Tag Archives: Operation Firmness Storm

August 12, 2015 – Arsenal For Democracy 138

  By

Posted by Bill on behalf of the team.

AFD-logo-470

Topics: Key news stories from Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Iran (and how it all relates to or affects U.S. policy in the region). People: Bill, Kelley, Nate. Produced: August 10th, 2015.

Discussion Points:

– Syria: The U.S. bombs fictional terror groups and Turkey bombs the Kurds.
– Iraq: On air conditioners and nation-building.
– Yemen: Saudi Arabia’s war and a horrific humanitarian crisis.
– Iran: Will the Iran Deal survive Congress? Will it change US-Israeli relations?

Episode 138 (56 min):
AFD 138

Related Links

– AFD: Syria Archives
– AFD: Iraq’s air conditioner uprising
– AFD: Yemen War Archives
– AFD: Iran Archives

Subscribe

RSS Feed: Arsenal for Democracy Feedburner
iTunes Store Link: “Arsenal for Democracy by Bill Humphrey”

And don’t forget to check out The Digitized Ramblings of an 8-Bit Animal, the video blog of our announcer, Justin.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Yemen War Update: Still an inhumane catastrophe

  By

After four months of nearly uninterrupted bombing by the Saudi air force and blockade by the Saudi navy, two articles (one big picture, one narrow but illustrative) sum up the horror that is the war in Yemen.

yemen-map

Washington Post: “In Yemen’s grinding war, if the bombs don’t get you, the water shortages will”

The number of Yemenis who lack access to drinking water has almost doubled since the war began, according to the United Nations and aid agencies. Now, they say, more than 20 million people — about 80 percent of Yemen’s population — struggle to find enough water to quench their thirst and bathe.

Diseases such as malaria are spreading, killing hundreds of people, because so many residents are forced to use improperly stored and unsanitary water, health experts say. The crisis is compounding a humanitarian emergency that already has prompted U.N. officials and aid workers to warn of famine.
[…]
Diesel fuel for backup generators, which could be used to power the pumps, has become scarce because of the difficulties of transporting it through war zones. In addition, U.N. officials and aid workers say an air and naval blockade established by the Saudi-led coalition is severely restricting imports.
[…]
The United Nations says that 120,000 children could die if the lack of access to clean water, sufficient food and adequate health care persists. The fighting has forced many hospitals and medical clinics to close.

 
The fighting from the Saudis and their allies on one side and the Houthis on the other side has killed an estimated 3,500 people in direct attacks. That will pale in comparison to the eventual death rate from the disease and starvation it is causing. Still, it is definitely not helping things to have Saudi bombers indiscriminately annihilating civilian targets constantly.

Associated Press: “Yemeni officials, witnesses: Saudi-led coalition airstrikes kill more than 120 in port city”

Saudi-led coalition airstrikes killed more than 120 civilians and wounded more than 150 after shelling a residential area [of Mokha] in the Yemeni province of Taiz on Friday evening, security officials, medical officials and witnesses said.

The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to reporters, said that most of the houses in the area were leveled and a fire broke out in the port city of Mokha. Most of the corpses, including children, women and elderly people, were charred by the flames, they said.

 
They were trying to remove injured survivors out of the site on animal carts toward hospitals in the provincial capital, but those were inaccessible because the war has closed or blocked most roads. Saudi targeting of places in the middle of nowhere isn’t helping matters when it comes to saving the wounded:

Security officials said this comes after Saudi-led coalition planes launched dozens of airstrikes on positions of Shiite Houthi rebels and their allies in Mokha. The closest Houthi outpost to Friday evening’s deadly strike is at least 5km away, officials and area residents said.

 
These are our “allies.” We gave them those bombs and jets. They haven’t improved from bombing schools and refugee camps in April. At what point do we cut ties with them?

Militarily, it has taken the full four months to turn back the Houthis even a little bit (from the city of Aden). Their overall territorial hold remains larger than when the bombing began in March. So, the war hasn’t been strategically particularly effective either.

They are not destroying a rebellion. They are destroying Yemen. A country whose population is half children and which was already one of the poorest in the world.

Young Yemen

  By

Yemen has the lowest median age of any country in the Middle East/North Africa region.

The median age in Yemen is 18.6 years, according to the CIA World Factbook. This means that, as of last year, almost half of the 26 million people of Yemen were under 18 years of age. Yemen’s median age is 19 years below the U.S. median age and 23.3 years below that of the EU.

Flag of Yemen

Flag of Yemen

Yemen’s economy is small and under-developed. The country has depended for many years on dwindling oil reserves and was unable to provide enough educational opportunities or legitimate jobs for its young people. In addition, Yemen’s government has been weak for quite some time.

As a result, the country has not been in a position to pursue suitable policies to address and mitigate the challenges associated with this stark demographic reality.

Now that a full-blown civil war has unfolded in Yemen and almost a dozen countries are currently participating in military operations in the country, it has become next to impossible to tackle the issue of the youth bulge in any meaningful fashion.

Even before this recent turn of events, Yemeni children were at serious risk of enslavement and abduction for human trafficking, not just in Yemen itself, but also in neighboring Saudi Arabia and Oman. Girls are kidnapped and forced into prostitution in Saudi Arabia’s hospitality and entertainment industry.

Young boys are also at risk of being forced into domestic servitude or prostitution. They bear the additional risk of being forced to fight in Yemen’s national army, clan militias and terrorist groups that operate in the country.

This piece was adapted from a Globalist Quiz I researched and wrote.

27 days in, high toll compels Saudis to halt Yemen bombing

  By

Note added April 22, 2015: Less than a day later, Saudi bombing resumed. The naval blockade will continue indefinitely.

27 consecutive days of Saudi-led airstrikes in Yemen will come to an end.

Saudi Arabia’s government claims they have met their tactical objectives against the Houthi rebels, and averted their “takeover” of the country, but there’s actually no immediate sign that the Houthis have been dislodged or even substantially set back, let alone defeated. The New York Times reported that Houthi-held territory, from the Saudi border to the capital to the coast, remained entirely intact after the 27 days of bombing.

The bigger reason compelling a halt to the bombing seems to be the very high civilian death toll and infrastructure annihilation from the Arab coalition’s fairly sloppy or lazy targeting. NYT:

The Saudis have come under international pressure because of the bombings, which hit a number of civilian targets, including a camp for displaced Yemenis, in which dozens were killed, and a storehouse of emergency aid administered by Oxfam, the relief agency. Oxfam called that strike “an absolute outrage.”

On Monday, the Saudis struck a target near Sana, the capital, that caused an enormous explosion that left at least 25 people dead, medical officials there said.

 
In isolation, perhaps the Saudi government would not care about that, but the United States applied pressure on the matter:

A senior American official said “there have been discussions” in the past several days among officials from the United States, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, a Saudi partner in the campaign, about ending the bombing. Asked why, the American official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said: “Too much collateral damage.”

 
Anonymous U.S. generals at CENTCOM reportedly say they were given no advanced warning by Saudi Arabia before the start of the operation last month and believed it was “a bad idea.”

This U.S. concern with the high civilian toll is itself because…

“A good number of the American arms that have been used in Yemen by the Saudis have been used against civilian populations,” said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, an assertion that Saudi Arabia denies.

 
It is unclear so far whether the Saudi naval embargo will also be lifted, allowing vital food and water aid to be delivered to the starving Yemeni population.

April 8, 2015 – Arsenal For Democracy 123

  By

AFD-logo-470

Topics: Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, Nigeria’s election outcome. People: Bill, Nate, Sasha. Produced: April 6th, 2015.

Episode 123 (42 min):
AFD 123

Discussion points:

– Why is Saudi Arabia leading a massive military intervention in Yemen?
– What is the significance of Nigeria’s peaceful democratic transfer of power between parties?

Related Links:

– Al-Bab: Yemen-Saudi Arabia Relations
– AFD: Nigeria: The call that changed it all

Subscribe

RSS Feed: Arsenal for Democracy Feedburner
iTunes Store Link: “Arsenal for Democracy by Bill Humphrey”

And don’t forget to check out The Digitized Ramblings of an 8-Bit Animal, the video blog of our announcer, Justin.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Saudi Arabia air campaign continues to pound Yemen

  By

Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen against the Houthi rebels continues to obliterate housing and infrastructure. According to sources on the ground in Yemen, the Saudi-led coalition bombed the water pipelines into Aden:

The BBC reports:

“People cannot go out to buy food, we know that there is a lack of water in the city because the water pipes have been damaged, we are trying to do everything we can but the situation is extremely difficult,” she said.

 
Ali al-Mujahed of The Washington Post, who lives in Yemen, reported on the nightly terror of the coalition air raids and the mounting daytime hoarding of resources before things run out.

International aid organizations have struggled to persuade the Saudis to stop bombing long enough to allow food and water in.

People are even fleeing the chaos to Somalia. When people have to flee to Somalia that means the “intervention” is a real step backward.

Airstrikes have been poorly targeted. Channel News Asia:

An air strike on a village near the Yemeni capital Sanaa killed a family of nine, residents said on Saturday [April 4], in what appeared to be a hit by the Saudi-led military campaign against Houthi militia.

France24:

An air strike on Monday [March 30] hit a refugee camp in northwest Yemen, killing 21 people, aid workers said.

 
Other reactions from Yemen, after al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) emptied a key prison and seized several military and political targets amid the general pandemonium:

The Saudi leadership acknowledges it has intentionally bombed residential areas but claims that these strikes were necessary to hit military equipment being sheltered among houses.

Saudi Arabia has requested that Pakistan deploy ground troops to Yemen, though there has been tremendous public resistance in Pakistan to any participation in the Saudi war in Yemen.

Meanwhile, some of the coalition participants are being pretty publicly cynical about the whole thing and their reasons for getting involved. Sudanese media reported that Sudan’s government openly admits it expects its role in the Yemen war will help its economy via US cash and hopes that the US will lift sanctions against the genocidal Sudanese regime.

There wasn’t much left of Yemen when this war started, but the GCC is finishing the job. This is going to be non-country by the end of this “intervention.”

That may well be the goal:

Relations with Saudi Arabia have always been a central feature of Yemeni foreign policy, not merely because the kingdom is the dominant state in the peninsula and Yemen’s most important neighbour, but also because the Saudis’ perception of their security needs is that they should seek to influence Yemen as much as possible in order to prevent it from becoming a threat.

According to this view, Saudi interests are best served by keeping Yemen “on the wobble” (as one western diplomat put it) – though not so wobbly that regional stability is jeopardised. Before the unification of north and south Yemen in 1990, this amounted to ensuring that both parts of the country focused their attentions on each other rather than on their non-Yemeni neighbours.

 

The war in Yemen has begun in earnest now

  By

After years of slowly building chaos, The Houthi force is moving against Aden, the government-in-the-south has fled the country, and — as of tonight — the Royal Saudi Air Force has launched an operation into Yemen under the GCC (or possibly the Arab League) at the request of the fallen government.

Flag of Yemen

Flag of Yemen

10 countries are participating in the operation already: Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Egypt, Pakistan, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Morocco, and Sudan are all said to be participating, with logistical and intelligence support from the United States.

The involvements of Egypt, Pakistan, Morocco, and Sudan are very unexpected and indicate a much wider operation than anticipated. It also strongly suggests that Saudi Arabia was leaning heavily on every government in the Middle East, North Africa, East Africa, and South Asia to whom it has given a lot of money previously. Saudi Arabia is cashing in every favor for a blistering war against the quasi-Shia Houthi rebels in Yemen, unlike with the rather lackadaisical coalition to support the United States against ISIS in Syria. Qatar, which sent no jets at all in the Syria campaign, sent 10 tonight.

Bahrain, which only participated minimally on the first day of the Syria raids, also sent 15 jets. Bahrain’s Sunni monarchy also “owes” Saudi Arabia for brutally suppressing their own Shia uprising in 2011 (during the Arab Spring) with GCC shock troops.

The UAE and Jordan also sent plenty of bombers over Yemen in the initial hours, in a marked contrast from their wavering in the Syria campaign.

This massive undertaking should, in my opinion, also be taken as a clear signal that Saudi Arabia firmly prioritizes the “threat” from Iran and Iranian proxies (which include the Houthis in Yemen but also 100,000 anti-ISIS fighters across Iraq and Hezbollah anti-ISIS units in western Syria) well above the threat from ISIS, despite tough talk on the latter some months ago.

Meanwhile, Iran has countless military advisers and trainers on the ground assisting the huge Iraqi campaign to re-take Tikrit from ISIS, has been providing close-air support and bombers against ISIS all over the Iraqi skies, and reportedly may even have 30,000 regular troops fighting in Iraq directly.

If I’m looking at the facts and figures, Saudi Arabia and the Arab League in general — the purported American allies — are doing far less to combat ISIS than Iran, even if you buy the theory that Iran’s support for Assad accidentally helped create ISIS in the first place.

This war in Yemen against the Houthis, which Saudi Arabia has been stirring up violently for years, seems essentially to be more of an indirect war between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

And this doesn’t even begin to touch the actual al Qaeda presence in Yemen.