Who Is the 'Top Missile Guy' the U.S. Killed in Yemen?
For an administration that likes to show off successful assassinations, the Trump team has been surprisingly tight-lipped about the Houthi commanders they targeted.
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 government headquarters, according to Fares Alhemyari, a Yemeni journalist who opposes the Houthis. Of course, it's always possible that the Houthis simply haven't acknowledged some of their casualties.
The U.S. air campaign has also killed at least 25 civilians, including four children, the nonprofit Yemen Data Project reports. Although the U.S. military publicly claims that it has "no credible indications of any civilian casualties," Hegseth admitted in the group chat to targeting at least one bystander—the "girlfriend" of the "top missile guy." That strike likely killed other people in the apartment building.
The Trump administration may be trying to replicate the Israeli successes at killing Hezbollah and Hamas leaders last year. But Hamas has been sealed off in the tiny, flat Gaza Strip for years, under intense AI-enabled surveillance. (Even so, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar avoided detection with a simple blanket. He died on the battlefield in a chance encounter with Israeli troops.) Meanwhile, Hezbollah was deeply penetrated by foreign intelligence agencies and seemed caught off guard when the Israeli campaign began in earnest.
The Houthis, meanwhile, have weathered over a decade of war in the mountainous expanse of northern Yemen. After they seized control of Sanaa, Saudi Arabia attempted to stop them, waging a vicious campaign of airstrikes and blockades from 2015 to 2022. Houthi forces are now dug into underground fortresses, which the U.S. government has "struggled" to gain good intelligence on, according to The New York Times.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told Fox News earlier this month that "we don't care what happens in the Yemeni civil war. This is about stopping the shooting at assets in that critical waterway." By that measure of success, Trump's war has so far failed. On March 16, a day after the "top missile guy" supposedly died, a Houthi missile hit Tel Aviv, injuring 16 people. The missile attacks have continued since then.
