‘When an American drone fired four Hellfire missiles at a convoy of cars travelling from a wedding in Yemen last December, who died?

According to their relatives, the twelve men killed in the attack were shepherds, farmers or migrants who worked across the border in Saudi Arabia. They were fathers and sons. Shaif Abdullah Mohsen Mabkhut al-’Amri was the youngest, at 22; in a photo belonging to his uncle he looks slightly perplexed, eyes fixed on the camera over a sparse mustache and a half smile. Hussein Muhammad al-Tomil al-Tisi, 65, was the oldest killed. Twenty-eight-year-old ’Aref Ahmed al-Tisi’s youngest child, his seventh, had been born less than two weeks earlier. Ali Abdullah, 36, had been a soldier. His father watched as the missile that killed him hit. “I found him tossed to the side. I turned him over and he was dead,” the father remembered later. “My son, Ali!”

These details were collected by Human Rights Watch and published Thursday in a report that suggests that some, if not all of the victims of the December strike were civilians. The report concluded that the attack violated policies for targeted killings that President Obama laid out in May.

The story told by the report is one of disputed identity. Anonymous US officials have said all of the twelve men killed were militants traveling with Shawqi Ali Ahmad al-Badani, allegedly a member of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and the primary target of the strike. Officials say al-Badani was wounded, and escaped. Relatives of the dead say they didn’t know him.’

Read more: The Men We Kill, and the Men We Don’t