DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (news agencies) — The Trump administration promised a tougher stance against Yemen’s Houthi rebels, and its new airstrike campaign appears to be more intense and more extensive, according to an media review of the operation.
The strikes against the Iran-backed rebels began March 15 and continue.
Here’s what to know about the campaign.
The new strikes are more intense over a far shorter period of time than those launched by the Biden administration. The U.S.-based Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, known as ACLED, has reported 56 events involving American strikes between March 15 and March 21.
The campaign has also seen the highest number of events in a week since the American bombing campaign began on Yemen during the Israel-Hamas war.
A larger number of strikes is to be expected. The Trump administration is allowing Mideast-based U.S. forces to launch offensive strikes at will, rather than having the White House sign off on each attack as under President Joe Biden.
The overall death toll from the attacks is 57, according to the Houthis. That figure is just over half of the 106 people the Houthis’ secretive leader, Abdul Malik al-Houthi, claimed that the U.S. and U.K. had killed in strikes during all of 2024.
U.S. national security adviser, Mike Waltz, has claimed key members of Houthi leadership, including their “head missileer,” have been killed. The Houthis have not acknowledged any losses in their leadership.
President Donald Trump’s campaign comes after the Houthis’ threatened to resume attacking “any Israeli vessel” over the country’s refusal to allow aid into the Gaza Strip.
The Houthis targeted over 100 merchant vessels with missiles and drones, sinking two and killing four sailors during their campaign targeting ships from November 2023, weeks after the war in Gaza began, until January of this year. Trump has said restoring the flow of commercial shipping through the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait connecting them is a priority.
During the Biden administration, the U.S. military’s Central Command, which oversees Mideast operations, offered details to the public on most strikes conducted during the campaign. Those details often included the target struck and the reason. Since the start of the new campaign, however, there’s been no similar breakdowns released by Central Command.
The U.K.-based group Airwars believes it is likely that at least five U.S. strikes hurt or killed civilians, based off of videos and photos from the site, Houthi statements and other details. The U.S. military has not acknowledged any civilian casualties since the strikes began over a week ago.
It declined to answer questions regarding possible civilian casualties, but said the “Houthis continue to communicate lies and disinformation.”
The aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson and its strike group is to transit into the Middle East. It will back up the USS Harry S. Truman, which is already in the Red Sea. That likely will give the American military two places to launch aircrafts as it hasn’t immediately appeared that any strikes came from bases in other Mideast nations — where public sentiment remains strongly with the Palestinians in the Israel-Hamas war.
Satellite images from Planet Labs PBC analyzed by the news agencies showed three B-2s parked Wednesday at Camp Thunder Cove in Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, stealth bombers that again could be used in Yemen to devastating effect.
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