Yemen, a country immersed in a violent conflict. And Sardinia, a picturesque holiday island in Italy. What connects the two is the global arms trade. Bombs made in Sardinia are being used in Yemen’s civil war by Saudi Arabia, and they haven’t just hit combatants. We found bomb fragments at the scenes of attacks on civilians. At one site, a family of six was killed. Italy isn’t the only country arming Saudi Arabia, but our investigation uncovers a massive increase in the export of these bombs in 2017 alone. We spent months tracking these shipments. We reveal how Italy is capitalizing on this brutal conflict to build up its defense industry and how this has put Italy’s leaders at the center of a debate over whether it’s violating national and even international laws. What’s presented here is a glimpse inside the murky networks that fuel global conflicts. The story begins in Sardinia and the weapons manufacturer RWM Italia. The company knows that Italy’s arms trade is a hot-button political issue, and it seems bent on avoiding scrutiny of any kind. They declined to comment on our findings. But local politicians like Mauro Pili have followed the company’s cargo trail for years. He and others have documented over two dozen shipments since Yemen’s conflict began. We cross-checked this footage with transport documents and traced the cargo from RWM’s factory to an airport and these ports in Sardinia. Sometimes the bombs were moved in plain sight like this cargo at Sardinia’s largest civilian airport. We have reporting that this was an urgent order, flown instead of shipped. This was six months after Saudi Arabia started bombing Yemen. More recently, the cargo has been loaded on trucks or containers. These labels are a telltale sign of what’s inside. Many shipments had an escort of police or trucks from the national fire service, which operate inside ports only when explosives are being ferried. We checked shipping and flight logs for these boats and planes and tracked them to Saudi Arabia. Several of the ships are part of the Saudi-owned fleet called Bahri. We have information that bombs loaded on these ships were destined for the Royal Saudi Air Force. Here’s one shipment we photographed in Sardinia’s main port in December 2017. And here’s the very same ship just after it docked in Jeddah one week later. In October, we lost track of one Bahri ship as it approached Sardinia. But video live streamed from the same port confirmed that the ship docked there. We don’t know why the ship’s tracking system was off, but this suggests there may be even more shipments that we are not yet aware of. Here’s how we track these bombs to attacks in Yemen. RWM sells the Saudis MK 80 series bombs that way up to a ton and are dropped from warplanes. We found these very bombs identifiable by their manufacturer code at the scene of five attacks in Yemen. On a government compound in Northern Yemen on Tahrir Square, a public space in the capital, on these remote civilian houses in Al Hada, and Dayr Al Bulaydim, and on the outskirts of Sana. In September 2016, warplanes dropped these bombs on the home of the Adelami family. Ahmad Algohbary, an activist and journalist in Yemen, visited the scene. They were not in the house, so no one injured, and no one was killed. But if they were in the house, it was really going to be a big massacre because it is a big family. A month later, RWM bombs were found in an attack that killed Hosni Ali Jabar, his wife, and their four children as they slept. These remains of a guidance system found in the rubble indicate it was a precision attack, and this fragment is stamped with RWM’s commercial code. Abdulrasheed Al-Faqih is the director of a human rights group that investigated the attack. European experts say that selling these bombs may be illegal. “The Italian law on arms export is one of the most restrictive ones in Europe, and it prohibits exports to countries engaged in armed conflict. And Saudi Arabia and its coalition members are engaged in an armed conflict.” Italy may be breaking international law too, which forbids arms exports where there is evidence of serious human rights violations. “For example, these people died, and nowhere in the vicinity of their house was a military objective. Then you have clear reasons to believe that we’re talking about a violation of international humanitarian law.” The European Parliament agrees. It voted for an arms embargo on Saudi Arabia for a third time in November, each time citing Saudi attacks in Yemen. But this may not matter, because the European Council must unanimously agree. And with big arms exporters like Britain and France at the table, there is no political consensus or will to take action. The same goes for Italian officials at the highest levels. They have repeatedly insisted that the sales are illegal. This is Roberta Pinotti, Italy’s minister of defense. And prime minister Paolo Gentiloni has said that everything is legal and above board. Some members of the opposition have pressed the government to stop these shipments. But Italy’s government is deeply entwined in the exports. The Foreign Ministry approves the export licenses. The Interior Ministry arranges police and fire escorts, and one logistics company told us the Defense Ministry asked them to ship the bombs. These sales have become big business for RWM, which is a subsidiary of the German defense giant Rheinmetall. Revenue grew 50 percent in 2016. And a former employee told us staffing has doubled. Italy’s government has granted the company licenses to sell almost half a billion euros in weapons. And most of the licenses are for MK 80 bombs, the very bombs sold to the Saudis and found in Yemen. The company is increasing MK 80 production, and it announced a $40 million euro expansion of its Sardinia plant. RWM’s activity has attracted some local opposition. Protesters from a town neighboring the plant called for a halt to these exports. But this region is one of Italy’s poorest, and some locals welcome the jobs. Clearly, this is great for Italy and other Western exporters. But for Yemen, where over 10,000 have been killed, there’s nothing good about it.