Tuesday marked one year since the US bombed a migrant detention facility in Saada, northern Yemen, killing 68 African migrants, and Amnesty International has reiterated its call for the attack to be investigated as a potential war crime.
The strike was part of the Trump administration’s bombing campaign in Yemen dubbed “Operation Rough Rider,” which was carried out from March 15, 2025, to May 6, 2025, and killed more than 250 civilians. Less than two weeks before the migrant facility strike, on April 17, 2025, the US bombed the Ras Issa fuel port on Yemen’s Red Sea coast, killing 84 people, all civilians.
Amnesty said that the impunity of the US bombing campaign in Yemen led to the US bombing of the elementary school in southern Iran on February 28 of this year, which killed 120 boys and girls.
“The Trump administration’s approach to its air strikes in Yemen from March to May 2025 should have set off alarm bells in the USA and around the world, clearly signaling an urgent need to strengthen measures to protect civilians. Instead, the US administration has systematically weakened safeguards, shrinking offices aimed at reducing civilian harm, while simultaneously displaying a dangerous disregard for the lives of civilians endangered by armed conflicts,” said Nadia Daar, Director of Amnesty International USA.
“Against that backdrop, attacks such as the US attack on a school in Minab in Iran, which killed 156 people, including 120 children, were a tragically foreseeable consequence of a failure to implement robust civilian-harm mitigation efforts,” Daar added.
Amnesty noted that there’s been no accountability for the US strike on the migrant facility and that the US hasn’t clarified the status of an investigation it previously announced. The migrant facility was previously targeted by Saudi Arabia in January 2022, a strike that killed 91 civilians, according to the Yemen data project.
The US was providing Riyadh with intelligence for its bombing campaign in Yemen, meaning it should have been aware that targeting the facility would have caused mass civilian casualties, and Amnesty’s investigation into the US strike found there was no evidence of a military target.
