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Airwars Assessment
(Previous Incident Code: YEM304)
One civilian was reportedly killed by a US drone strike in Al Hudhi, Hadhramout, at around 5pm on March 7th 2018, “a member of his family and independent observers” told The Intercept. Saleh al-Wuhair was reportedly killed as he stood on a hill in the area, looking for a mobile phone signal. No other known sources specifically reported this strike.
As The Intercept report noted: “Two days after Amer was killed [on march 5th], a man named Saleh al-Wuhair stood on top of a hill in al-Hudhi, looking for cell service to make a call. At around 5 p.m., a missile came flying down and killed him, according to a member of his family and independent observers in Yemen. Because the area was targeted twice in two days, tribe members drove out to al-Hudhi to urge residents to relocate to a safer place.”
Reprieve shared their findings on this strike with Airwars. An on-the-ground investigator reported that a strike had killed a twenty-year-old man while he was walking, likely referring to Saleh al-Wuhair, but suggested that the strike took place on March 8th.
Saleh was reportedly a member of the Al-Mahashima tribe, whose members were allegedly targeted by multiple strikes in March 2018. He was among a group of internally-displaced persons, who had fled fighting in Al-Jawf.
Local sources denied that Saleh had any affiliations to either AQAP or ISIS. One of his relatives told The Intercept that Saleh’s uncle was an AQAP leader killed by a drone strike around five years previously. Writing in The Guardian, Yemeni Human Rights Minister Mohamed Askar said that a government committee had collected evidence that the target of strikes in the area at the beginning of March were civilians, but did not specifically mention this alleged event.
A US Central Command spokesperson later told the Long War Journal that a strike had taken place in Hadhramout on March 7th 2018. Since there were no other known reports of a strike on that day, this event is treated as confirmed. US Central Command also told the Bureau of Investigative Journalism that allegations of civilian harm in this strike were ‘non-credible’, due to what it said was a lack of available evidence.
In its annual civilian casualty report to Congress issued in April 2019, the US Department of Defense stated that it had assessed “no credible reports of civilian casualties resulting from US military actions in Yemen during 2018″.
Responding to Airwars’ publication of its Yemen dataset and accompanying report in October 2020, CENTCOM dismissed all but two civilian harm claims under President Trump, asserting that “USCENTCOM conducted a thorough review of the information AirWars provided regarding allegations of potential civilian harm caused by USCENTCOM strikes in Yemen from 2017-2020… The bulk of the information asserted by AirWars, however, did not correspond with dates and locations of U.S. military strikes or raids in Yemen. Other AirWars allegations either did not allege civilian harm or were not assessed as credible upon our review.”
Key Information
Geolocation Notes
Reports of the incident mention Al Hudhi (الهدي) without specifying whether it is an area or a settlement. One possible location for this incident is within the vicinity of the Hudhi (هدي) hill, for which the generic coordinates are: 16.30299, 47.24515. Due to limited satellite imagery and information available to Airwars, we were unable to verify the location further.