive operations in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden since mid-March. It has been engaging Houthi drones and missiles fired from inside Yemen toward Israel and toward maritime traffic. The destroyer USS Mason (DDG 87) has also been operating in the Red Sea. Just on Tuesday, it targeted a Houthi anti-ship ballistic missile that was targeting the U.S. commercial ship M/V Yorktown, according to the Navy. The destroyer USS Laboon (DDG 58) arrived in the region in December and has been operating mostly in the Gulf of Aden. The guided-missile cruiser USS Philippine Sea (CG 58) arrived around Christmas and has served as the main air defense command-and-control hub.

American ships have quietly called at ports in Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Djibouti (the port of Duqm in Oman has been the most often visited foreign port). Lebanon is also involved in the conflict as Israel and Hezbollah have traded attacks.

The White House has also said that U.S. fighter jets were involved in some of the shootdowns of Iranian missiles. Flight trackers noticed a U.S. Air Force refueling plane, stationed in Qatar, flying missions over Iraq during the Iranian attack. In total, according to CNN, around 170 drones, more than 30 cruise missiles, and more than 120 ballistic missiles were launched at Israel overnight Saturday. All told, US forces were responsible for over 100 interceptions of Iranian drones and missiles, according to Israeli officials.

The post Israel Conflict Spreads to 16 Nations as Biden Admin Says There’s No War appeared first on The Intercept.

“We can confirm that there was a suspected rocket attack on August 5th against U.S. and coalition forces at Al Asad Airbase, Iraq,” a spokesperson with U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM, the umbrella organization overseeing the Middle East, told The Intercept by email. “Base personnel are conducting a post-attack damage assessment.”

The latest attack raises renewed questions about the vulnerability of U.S. bases in the region. Since Israel’s war in Gaza began last October, attacks by Iranian proxy forces on these sites have killed or wounded at least 145 U.S. personnel on Middle Eastern bases. 

U.S. and allied forces have been attacked more than 170 times during the Gaza war: 102 times in Syria, 70 in Iraq, and once in Jordan. The latter assault, in January, ignited a round of escalatory U.S. counterattacks against Iranian-allied targets that led Iran to rein in its proxies. As Israel has widened the Gaza war in recent weeks, with more provocative attacks in Lebanon, Iran, and Yemen, Iran’s partners have resumed attacks on U.S. outposts across the region.

While America’s enemies have demonstrated, to lethal effect, their knowledge of the locations of U.S. bases in the region, the Pentagon’s public affairs office claims to have no list of such outposts. “I don’t have any inherent information,” Defense Department spokesperson Pete Nguyen told The Intercept earlier this year. CENTCOM refused to comment on the locations of its bases, citing several reasons, including partners’ reluctance to admit to the presence of U.S. troops in their countries. “[O]ur relationship with the host nations is one of the reasons why this information is not made public,” CENTCOM spokesperson Vail A. Forbeck told The Intercept.

Undeterred, The Intercept launched its own investigation and developed a list of more than 60 U.S. bases, garrisons, or shared foreign facilities in the Middle East. These sites range from small combat outposts to massive air bases in 13 countries: Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. 

At least 14 of these bases have been attacked in recent years. Since October 17, 2023, alone, a mix of one-way attack drones, rockets, mortars, and close-range ballistic missiles have led to at least 145 U.S. casualties — troops and contractors — at regional outposts including three service members killed in a January drone attack on Tower 22, a facility in Jordan.

“The indefinite U.S. military presences in Iraq, Syria, and around the region have near-zero genuine strategic value for the American people, but D.C. national security elites still think the risk is well worth it. Those concerned with the well-being of our service members — such as their families — are likely less comfortable with these soldiers being sitting ducks for local militias,” said Erik Sperling of Just Foreign Policy, an advocacy group critical of mainstream Washington foreign policy. “Americans who are tired of Mideast war should be worried about how these unauthorized hostilities effectively empower regional militias to draw the U.S. into an escalation any time they desire.”

The U.S. has regularly justified maintaining secrecy about bases by claiming that, as CENTCOM told The Intercept last year, “in order to protect our forces and maintain operational security, we will not confirm U.S base locations.” Forbeck — a private contractor from the Red Gate Group working for CENTCOM — refused to provide even a count of U.S. bases in the region. “Numbers. Cannot provide that because opsec,” she said, referring to operational security, while failing to explain how providing a simple tally of bases could jeopardize U.S. personnel.

But America’s enemies, specifically Iranian-backed militias, have had no trouble finding and striking U.S. bases since the late 2010s.

Regular tit-for-tat attacks began in January 2020 when Iran’s top general, Qassim Suleimani, was killed near the Baghdad airport in a U.S. drone strike authorized by President Donald Trump. Trump said the U.S. was “totally prepared” for Iran to retaliate — which they did by firing 22 ballistic missiles at two American bases in Iraq. “All is well!” Trump proclaimed in the wake of the attack, as the U.S. claimed no U.S. troops were killed or wounded. Weeks later, the Pentagon admitted that there were actually 109 U.S. casualties.

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Lies by American officials and secrecy surrounding bases in the Middle East has allowed the Pentagon to skirt accountability on several different fronts. U.S. outposts in the region have, for example, become sites of secret sexual assault and a ready source of weapons, ammunition, and equipment for criminals and militants.

Investigations by The Intercept have found, for example, that U.S. outposts in Iraq and Syria are plagued by systematic thefts of military materiel by militias and criminal gangs. Exclusive documents obtained by The Intercept found that “multiple sensitive weapons and equipment” — including guided missile launch systems, drones, 40mm high-explosive grenades, armor-piercing rounds, and specialized field artillery tools and equipment — have been stolen without comment or announcement by the Pentagon.

Beginning in October 2023, an umbrella group calling itself the Islamic Resistance in Iraq regularly claimed that attacks on U.S. bases in that country were in retaliation for Washington’s support of Israel’s war in Gaza and were aimed at pressuring the U.S. to remove troops from the region. The attacks dwindled from March to July of this year, but after a July 17 drone attack targeting al-Asad Air Base in Iraq’s Anbar province, where U.S. personnel are deployed, a senior member of the Asaib Ahl al-Haq militia said that attacks by the “resistance factions” had resumed, following a four-month ceasefire, because a deadline given to the Iraqi government to negotiate the departure of U.S. forces from outposts there had expired. (The Iraqi government reportedly wants U.S. troops to begin withdrawing in September and to fully end their work by September 2025.)

The 64 Middle East bases identified by The Intercept have been active in recent years, according to Defense Department information or credible open-source intelligence. But without corroboration by the Pentagon, it’s impossible to know if all remain active today. What is clear are the sizable ongoing U.S. troop deployments in the region.

Despite the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 and a drawdown of forces in Iraq, there were more than 30,000 U.S. troops stationed in the Middle East in 2023, according to Pentagon figures. 

As of June, there were more than 3,800 U.S. military personnel deployed to Jordan “to support Defeat-ISIS operations” and “to enhance Jordan’s security, and to promote regional stability,” according to the White House. More than 2,300 U.S. troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia to “provide air and missile defense capabilities and support the operation of United States military aircraft.” The U.S. also reportedly has around 2,500 troops deployed to Iraq to “advise, assist, and enable select elements of the Iraqi security forces, including Iraqi Kurdish security forces.” In addition, around 900 troops are stationed in Syria to “conduct operations, in partnership with local, vetted ground forces, to address continuing terrorist threats emanating from” that country. Approximately 75 U.S. military personnel are also deployed to Lebanon to “enhance the government’s counterterrorism capabilities and to support the counterterrorism operations of Lebanese security forces.”

Numbers of personnel deployed to the Middle East regularly fluctuate. Late last week, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered additional combat aircraft and warships to the region, in response to threats from Iran and its proxies to attack Israel in the coming days to avenge the death of Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh. Haniyeh was assassinated while visiting Tehran for the inauguration of Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. (Hamas, as well as Iranian and U.S. officials, assessed that Israel, which has not publicly acknowledged its responsibility for the killing, was to blame.)

The Pentagon announced plans to send additional Air Force F-22 fighter jets and additional Navy cruisers and destroyers capable of intercepting ballistic missiles to the Middle East. Austin also directed the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, now deployed in the Pacific Ocean, to relieve the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, which is already in the region, in the coming weeks.

“When the supreme leader [of Iran] says he’s ‘going to avenge,’ we have to take that seriously. … We got to make darn sure that we’re ready, and we have the capabilities in the region to be able to help Israel defend itself and, quite frankly, defend our own people, our own facilities,” said White House national security communications adviser John Kirby on “Fox News Sunday.”

Nguyen, the Pentagon spokesperson, failed to respond to more than a dozen requests by The Intercept for updated information about attacks on U.S. troops in the Middle East.

The post The U.S. Has Dozens of Secret Bases Across the Middle East. They Keep Getting Attacked. appeared first on The Intercept.

But the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman and its supporting strike group launched the “largest airstrike in the history of the world” from an aircraft carrier on Somalia in February, said Adm. James Kilby, the Navy’s acting chief of naval operations, while speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations’ Robert B. McKeon Endowed Series on Military Strategy and Leadership on Monday.

The strike involved 16 F/A-18 Super Hornets that launched from the Truman as the carrier strike group operated in the Red Sea, a Navy official told The Intercept on condition of anonymity. When it was over, Somalia had been pummeled by around 125,000 pounds of munitions, according to Kilby. Those 60 tons of bombs killed just 14 people, according to Africa Command, or AFRICOM.

A Navy official clarified that Kilby’s “off the cuff” remarks did not mean the airstrike was comparable to the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II or even other massive bombing raids like President Richard Nixon’s 1972 Linebacker II raids in North Vietnam, also known as the “Christmas bombings.”

Other strikes from aircraft carriers have been larger in terms of bomb tonnage dropped during a single day, including during Operation Desert Storm in 1991 and during the Afghan War, according to the official. “It’s the effort from a single carrier in such a short time span,” he said, noting that the Hornets each struck their target in rapid succession. “This was a time span of minutes, it was everything hitting, and all of it coming from one aircraft carrier. That’s historically significant.”

The official refused to offer further information, which he said would constitute “tactical details.”

At the time of the mega-strike in the Horn of Africa, AFRICOM downplayed the scale of the attack using boilerplate language. “In coordination with the Federal Government of Somalia, U.S. Africa Command conducted airstrikes against ISIS-Somalia on Feb. 1, 2025,” reads the press release. “The command’s initial assessment is that multiple ISIS-Somalia operatives were killed in the airstrikes and no civilians were harmed.” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth also offered a similarly blasé assessment of the mammoth bombing at the time.

AFRICOM did not respond to requests for clarification about why it took 60 tons of bombs to kill less than 15 militants, but it was likely the type and location of the target: a series of cave complexes in the rugged terrain of the Golis Mountains in the north of Somalia.

In the months since the strike, two F/A-18 jets have fallen off the deck of the USS Harry S. Truman. In both incidents, personnel were injured in the course of the accident, and the approximately $60 million warplanes were lost to the sea.

Since taking office, President Donald Trump has ramped up the conflict in Somalia, despite running as an anti-war candidate and pitching himself as a “peacemaker.”

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After Trump relaxed targeting principles during his first term, attacks in Somalia tripled. Counts of civilian casualties published by the U.S. military and independent organizations across U.S. war zones — including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen — increased. Since taking office a second time, Trump has again rolled back constraints on American commanders to authorize airstrikes outside conventional war zones.

During his first overseas trip as defense secretary, Hegseth met with senior AFRICOM leaders and signed a directive easing policy constraints and executive oversight on air attacks. “The president and the secretary of defense have given me expanded authorities,” Gen. Michael Langley, the chief of AFRICOM, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last month. “We’re hitting them hard. I now have the capability to hit them harder.”

The Trump administration even boasted about its growing body count in Somalia on Monday. 

“We haven’t forgotten the threat posed by Jihadis. 10 more were permanently removed from the battlefield in Somalia yesterday,” the White House posted on X above black-and-white footage that shows a bomb dropped on men innocuously walking in a rural area. “That brings the total to over 100 bloodthirsty terrorists killed since President Trump was sworn in.” The administration added: “WWFY/WWKY: We will find you, and we will kill you.”

The White House did not respond to requests for additional information about the strike or civilian casualties resulting from the attacks that have killed more than 100 people in Somalia since January 20. AFRICOM recently stopped providing civilian casualty assessments in its press releases announcing U.S. attacks in Somalia. “As the new administration settles in, we’re refraining from reporting estimated battle damage assessments and providing initial assessments on civilian harm probability as a matter of course,” AFRICOM spokesperson Lt. Col. Doug Halleaux told Antiwar.com last week.

A 2023 investigation by The Intercept determined that an April 2018 drone attack in Somalia killed at least three, and possibly five, civilians, including 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter Mariam Shilow Muse. At the time, AFRICOM announced it had killed “five terrorists” and that “no civilians were killed in this airstrike.” 

The Intercept’s investigation revealed that the strike was conducted under loosened rules of engagement sought by the Pentagon and approved by the Trump White House, and that no one was ever held accountable for the civilian deaths. For more than six years, Luul and Mariam’s family has tried to contact the U.S. government, including through an online civilian casualty reporting portal run by AFRICOM, but has not received a response.

The United States has been conducting attacks in Somalia since at least 2007, with airstrikes skyrocketing during Trump’s first term. From 2007 to 2017, under the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the U.S. military carried out 43 declared airstrikes in Somalia. During Trump’s first term, AFRICOM conducted more than 200 air attacks against members of al-Shabab and the Islamic State group. The Biden administration conducted 39 declared strikes in Somalia over four years.

The U.S. has carried out almost 30 airstrikes in Somalia during Trump’s second term, according to AFRICOM and White House announcements. At this pace, AFRICOM is poised to equal or exceed the highest number of strikes in Somalia in the command’s history, 63 in 2019.

AFRICOM did not reply to detailed questions regarding attacks in Somalia prior to publication.

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Who Could Have Predicted the U.S. War in Somalia Would Fail? The Pentagon.

The U.S. war in Somalia has ground on since the opening days of the war on terror. Special Operations forces were dispatched there in 2002, followed by conventional forces, helicopters, surveillance aircraft, outposts, and drones. By 2007, the Pentagon recognized that there were fundamental flaws with U.S. military operations in the Horn of Africa, and Somalia became another forever war stalemate. By the end of his first term, Trump was ready to call it quits on the sputtering war in Somalia, ordering almost all U.S. troops out of the country in late 2020. 

The withdrawal was reversed by President Joe Biden but the tiny ISIS-Somalia faction remains “a significant threat to peace and security in Somalia,” while the larger militant group, al-Shabab, “continues to carry out complex attacks against the Government, [African Union Transition Mission in Somalia] and international forces, as well as civilians and the business community, including inside protected areas in Mogadishu,” according to a panel of experts report on Somalia issued late last year for the U.N. Security Council.

The White House did not respond to questions about Trump’s about-face on the war from the end of his first term to the beginning of his second and the goal of the strikes on Somalia. The White House also declined to respond to the question of whether if Trump was committed to winning the nearly quarter-century-old war in Somalia and, if so, when.

The post U.S. Conducts “Largest Airstrike in the History of the World” (Sort Of) appeared first on The Intercept.

“In Syria, which has seen so much misery and death, there is a new government that will hopefully will succeed in stabilizing the country and keeping peace,” Trump said. “I will be ordering the cessation of sanctions against Syria in order to give them a chance at greatness.” Trump said that Syria deserves “a fresh start.”

That new beginning does not, however, include an end to the U.S. occupation of Syrian territory, according to the Pentagon. Around 1,000 U.S. troops are currently stationed in the country.

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Missiles and Drones Among Weapons Stolen From U.S. in Iraq and Syria

The U.S. military has been operating in Syria for many years as part of its complex and often muddled military efforts in the region. America’s bases ostensibly exist to conduct “counter-ISIS missions,” but experts say they are also as a check against Iran. The outposts have come under frequent attack in recent years and have also been targeted for thefts by militias and criminal gangs.

Late last year, the government of Bashar al-Assad was toppled after a rapid offensive by rebel forces led by Syria’s current interim president, Ahmed al-Shara. Last month, reports emerged that the U.S. was shuttering three of its eight small outposts in Syria.

Experts say that withdrawing U.S. troops from a handful of bases in Syria is now long overdue and necessary to effect a real change in strategy and policy for the region.

“Lifting sanctions on Syria is a positive step — but sanctions aren’t the only holdover policy from the Assad days that the U.S. should revisit,” said Rosemary Kelanic, the director of the Middle East Program at Defense Priorities, a think tank that advocates for more restrained U.S. foreign policy. “Over 1,000 U.S. troops remain stuck in Syria without a clear mission or timetable to return. They’re a legacy of the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, but that would-be ‘caliphate’ was defeated and lost all its territory over 5 years ago. It’s time for those troops to come home.”

When asked if the U.S. was planning a withdrawal of forces from Syria, a Pentagon spokesperson referred The Intercept to an April statement that announced “the U.S. footprint in Syria” would drop “down to less than a thousand U.S. forces in the coming months,” but would not end entirely.

“The Department of Defense continues to maintain a significant amount of capability in the region and the ability to make dynamic force posture adjustments based on evolving security situations on the ground,” the statement reads.

On Wednesday, Trump spoke for about half an hour with al-Shara, whom he called a “young, attractive guy.” Trump also referred to the Syrian president’s “strong past” and called him a “fighter.” Al-Shara is designated as a terrorist by the U.S. government for his former affiliation with Al Qaeda.

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Israel Exploits Assad’s Fall to Expand Into Syria

Trump also encouraged al-Shara to “tell all foreign terrorists to leave Syria”; help the U.S. prevent the resurgence of ISIS; and sign on to the Abraham Accords, a 2020 Trump-brokered pact that established formal ties between Israel and four Arab countries, among other recommendations, according to a statement on X by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.

Fear of an ISIS revival has been the long-standing argument for keeping U.S. troops in Syria. Kelanic pointed to the recent history of Afghanistan as an argument against claims that the U.S. needs to have boots on the ground to counter any ISIS resurgence.

“The big argument against the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan was that we would see a resurgence of terrorism from al-Qaeda or ISIS. But the U.S hasn’t been targeted by terrorism from Afghanistan,” Kelanic told The Intercept. “The U.S. has detected plots by ISIS-Khorasan, which operates in Afghanistan and Pakistan, in Iran and Russia and warned those countries ahead of time. We’re able to still detect what’s going on with extremely sophisticated intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities without having boots on the ground.”

The White House did not respond for a request for comment concerning the continued U.S. troop presence in Syria.

A recent investigation by The Intercept found that U.S. troops in the Middle East have come under attack close to 400 times, at a minimum, since the outbreak of the Israel–Hamas war, according to figures provided by the Office of the Secretary of Defense and Central Command. This amounts to roughly one attack every 1.5 days, on average. 

The strikes, predominantly by Iranian-backed militias and — prior to a ceasefire signed last week — the Houthi government in Yemen, include a mix of one-way attack drones, rockets, mortars, and ballistic missiles fired at fixed bases and U.S. warships across the region. These groups ramped up attacks on U.S. targets in October 2023, in response to the U.S.-supported Israeli war on Gaza.

“About 200” of those attacks have been on U.S. bases, according to Pentagon spokesperson Patricia Kreuzberger. Around 50 percent occurred in Syria.

“Having these troops in Syria puts them at risk of retaliation from Iran and others,” said Kelanic. “It’s like we’re giving them hostages to take if they see fit, without there being a particularly compelling reason for these troops to be there.”

The post Trump Said Syria Deserves a “Fresh Start” — But U.S. Troops Aren’t Leaving appeared first on The Intercept.

The project includes new construction and upgrades of existing buildings, including one or more hangars, warehouses, and storage facilities, at an Israeli military base in the south of Israel, according to Army Corps of Engineers documents.  

The construction stems from a nearly $1 billion contract, awarded to defense giant Boeing in 2022, to provide Israel with four KC-46A Pegasus tanker aircraft to be delivered by the end of 2026. The purchase of the KC-46As was seen as a signal of Israel’s determination to increase its capacity to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The KC-46A is the newest tanker being produced for the U.S. Air Force to replace its two aging models. The new aircraft has been plagued with myriad problems, including issues with its Remote Vision System, which allows the boom operator to see the boom through a video feed. The plane has also become a financial burden, racking up more than $7 billion in losses.

For Israel, the new aircraft, purchased for $927 million, will replace the decades-old, repurposed Boeing 707 passenger planes that the Israeli Air Force currently uses for midair refueling of fighter aircraft.  

Last month, the Biden administration approved five major arms sales to Israel, including 50 F-15 fighter aircraft, tank ammunition, tactical vehicles, air-to-air missiles, and 50,000 mortar rounds, among other equipment totaling more than $20 billion. While technically “sales,” the cost of these weapons is mostly paid by the United States since Israel uses much of the military aid Congress approves to buy U.S.-made weapons.

Since last October, Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip have spawned a humanitarian catastrophe, killed more than 40,000 Palestinians and wounded close to 94,000, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. Israel has used U.S. munitions in its strikes on Gaza.

The KC-46A construction project, according to documents issued on Wednesday, includes “establishing and adapting aviation and maintenance infrastructure for the KC-46,” including construction of five new concrete and steel structures, as well as the possibility for building additional buildings and warehouses.

The Pentagon is no stranger to construction projects in Israel. Late last year, The Intercept revealed that the Defense Department had awarded a multimillion-dollar contract to build U.S. troop facilities for a secret base it maintains deep within Israel’s Negev desert, just 20 miles from Gaza. Code-named “Site 512,” the longstanding U.S. base is a radar facility that monitors the skies for missile attacks on Israel. 

A recent investigation by The Intercept disclosed that Site 512 is just one of more than 60 U.S. bases, garrisons, or shared foreign facilities in the Middle East. These sites range from small combat outposts to massive air bases in 13 countries: Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. 

At least 14 of these bases have been attacked in recent years. Since October 17 of last year alone, a mix of one-way attack drones, rockets, mortars, and close-range ballistic missiles have led to at least 145 U.S. casualties — troops and contractors — at regional outposts. That includes the three service members killed in a January drone attack on Tower 22, a facility in Jordan.

The Defense Department intends to award contracts for work on the KC-46A construction project in February 2025. The Pentagon failed to respond to The Intercept’s request for comment about the construction project. The State Department acknowledged The Intercept’s questions but did not offer answers prior to publication.

The post U.S. Army Is Upgrading an Israeli Base to Make Room for New Boeing Jets appeared first on The Intercept.