DAWN Urges Congress to Stop “Unconstitutional” Strikes on Houthis

On 27 March 2025, Democ­ra­cy for the Arab World Now (DAWN) pub­lished a state­ment stat­ing that US airstrikes against Houthi lead­er­ship in Yemen since March 15 were “uncon­sti­tu­tion­al” and lacked con­gres­sion­al autho­riza­tion. The arti­cle begins:

U.S. airstrikes across Yemen since March 15 are uncon­sti­tu­tion­al acts of war that lack con­gres­sion­al autho­riza­tion, said the orga­ni­za­tions DAWN, Action Corps and Just For­eign Pol­i­cy today. Con­gress should stop strikes on Yemen and uphold its sole author­i­ty to declare war under Arti­cle I of the Con­sti­tu­tion and the 1973 War Pow­ers Res­o­lu­tion (WPR). The strikes also vio­late Chap­ters I and VII of the Unit­ed Nations Char­ter, which pro­hib­it states from launch­ing a war unless in self-defense or autho­rized by the U.N. Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil. “Pres­i­dent Trump has not only launched us into a new mil­i­tary escapade in the Mid­dle East, he’s done so in breach of our Con­sti­tu­tion, which requires con­gres­sion­al autho­riza­tion to start a war,” said Isaac Evans-Frantz, direc­tor of Action Corps. “Con­gress should demand an end to this reck­less, unau­tho­rized war that will both harm U.S. inter­ests and con­tin­ue to ter­ror­ize the Yemeni peo­ple who have already suf­fered years of U.S.-backed vio­lence.” The most recent U.S. airstrikes on Yemen began on March 15, 2025. The fol­low­ing day Dr. Anees al-Asbahi, a spokesper­son for the Houthi gov­ern­ment health min­istry, report­ed that 53 peo­ple had been killed, includ­ing women and chil­dren, and 98 peo­ple injured, in one of the most expan­sive attacks on the coun­try since Octo­ber 2023. The strikes report­ed­ly includ­ed attacks on res­i­den­tial areas in Yemen’s cap­i­tal Sana’a, the Dahyan pow­er sta­tion, a can­cer facil­i­ty being built in the city of Saa­da, and crit­i­cal infra­struc­ture across mul­ti­ple gov­er­norates. From March 23 to 24, the U.S. pum­meled the coun­try with airstrikes on Sadaa, Hodei­da, and Sana’a, strik­ing a build­ing in Sana’a that result­ed in at least one casu­al­ty and 13 peo­ple injured, accord­ing to local authorities.

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Key Points:

• DAWN said that US airstrikes in Yemen since March 15, 2025, were uncon­sti­tu­tion­al and lacked con­gres­sion­al autho­riza­tion, vio­lat­ing both US law and the UN Charter.
• Accord­ing to DAWN, the strikes had result­ed in sig­nif­i­cant civil­ian casu­al­ties and tar­get­ed crit­i­cal infra­struc­ture, esca­lat­ing ten­sions and harm­ing US interests.
• The group also said that the Houthis had been engaged in mar­itime strikes in response to Israeli actions in Gaza, lead­ing to US retal­i­a­tion “with­out con­gres­sion­al approval.”
• DAWN urged Con­gress to assert its author­i­ty under the War Pow­ers Res­o­lu­tion to end the unau­tho­rized mil­i­tary actions in Yemen.

Democ­ra­cy for the Arab World Now (DAWN) is a think tank and watch­dog set up in 2020 by asso­ciates of the late Sau­di dis­si­dent and Wash­ing­ton Post colum­nist Jamal Khashog­gi to mon­i­tor human rights vio­la­tions by US allies in the Mid­dle East and North Africa. The New York Times has report­ed that Khashog­gi had come up with the idea to form DAWN in the months lead­ing up to his 2018 killing in the Sau­di con­sulate in Istan­bul by Sau­di oper­a­tives. In Feb­ru­ary 2021, a Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report (GIOR) inves­ti­ga­tion found that the DAWN board at that time includ­ed mul­ti­ple indi­vid­u­als tied to the Glob­al Mus­lim Broth­er­hood (GMB) in the US. Two of those board mem­bers remain as part of the DAWN board, most notably Nihad Awad, the long-time exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Coun­cil on Amer­i­can Islam­ic Rela­tions (CAIR). Both Awad and CAIR are his­tor­i­cal­ly asso­ci­at­ed with Hamas. DAWN is led by for­mer Human Rights Watch Mid­dle East direc­tor Sarah Leah Whit­son, who has often defend­ed the Egypt­ian Mus­lim Broth­er­hood against accu­sa­tions of ter­ror­ism and extremism.

In March 2025, the GIOR report­ed that DAWN had called on the US Con­gress to rein­state fund­ing for the Unit­ed Nations Relief and Works Agency for Pales­tine Refugees (UNRWA).

Dis­claimer: The GIOR uti­lizes AI to gen­er­ate sum­maries of news items, includ­ing the intro­duc­tion and the key points that fol­low. Any text fol­low­ing the key points is con­text added by GIOR edi­tors. Please ver­i­fy all infor­ma­tion before using. Images are also AI-gen­er­at­ed and are for illus­tra­tive pur­pos­es only—they are meant to rep­re­sent the events or indi­vid­u­als con­cerned but should not be under­stood as “real word” photography.