Yemen - Massacres and Assassinations Trigger a New Phase of War
4
May, 2018
In
mid April some 20+ of Sudanese soldiers were
killed in
an ambush in northern Yemen. Sudan, which sent up to 10,000 soldiers
to Yemen in hope of Saudi money, is reconsidering its
engagement. The Gulf states had promised investments in Sudan and the
lifting of U.S. sanction in exchange for sending cannon fodder.
Neither happened.
The
war Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and the powers behind them
wage on Yemen aims to install a proxy-government that defers to them.
The Yemeni people do not want that. They resist against the
overwhelming forces of their rich neighbors. Especially the Zaidi
people of north Yemen dislike their proselytizing Wahhabi neighbors.
Their Houthi movement leads the fight. Yemeni in general regard them
as 'monkeys with laptops'. To overcome the resistance the Saudi
launched a genocidal campaign of blockading, bombing and starving the
people into submission.
The
same week the Sudanese mercenaries were killed, airstrikes by Saudi
jets slaughtered
dozens of
Yemeni civilians:
An airstrike by the Saudi-led coalition hit a wedding party in northern Yemen, killing at least 20 people including the bride, health officials said Monday, as harrowing images emerged on social media of the deadly bombing, the third to hit Yemeni civilians since the weekend.
...
An airstrike on Sunday night hit a house elsewhere in Hajja, killing an entire family of five, according to al-Nadhri.
On Saturday, at least 20 civilians were killed when coalition fighter jets bombed a bus carrying commuters in western Yemen, near the city of Taiz, which has been locked in fighting for three years.
After
the bombing of the wedding one boy, 3 to 5 years old, clutched
to his dead father all night (video)
and rejected attempts to be taken away. A graphic
video taken
the next morning shows that the boy is still there and the terrible
aftermath of the Saudi massacre. The
Oniononly
slightly exaggerates when it writes that
the Saudi clown prince visited the child to finish the job.
The
standard agency reports from Yemen, like the above one, always repeat
the UN estimate that more than 10,000 have died in the war. But that
UN number is at least two
years old,
never changes and only hides the ongoing massacre:
Elisabeth Kendall @Dr_E_Kendall - 20:28 UTC - 11 Apr 2018
#Yemen war: Why does the much-quoted UN statistic of 10,000 deaths never seem to increase? @YemenData documents 16,847 air raids by the #Saudi-led coalition from 3/2015 to 3/2018 (with 423 this March) & @MSF received over 97,000 emergency patients in 1st 3 months of 2017 alone
At
least 70,000 have
been killed by bombing alone. That number does not include the
probably one hundred thousand who starved or died from easily
preventable diseases. When asked about the real numbers UN officials
are evading
any sensible response (vid).
The
Saudi coalition strikes on civilians are not by accident. The Saudis
target infrastructure, all food and people transport, health
facilities and any gathering that is deemed suspicious. Other strikes
are targeted assassinations.
One
recent drone
camera video from
a United Arab Emirates owned drone, follows a car near Hodeidah port
in north-west Yemen and shows a missile hitting it. The video cuts to
a second drone camera, filmed from a screen in an operations room,
which shows people coming to the rescue after the first strike. A
second missile strike kills them all. The people in the operations
room are elated.
Saleh al-Samad, the president of the Houthis’ Supreme Political Council, was killed in the drone strike, delivering the deathblow to an already stagnant Yemeni peace process. Samad was regarded as a conciliatory figure within the Houthi rebellion and had sought to reach a negotiated settlement to Yemen’s civil war. He was scheduled to meet with Martin Griffiths, the U.N. special envoy for Yemen, on April 28.
A
well bribed nephew of the deceased former president of Yemen Ali
Abdullah Saleh may help the UAE to kill his dead uncle's allies. I
though suspect that U.S. intelligence, targeting mobile phones and
alike, or even U.S. boots on the ground are heavily involved:
Tareq Saleh and his men were forced to seek refuge in the UAE, bringing with them a deep knowledge of the Houthis inner workings.
...
Samad’s death was not an isolated incident. A number of key Houthi figures, who shared close ties to former President Saleh, have been killed recently. Mansour al-Saidi, the commander of Houthi naval forces; Salah al-Sharqai, his deputy; Nasser al-Qaubari, the major general of Houthi missile forces; and Fares Manea, a notorious arms dealer and former governor of Saada, were all killed in airstrikes over the last week.
Killing
the leaders of resistance movements is not a successful strategy.
Such leaders usually get replaced with smarter or more brutal
hardliners who care less about collateral damage:
Samad’s successor, Mahdi al-Mashat, who was appointed Monday, is a hard-liner with extensive links to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Ali al-Bukhaiti, a former senior Houthi figure now based in Amman, Jordan, claims that there is growing puritanism within the movement. “Mashat is the polar opposite of his predecessor: He is tactless, threatens, doesn’t compromise,” he says. “He does not build relationships — he damages them.”
Tens
of thousands gathered in the Yemeni capital Sanaa for the funeral
commemoration for Saleh al-Samad. Saudi jets flew over the crowd
and bombed
nearby.
The crowd was not deterred. No one ran away but the people got
up on their feet (vid)
and chanted (vid)
Houthi slogans. They are willing to fight and far from defeated.
The
United Arab Emirates has its own design on Yemen. It is in for the
money. The UAE occupies the Yemeni Sakrota island,
the Unesco-protected
'Jewel of Arabia',
and is stealing its natural resources.
Aden,
in the south of Yemen is also under UAE occupation. The UAE company
Dubai Port, now DP
World,
wants to control Aden's port. But mothers in Aden starve themselves
to death to keep their children alive. There is no state, no security
and no one gets paid for their work as doctor, teacher or street
sweeper. Some food is available on the markets but the people can not
longer afford it.
Professor
Isa Blumi of Stockholm University argues (radio)
that the war in Yemen is not a civil war and not even a war by the
local powers Saudi Arabia and the UAE. It is an imperial war by
larger powers with a deep colonial history.
Neither
the UAE nor Saudi Arabia could do anything in Yemen without direction
and support from
Britain (pdf)
and the USA:
Thousands of UK and non-UK employees of UK companies work in Saudi Arabia to train, install, maintain and help operate UK-supplied aircraft and other military equipment, including the Tornado IDS fighter-bombers and Typhoon fighters that constitute just under 50% of the in-service combat aircraft of the Royal Saudi Air Force (RSAF).
...[T]he UK has made a blanket commitment to provide RSAF with UK civilian and military personnel to support and arm UK-supplied aircraft used by RSAF in an armed conflict.
...
UK officials interviewed for this paper, and at least one of the government-to-government agreements governing the supply of UK weapons systems to RSAF, thus suggest that the UK MOD has detailed knowledge about the roles and activities of UK personnel both civilian and military, private and governmental, in Saudi Arabia; as well as about the use of UK-supplied aircraft and their munitions.
The US military is looking for contractors to provide personnel recovery, as well as airborne casualty and medical evacuation services, for special forces personnel operating in and around Yemen.
Why
would the U.S. need those? And why in
these weird places?
(And why would the U.S. Special Operations Command ever outsource
such a specialized, dangerous and important military task?) So far
the U.S. had claimed that a very few of its soldiers are looking for
al-Qaeda in south Yemen. These are supposed to be in-hit-out
operations with direct U.S. air support.
The
U.S. downplays its intelligence and aerial refueling support for the
Saudi bombing of the various hospitals and weddings. In reality no
Saudi plane would fly without direct U.S. and UK support. Now we
learn that U.S. soldiers are also directly
involved in
the fighting on the ground:
[L]ate last year, a team of about a dozen Green Berets arrived on Saudi Arabia’s border with Yemen, in a continuing escalation of America’s secret wars.
With virtually no public discussion or debate, the Army commandos are helping locate and destroy caches of ballistic missiles and launch sites that Houthi rebels in Yemen are using to attack Riyadh and other Saudi cities.
...
Along the porous border, the Americans are working with surveillance planes that can gather electronic signals to track the Houthi weapons and their launch sites, ..
...
They also are working closely with American intelligence analysts in Najran, a city in southern Saudi Arabia that has been repeatedly attacked with rockets, to help locate Houthi missile sites within Yemen.
The
U.S. media seem to support the U.S. war on Yemen. In a recent
interview on CNN Senator Rand Paul argued to at least debate the war
in the U.S. congress. CNN host Wolf Blitzer dismissed (vid)
that as "moral issue". He says there are "a lot of
jobs at stake" and selling less bombs to Saudi Arabia might
cause a "significant loss of jobs and revenues". He wonders
why that is "secondary question" to Paul.
I'll
leave it to a Yemeni to respond:
Haykal Bafana @BaFana3 - 19:51 UTC- 14 Apr 2018
To whom it may concern: Which part is not sinking into your small-brained thick skull? Your half-fucked fuckery has been one long fuckin' orgy of disastrous self-fucking from start to now. End this humiliating porn. And stay the fuck out of Yemen. Dumb fucks.
The
Sudanese seem to have understood. Others still have to learn. After
the recent assassination of their leaders the Houthis promised
to directly
attack Saudi
and UAE leaders. This will be a new phase of the ongoing war.
If the war continues for long the people of Yemen turn their eyes
towards the imperial powers behind those figures.
Green Berets Are Now On The Ground Assisting The Saudi War On Yemen In "A Marked Escalation"
4
April, 2018
Once
again a creeping, years' long shadow war is expanding from indirect
proxy intervention to direct engagement, complete with US "boots
on the ground" where
no American ground forces were previously thought to exist.
And
it's not Syria,
or Libya, or central Africa where
the now familiar pattern played out before, but in
the Arabian peninsula where the Pentagon has long claimed to merely
coordinate intelligence, refuel jets, and provide logistical support
to the Saudis which
have been bombing Yemen since March of 2015.
"
Spec
Ops Magazine: Old photo (in 2017 or prior) of U.S. Special Forces
posing for a picture at undisclosed location, which were
likely previously
engaged in anti-AQ operations in Yemen.
Now the mission has shifted to focus on Houthi targets and pro-Iran
forces in the region.
Spec
Ops Magazine: Old photo (in 2017 or prior) of U.S. Special Forces
posing for a picture at undisclosed location, which were
likely previously
engaged in anti-AQ operations in Yemen.
Now the mission has shifted to focus on Houthi targets and pro-Iran
forces in the region.
On
Thursday The
New York Times revealed
for the first time that US special forces have been on the
ground supporting
Saudi coalition forces since late last year:
But
late last year, a
team of about a dozen Green Berets arrived on Saudi Arabia’s
border with Yemen, in a continuing escalation of America’s secret
wars.
With
virtually no public discussion or debate, the
Army commandos are helping locate and destroy caches of ballistic
missiles and launch sites that Houthi rebels in Yemen are using to
attack Riyadh and other Saudi cities.
Details
of the Green Beret operation, which has not been previously
disclosed, were provided to The New York Times by United States
officials and European diplomats.
According
to the report, the elite Army operators were sent to assist the
Saudis starting in December, weeks
after ballistic missiles fired by Yemeni Houthi rebels came
close to directly hitting Riyadh's international airport,
though the Saudis claimed to have intercepted it - a claim which was
subsequently cast
into doubt by weapons experts.
At
that point, a worried Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman reportedly
renewed calls for the the United States to send ground troops in
order to bolster Saudi-led operations aimed at rooting out the
source of the sophisticated Yemeni missile attacks, which have
occurred on multiple occasions over the past year of fighting.
Like
all administrations going back to 2001, the
White House is relying on the the 9/11-era Authorization
For Use of Military Force (AUMF) to give legal justification
for its actions in the Arabian peninsula. But
this time the target is not primarily al-Qaeda, ISIS, or Sunni
Islamist militants, but Iran — which the Trump administration
has repeatedly accused of supplying Yemen's Shia Houthis with its
ballistic missile arsenal.
So it's not just a "Saudi" war. "US Army Special Forces Secretly Help Saudis Combat Threat From Yemen Rebels." nyti.ms/2HI2f9Q
To
underscore the US perception that it is fundamentally in a struggle
against Iranian influence in Yemen, the Times quotes
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo who
stated during a visit to Riyadh on Sunday, “Iran
destabilizes this entire region.” Pompeo
further charged Iran with supporting “militias and terrorist
groups" — specifically that it is “an arms dealer
to the Houthi rebels in Yemen.”
However,
even the usually national security state-friendly New York Times
isn't fully buying the "it's necessary to counter Iran"
narrative spun by the Pentagon, instead calling
the Green Beret presence "a
marked escalation of Western assistance to target Houthi fighters
who are deep in Yemen."
The
NYT further notes that, “There is no
evidence that
the Houthis directly threaten the United States;
they are an
unsophisticated militant group with no operations outside Yemen and
have not been classified by the American government as a terrorist
group.”
*
* *
So
if we are once again on the slow and creeping path of American
"boots on the ground" in yet another Middle East proxy
war, how did we get here?
To
quickly review, Saudi airstrikes on already impoverished Yemen,
which have killed and maimed tens of thousands of civilians
(thousands
among those are children according
to the UN) and displaced
hundreds of thousands,
have been enabled by both US intelligence and military hardware.
Cholera has recently exploded amidst
the appalling war-time conditions, and civilian infrastructure such
as hospitals and schools have been bombed by the Saudis.
After Shia
Houthi rebels overran Yemen’s north in 2014,
embattled President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi vowed
to “extract Yemen from
the claws of Iran” something
which he's repeatedly affirmed, having been given international
backing from allies in the West, and a major bombing campaign began
on March 2015 under the name "Operation Decisive Storm"
(in a cheap mirroring of prior US wars in Iraq, the first of which
was "Desert Storm").
NYT: “There is no evidence that the Houthis directly threaten the United States; they are an unsophisticated militant group with no operations outside Yemen and have not been classified by the American government as a terrorist group.” nytimes.com/2018/05/03/us/…
Saudi
Arabia and its backers fear what they perceive as growing
Iranian influence in the region,
something considered by some analysts to be grossly
exaggerated,
and seek to defend at all costs Yemeni forces loyal to
UN-recognized President Hadi - who since 2017 appears to be in some
sort of house arrest situation in Riyadh. According to Al
Jazeera Saudi
Arabia's King Salman has denied Hadi's repeat requests to return to
Yemen in order to rally forces loyal to him.
The
pro-Saudi coalition goes far beyond US involvement but
also includes Bahrain,
Kuwait, UAE, Egypt, Sudan, and Britain; and the Saudi initiated
war has also received behind
the scenes political support from Israel, something
recently confirmed by
Israeli officials.
Concerning
the supposed Iran threat in Yemen, an
emergency session of the Arab League held
in response to the November 4th Houthi missile attack on Riyadh
doubled down on its shared commitment to
wage war against Iranian interests after it blamed Tehran for the
supplying and advising the attack,
which Iran for its part denies playing a role in.
The
attack clearly rattled not just the Gulf allies, but the US itself
(concerned chiefly over what it perceived as "Iran's reach"),
which is apparently what led to the relatively quick deployment of
the special forces to the Saudi border with Yemen.
*
* *
But
for all the international powers involved in the anti-Houthi
military alliance, the
coalition may be dysfunctional and in shambles,
at least according one major Middle
East Eye investigation published
in late 2017.
The
report predicted that the Saudi military campaign is likely to end
in total failure as "more than two years into a disastrous war,
the coalition of ground forces assembled by the Saudis is showing
signs of crumbling" and as the Saudis have become increasingly
reliant on foreign mercenaries for its ground forces,
such as a
huge contingent of Sudanese mercenaries and UAE officers.
It
is entirely possible and probable that should the coalition suffer
continued setbacks, or should at any point Houthis gain in strength
and territory, the
US would bolster its role by ramping up its current special forces
contingent. As
recent history has born out — most especially in
Syria for example —
a tiny "footprint" easily slides into small forward
operating bases,
and then on to
thousands of conventional forces, without
so much as a peep from Congress.
Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia and a member of the Armed Services Committee, on Thursday called the Green Berets mission a “purposeful blurring of lines between train and equip missions and combat.” He cited the report in The Times and called for a new congressional vote on the authorization for the use of military force — a war powers legislation used by three successive presidents in conflict zones around the world.
And
concerning just what the Green Berets have been and will be doing
along the Yemeni-Saudi border, the Times continues:
A half-dozen officials — from the United States military, the Trump administration, and European and Arab nations — said the American commandos are training Saudi ground troops to secure their [Saudis] border. They also are working closely with American intelligence analysts in Najran, a city in southern Saudi Arabia that has been repeatedly attacked with rockets, to help locate Houthi missile sites within Yemen.
Along the porous border, the Americans are working with surveillance planes that can gather electronic signals to track the Houthi weapons and their launch sites, according to the officials, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the mission publicly.
In
spite of the usual promises to the contrary, we expect to hear of
direct US commando and pro-Iranian Houthi clashes any day now.
And
likely, the
currently reported number of about "a dozen" US special
forces on the ground is perhaps much higher,
as Wednesday's NYT report itself suggests: On
April 17, Robert S. Karem, assistant secretary of defense for
international security affairs, told the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee that the
United States had about 50 military personnel in Saudi Arabia,
“largely helping on the ballistic missile threat.”
As
we've pointed out the obvious many times before, whether it's the
Middle East, Africa, or Eastern Europe, the familiar
pattern of
American military expansion goes something like this...
First
we are promised that US troops are merely in a country for limited
"training" missions with "partner" forces; next
we are told of "counter-terror" operations which require
an increased "footprint"; after which we are assured once
again that there are "no boots on the ground"
but a "minimal" increase of train and assist missions;
finally, US
soldiers begin to come home in body bags at
which point the 9/11 era AUMF is cynically invoked and Congress
passively looks the other way.
And
now it appears the cycle will repeat itself in already war-torn
Yemen.
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