US military may have drawn intel from social media accounts for deadly Yemen strike: Report
Serious allegations have emerged that the US military has been carrying out air strikes, relying on anonymous X accounts who post coordinates that they dubiously claim contain military assets, according to a report.
An American website, Drop Site, reported on Thursday that US warplanes bombed a location alleged by two such amateur open-source intelligence accounts to be a stronghold of Yemen’s Ansarullah resistance movement, killing innocent bystanders in the process.
A Twitter account called @VleckieHond —operated by an individual who claims they are based in the Netherlands- apologized this week after the US struck coordinates she erroneously suggested, in early April, were the location of an underground Ansarullah military position. It was not a military site.
“Allright, time for me to go through the mud,” Vleckie posted.
“Based on satellite imagery, I’d marked this quarry as an underground base, and tweeted is out as such. I’m fairly certain Centcom doesn’t take their targeting data from Twitter, but this still is a very severe mistake,” Vleckie added.
The US military also reportedly had relied, in part, on a secondary account, @Galal_Alsalahi, who claims they are based in Houston. This account is hostile to the Houthis and claims to have discovered a Houthi missile launcher at the coordinates.
The US carried out strike on April 28 that reportedly killed eight civilians in their homes on the outskirts of the capital of Sana’a.
Vleckie’s reading of satellite imagery was incomplete the account later said, adding they said they had privately marked the target as only “possible.”
“I should never have posted it,” they added.
Yemeni news outlets reported the devastating impact of the US attack. Among the dead and wounded were children, some of whom were later evacuated to local hospitals.
Nearly 70 inmates were killed and more than 50 more wounded in the US airstrike that targeted one of the detention centers designated for African migrants in Sa’ada province on Monday.
The UN chief’s spokesperson, Stephane Dujarric, said the airstrikes “pose a growing risk to the civilian population” in the Arab country, including women and children.
Yemen’s Ansarullah movement also denounced the strike as a “brutal crime,” accusing Washington of deliberately targeting civilians under the guise of military operations.
In reaction to the atrocities committed by Israel in Gaza and the aggression of the US and UK against Yemen, the Yemeni Armed Forces have initiated a series of strikes aimed at Israeli, American, and British interests in the Red Sea and adjacent regions.
Yemeni naval and air force units conducted a joint operation against the Nimitz-class vessel of the United States Navy and other American warships, using several homegrown cruise and ballistic missiles as well as combat drones.
