Target Acquired: How OSINT Hobbyism Helped Murder a Yemeni Family

"It's very sad, all this killing, all this war. But at the same time, we don't lose our hope, and we don't lose our vision, and we don't lose our dream."
— Tawakkol Karman

I. Coordinates for a Funeral

It begins with a tweet. A Dutch OSINT hobbyist—oblivious to the dust, the breath, the lives beneath the satellite view—posts an aerial shot of a Yemeni quarry and calls it suspicious. Not a verified base. Not a confirmed military target. Just a guess. A gut feeling dressed up as geospatial “analysis.” She posts the coordinates like a digital offering to empire: 15.4°N, 44.2°E. A red circle around the image. A caption implying danger. And the algorithm moves on.

Weeks later, CENTCOM bombs that location.

They don’t strike a weapons cache. They don’t hit a launchpad. They hit a home. A man named Yahiya Salah Masoud is killed. His wife. His children. His relatives. All reduced to carbon and ash. Three families, erased. No military casualties reported—because there were no so-called ‘militants’ there to begin with.

This wasn’t a mistake in the fog of war. There was no fog. Just blue sky, satellite clarity, and the brutal efficiency of empire outsourcing its reconnaissance to civilians. The coordinates were posted publicly. The U.S. strike occurred exactly where the tweet pointed. And Yemenis, again, were left to bury the charred bodies of their loved ones under rubble tagged “terrorist facility” by someone who had never stepped foot on their soil.

What’s most haunting isn’t that this happened—it’s how easily it could happen again. This is what genocide looks like when sanitized. When war crimes wear the mask of crowdsourced intelligence. When empire no longer needs to justify its targets because someone else already did the mapping for free.

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II. The Click That Killed

She didn’t pull the trigger—but she handed over the coordinates. The Dutch OSINT user, known online as @VleckieHond, had no military background. No access to classified intelligence. No Yemeni sources. No context. What she did have was a high-resolution satellite subscription, an obsession with visual patterns, and a platform that rewarded speculation dressed up as expertise. She circled a spot on the map, captioned it as a potential underground missile facility, and fed it into the imperial bloodstream. The post was clean, sharp, clinical. It looked like analysis. It wasn’t.

There was no “assessment process.” No secondary source. No verification. Just an unchecked claim by a civilian hobbyist, tweeted into the world with imperial confidence—and picked up by a military machine starved for justification. Her words were unassuming: a hunch, a maybe, a suggestion. But in a settler-colonial system, a European “maybe” carries more weight than a Yemeni life. Her post triggered an algorithm of death: red dot, black smoke, blood.

The United States didn’t announce the strike with clarity. There was no press conference. Just another vague CENTCOM report about “precision strikes” against “Iranian-backed Houthi missile sites.” The language, as always, was sterile and inflated. But Yemenis knew. Local reports began circulating within hours. There were no missiles. No fighters. Just a quarry, a home, and a family turned into dust.

What gets missed in Western discourse is this: it isn’t just the bombs that kill. It’s the entire ecosystem of justification. The people who play cartographer with lives they’ll never meet. The military that uses civilian-sourced Twitter data as pretext. The journalists who remain silent. The academics who cite it as valid. The NGOs who clean it up. And the tech platforms that make it all searchable. A man, his wife, and their children died because a white woman drew a red circle on a screen and called it “analysis.” And no one stopped it.

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III. Cosplaying Intelligence, Practicing Genocide

The people who call this a “mistake” are lying. This wasn’t a tragic accident or fog-of-war mishap. It was a predictable consequence of an unholy alliance between amateur surveillance and militarized power. When untrained civilians play analyst and empires treat their guesses as gospel, death isn’t a glitch—it’s the system working as designed. And what makes it more grotesque is how this death pipeline is celebrated as innovation. As “open-source transparency.” As democratic participation in global security.

@VleckieHond wasn’t operating in a vacuum. She was part of a growing network of OSINT enthusiasts—mostly white, mostly Western—who spend their nights scouring satellite imagery, tagging military equipment, and mapping out alleged enemy positions in countries they cannot pronounce. They are not intelligence professionals. They are hobbyists. Enthusiasts. Voyeurs of war. They refer to themselves as “analysts,” but there is no vetting, no oversight, and no ethical framework. Their credibility is built entirely on aesthetics: clean screenshots, annotated maps, and threads that mimic professionalism.

And yet: they are cited by the U.S. military. In April 2024, West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) published a report that explicitly referenced this Dutch user as an “ever-resourceful analyst.” Her tweets were treated as legitimate, her posts elevated to footnote status in official publications. This is not passive endorsement—it is structural laundering. A white European civilian was allowed to shape military perception about a so-called “terror threat” in Yemen, and that perception—baseless as it was—translated directly into lethal force.

What this reveals is chilling: empire no longer needs classified intelligence to justify its strikes. It can source its targets from Twitter. It can cite hobbyists as analysts. It can collapse the entire chain of military responsibility into a single screenshot. This is the gamification of imperialism, where reconnaissance is crowd-sourced, accountability is dissolved, and the burden of proof is transferred to the grave.

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IV. Blood Money and the Currency of Remorse

When the truth came out—that the strike had killed civilians, not combatants—the Dutch OSINT user did not disappear. She did not fall silent, did not issue a formal retraction, did not warn others about the danger of unverified targeting. Instead, she posted receipts.

Literal receipts.

Screenshots showing she had donated a combined 500 euros to Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and the Yemen Data Project. As if that gesture could bridge the chasm between remote speculation and physical obliteration. As if a one-time donation could undo the systemic violence she had helped facilitate. As if money could wash the blood off her hands.

This was not remorse—it was performance. A bloodless, antiseptic apology designed for the same algorithm that made her relevant in the first place. Her followers—many of them fellow OSINT hobbyists—responded with sympathy. Some called her brave for “owning up.” Others thanked her for being “transparent.” In this warped theater of digital warfare, the bar for accountability is set so low that a donation becomes an exoneration, and a tweet becomes a trial.

But the people of Yemen were not interested in her receipts. They didn’t care about her regret. They were burying their dead. And they were angry.

“We don’t want your donations. We don’t need them. Just stop publishing false aerial photos… you’re causing the killing of our people.”

— al_azzi0, on X

This wasn’t a plea for pity. It was a demand for disengagement. A demand that the Global North stop playing god with their geography. That people who don’t speak the language, who don’t understand the context, who don’t see their humanity, stop mapping their lives as if they were military puzzles. That the violence—digital, rhetorical, and literal—stop being treated like content.

Yemenis don’t want charity. They want the airstrikes to end.
They want their families to live.

And no donation, no screenshot, no thread of remorse will ever bring back the people killed by her coordinates.

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V. Target Verified by West Point

This is the part no one wants to say out loud: the murder of those Yemeni families wasn’t just facilitated by one civilian’s tweet—it was institutionalized by the U.S. military’s academic arm. In 2024, the West Point Combating Terrorism Center—a pipeline for imperial doctrine—published a report on so-called “Houthi” missile activity in Yemen. In that report, the Dutch OSINT account responsible for the quarry coordinates was cited by name and praised as “ever-resourceful.”

Let that sink in: West Point, the heart of U.S. military pedagogy, considered an untrained civilian’s tweets a valid source of intelligence. Her screenshots were treated as analysis. Her mapping, as contribution. Her speculation, as signal.

This wasn’t some marginal acknowledgment buried in a footnote. It was part of the architecture of knowledge production that legitimizes violence. The entire OSINT-to-airstrike pipeline depends on this laundering—where military scholars validate amateur data, and then military strategists act on it. By the time a missile is launched, no one remembers the post was a guess. The strike becomes “verified.” The death toll becomes “regrettable.” The quarry becomes a “previously suspected launch site.”

And all of it—every phrase, every euphemism, every calculated omission—is designed to erase the fact that someone’s hunch got someone else’s entire family killed.

This is what happens when empire stops needing secrets. When it replaces classified intel with unaccountable clout. When it trusts a woman with a subscription to Maxar imagery more than it trusts the people whose lives are on the ground. The U.S. didn’t need proof—because it already had precedent. Precedent written in West Point’s own publications, footnoted by hobbyists, and sanctified by the same institutions that have never seen a brown body they didn’t mistake for a threat.

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VI. Twitter as Battlefield, Yemen as Gameboard

The most disturbing part isn’t that Twitter was used to suggest a target. It’s that Twitter was used to verify one.

Following the airstrike, U.S. Central Command issued one of its routine, dispassionate statements: another “precision strike,” another “suspected missile site” neutralized. But embedded in this banality was a grotesque reveal—CENTCOM had monitored and confirmed the damage using social media posts. Videos of black smoke, local grief, and dismembered bodies became material for CENTCOM’s post-strike analysis.

In other words: they bombed a home based on online speculation and then used online posts to affirm the bomb had landed.

This is war by Wi-Fi. Death by hashtag.

And it isn’t theoretical. Pentagon insiders have openly admitted that damage assessments in current operations are increasingly drawn from platforms like Twitter and Telegram. The U.S. isn’t just letting hobbyists influence its strikes—it’s letting the public reaction shape its post-strike narrative. Civilian deaths can be dismissed if there's no viral video. Infrastructure losses can be downplayed if local reporting doesn’t trend. The war becomes a feedback loop, shaped not by truth, but by visibility.

And who gets seen? Who gets believed?

Not the Yemeni eyewitnesses begging the world to stop killing their families. Not the survivors posting videos of body bags and rubble. No—the ones who get cited are the sanitized OSINT accounts, the Westerners mapping explosions from their laptops, the self-appointed experts who tag themselves into genocidal conversations like it’s fantasy football.

This is the final insult: Yemenis must now prove their deaths on a platform that helped make them killable.

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VII. The White Face of Imperial Violence

She will never be tried. She will never face a tribunal. She will never be asked to name the children her coordinates helped kill. She will keep her Twitter account, her academic followers, her clout in OSINT circles. Maybe she’ll get invited to a panel. Maybe she’ll write a Medium post about the ethics of “open-source targeting.” Maybe she’ll call for “improved safeguards” next time. But she will not be punished. Because in the architecture of empire, she is not a threat. She is its ideal servant: white, distant, and willing.

She lives in the Netherlands. She speculated about a Yemeni home. She posted coordinates. CENTCOM acted. People died. And yet she moves on. Unscarred. Untouched. Her country was not sanctioned. Her accounts were not suspended. Her name is not being dragged across headlines as an accessory to murder. Her grief is not on display—because there is no grief. There is only her detachment, and the deadly confidence that comes with it.

This is what settler colonialism looks like when digitized:
European civilians deciding which Arab families are too suspicious to live.
Military institutions outsourcing the labor of war and absolving themselves when it turns lethal.
Narrative control remaining firmly in white hands—even as the death toll mounts.

She wasn’t alone, either. Others in the OSINT community defended her, doubled down, called the outrage over her mapping “emotional” and “unfair.” This wasn’t bad methodology, they claimed—it was just unfortunate. But they didn’t lose anyone. They didn’t carry bodies. They didn’t bury their children in pieces. They’re playing a game where the worst consequence is a deactivated account—and the prize is attention.

It’s always been like this. From colonial cartographers drawing borders that erased whole nations, to drone pilots killing by joystick, to digital “analysts” declaring homes to be missile sites—the white gaze has always been fatal.

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VIII. Narrative Warfare: The Lie of Neutral Data

OSINT sells itself as a revolution in transparency. A democratization of intelligence. A way to hold states accountable using publicly available data. And in theory, it could be. But in practice, OSINT is often just imperialism with better branding—a whitewashed pipeline that masquerades as neutral while reinforcing the same old power structures. It replicates the logic of surveillance states and militaries but lets civilians wear the badge. And it does so under the guise of “objectivity.”

But objectivity isn’t neutral when your gaze starts at suspicion and ends in a strike zone.

What’s deemed “credible” is never divorced from power. Yemeni voices warning against false targeting were ignored. Local testimony was dismissed. The families who pleaded for the violence to stop were unverified. But a white woman’s annotated map? That was archived. Cited. Footnoted by West Point. Elevated to the level of actionable intelligence. Her ignorance was institutionalized. Her guess, laundered into analysis.

This is narrative warfare. And it doesn’t just kill through bombs—it kills through erasure. Through the privileging of “data” over lived experience. Through the insistence that an outsider with a satellite subscription knows more than the people under the rubble. Through the fantasy that war can be mapped cleanly from the sky, without context, without community, without consequence.

And when the Dutch user’s earlier posts show her defending Israeli occupation, when she parrots the same talking points used to justify the genocide in Gaza, we must call this what it is: not just voyeurism—but ideological alignment. She wasn’t just mistaken. She wasn’t just uninformed. She was operating with a settler-colonial lens that marks all resistance as suspect, all Arab infrastructure as potentially ‘militant’, and all civilian death as an unfortunate byproduct of empire doing its job.

She didn't invent that lens. But she polished it, pointed it at Yemen, and helped pull the trigger.

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IX. There Must Be Consequences

If the death of three Yemeni families—bombed on the basis of a speculative tweet—does not trigger international outrage, then we must ask: what does it take? What level of dehumanization is too much for the world to finally say, “enough”? Because this isn’t theoretical. This isn’t accidental. This is systemic, and it is ongoing.

There must be consequences.

Not symbolic scoldings. Not ethics panels or think pieces. Not retrospective hand-wringing after the fact. Real consequences. For CENTCOM, which carried out the strike based on unverified, crowdsourced coordinates. For West Point, which validated those coordinates by platforming the hobbyist behind them. For the OSINT community, which refuses to implement ethical guardrails despite the growing body count. For the tech platforms, which amplify this speculation and erase the testimony of those on the ground. And yes—for the civilian who posted those coordinates and treated a warzone like a puzzle to be solved.

The Dutch user may not be a government official. But she is a participant in a network of digital imperialism—a structure that extends the reach of empire by outsourcing surveillance and absorbing no blame. Her actions directly contributed to lethal violence. The receipts prove it. The timeline confirms it. The families are dead because she guessed wrong and a military power acted without question.

And the world said nothing.

So here is what must happen now:
— Stop citing speculative OSINT in military assessments.
— Stop treating amateur mapping as neutral or harmless.
— Acknowledge this for what it is: accessory to war crimes.
— Demand justice for the dead—not just apologies for the algorithm.

If this is allowed to pass without repercussion, it will happen again. Another red circle. Another tweet. Another body. Another receipt posted as proof that someone “tried.” And no justice.

The pipeline must be broken. Before it maps another massacre.

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X. In Their Name

This ends with names we were never meant to know. Names that were not listed in the strike report. Names that weren’t echoed by Western media. Names that Twitter’s trending tab will never feature. Yahiya Salah Masoud. His wife. His children. Their extended family. Entire lineages folded into dust. Lives that were mapped only as risk, rendered as red circles on a quarry, and extinguished before the world could learn who they were.

But they were people. People with memories, joys, frustrations, and futures. People with routines. People with rooms. People with dreams for the next harvest, the next holiday, the next hour. They were not so-called ‘militants.’ They were not threats. They were not abstractions. They were killed because they existed in a place empire had decided was expendable. Because someone speculated about them from a continent away. Because no one stopped the system that turns geography into guilt.

We say their names not to perform mourning—but to indict. To refuse the flattening. To keep their stories from being deleted as easily as a tweet. We name them because they were made killable by a structure that rewards distance and erases the dead. And because somewhere, right now, another hobbyist is dragging their cursor over a satellite image in Lebanon, or Iran, or Palestine—circling something they don’t understand, but believe must be dangerous.

So let this piece be record. Let it stand in defiance of that erasure. Let it say plainly:
No more.

No more speculative targeting disguised as analysis.
No more narrative laundering of imperial violence.
No more citations of civilians who map death from the safety of whiteness.
No more impunity for digital war crimes carried out with a keystroke and a shrug.
No more pretending that this is complicated.

Because it isn’t.

A family was murdered. And the people who helped do it are still tweeting.

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Postscript:

If you are posting satellite imagery, "marking" locations, or speculating about so-called ‘militant’ sites in warzones without consent, training, or ethical accountability—you are not doing analysis. You are risking lives.

And if you are a Western institution citing such people as “experts,” you are not studying terrorism. You are engineering it.

This post is dedicated to the Yemeni families murdered in silence and erased by spectacle. Their names deserve more than hashtags. They deserve justice.