Who Is the ‘Top Missile Guy’ the U.S. Killed in Yemen?
The White House says it killed some very important Houthi commanders, but it won’t tell you which ones. Earlier this month, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz insisted to ABC that President Donald Trump’s war in Yemen was different from former President Joe Biden’s campaign because the Trump administration “actually targeted multiple Houthi leaders and took them out.”
Who were those leaders? Waltz didn’t say. White House spokeswoman Anna Kelley referred Reason to the Department of Defense, which referred us to U.S. Central Command, which said that it “confirmed the death of several Houthi leaders” but didn’t name any of them. The silence is strange from an administration that normally enjoys parading around the scalps of its defeated enemies, from Iran’s Qassem Soleimani to the Islamic State’s Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to deported immigrants.
Waltz is the fellow who apparently added Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg to a White House group chat for planning the attack before it began. In the chat, Waltz wrote that the U.S. military killed the Houthi forces’ unnamed “top missile guy” by blowing up and collapsing “his girlfriend’s building.” U.S. officials have told The Wall Street Journal that the missile commander was targeted with the help of Israeli intelligence, but again they did not name him.
The Houthi government in Sanaa has acknowledged 41 members killed in naval and air combat, 30 killed in ground combat, and 5 killed in unspecified operations during the month of March, according to a list compiled last week by the Yemeni-American researcher Mohammed Al-Basha, who describes the Houthi commanders killed by U.S. airstrikes as a group of “mid-level officers with expertise in missile and drone technology.”
The highest-ranking acknowledged Houthi casualty was Col. Zayn al-Abidin Al-Mahturi, a “security official” responsible for protecting a local govern
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