Yemen Crisis/Conflict & the "Decisive Storm" Coalition

antiterror13 said:

I am not too sure where should I put this news, but it is very important news ... and extremely interesting. Interesting whether Obama would veto it

Senate passes bill allowing 9/11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia

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kwaigonegin said:

Saudis may have the best equipment $ can buy but ..

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The Obama administration has moved to block sales of cluster bombs to Saudi Arabia for use in Yemen, amid reports of mounting civilian casualties there, a US media report said Saturday.

The report in the journal Foreign Policy, citing US officials, said that the White House had quietly placed a hold on the transfer of such munitions to the Sunni kingdom as it carries out a bloody war on Shiite rebels in Yemen.

A Saudi-led coalition has been fighting the Iranian-backed Huthis since March 2015, trying to roll back their control of wide swaths of Yemen.

Asked by AFP for comment, an administration official said that “we are aware of reports that the Saudi-led coalition used cluster munitions in the armed conflict in Yemen, including in areas in which civilians are alleged to have been present.”

“We take such concerns seriously and are seeking additional information,” the official added.

Foreign Policy said it was the first concrete display of unease by US officials over bombings that human rights activists say have killed and injured hundreds of civilians, including children.

Cluster bombs are designed to kill enemy personnel and destroy vehicles or runways.

But because they disperse scores of tiny bomblets over a wide area — some of which may not explode for years or even decades after being dropped — they pose a particular threat to civilians.

They were banned by an international treaty in 2008, but Russia and the United States, both major suppliers, failed to sign it.

The US antiwar group CodePink on Sunday applauded the administration decision, and called on President Barack Obama to suspend all arms transfers to the kingdom.

Amnesty International said Monday that the Saudi use of cluster bombs had created “minefields” for civilians in Yemen. It has called, along with Human Rights Watch, for a ban on arms sales to the Saudis.

The United States has sold the Saudis millions of dollars’ worth of cluster bombs and provided other forms of military support.

The reported move on cluster bombs comes amid growing criticism by American lawmakers of the Saudi monarchy. Legislators are unhappy that the Saudis have not done more to fight the militants of the Islamic State group in Syria, Yemen and elsewhere.

The longstanding US-Saudi relationship, built on an exchange of American security backing for a reliable supply of Saudi oil, has been strained as the United States has gained greater energy independence even while reaching historic agreement with the Saudis’ bitter regional foe Iran.

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Saudi Arabia has intercepted and destroyed a ballistic missile fired from Yemen and a Saudi-led military coalition said in a statement late on Monday it may be forced to reconsider a truce that has been place since April.

Saudi state news agency SPA quoted the statement as saying that the missile, the second such strike this month, was destroyed in mid-air without causing any casualties. The air force also destroyed the platform from which the missile was fired, it said.

Saudi Arabia, leading a coalition of Arab states, intervened in Yemen in March last year mainly with air strikes to try to restore President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi. Houthis, backed by forces loyal to former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, had advanced on Hadi's temporary headquarters in the southern city of Aden, forcing him to flee the country.

The war has killed more than 6,200 people and displaced more than 2.5 million people.

The Houthis describe their capture of the capital, Sanaa, in 2014 and their advance on Aden as part of a revolution against corruption and to end attacks by al Qaeda. They have accused the Saudi-led coalition of violating the truce with air strikes.

The Houthis and Yemen's Saudi-backed exiled government are currently engaged in peace talks in Kuwait aimed at ending the 14-month-old war and easing a humanitarian crisis in the Arabian Peninsula's poorest country.

The U.N.-sponsored talks have so far yielded few results.

SPA gave no details on the target or the type of missile used. However, the agency said the Saudi-led coalition warned it would not sit idle against any further violations of the truce, which began on April 10.

"The coalition command, through this statement, assert that violating the truce by the Houthi militia and its supporters and the targeting of the kingdom's lands ... would force the coalition to reconsider the feasibility of this policy (of self restraint)," SPA said.

Saudi Arabia said on May 9 it had also intercepted and destroyed a ballistic missile fired from Yemen before it reached its target.

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"Our armed forces, as I have stated in my lecture, has performed its duties in the most courageous and professional manner and this will continue with Saudi Arabia until the coalition announces the end of the war," he said.

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UAE's minister of state for foreign affairs, Anwar Gargash

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Jura said:

so how is
"Decisive Storm"
going?
...

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Riyadh is killing civilians with American help, and it’s jeopardizing the international credibility of the United States.

Across Republican and Democratic administrations, the United States has taken pride in standing by its friends and allies around the world when trouble commences. Acting side-by-side with allies in the Middle East, Europe, and Asia is often considered one of the bedrocks of a bipartisan U.S. foreign policy establishment; when a friend is in need or its security is threatened, the U.S. is quick to rise up and provide critical assistance often to the tune of billions of dollars.

That foreign policy tenet, however, is increasingly causing the United States more grief than benefit, particularly when America’s allies are engaging in activity that is at best questionable and at worst against international humanitarian law. Washington’s logistical aid to the Saudi-led Arab coalition fighting against the Houthis in Yemen fits that category perfectly.

An operation that was launched in March 2015 for a legitimate objective — defending the internationally recognized Yemeni government — has turned into a stalemate that has produced nothing but misery for millions of Yemeni civilians simply trying to survive. Yemen, already the Arab world’s poorest country before the war began, has been devastated in terms of economic productivity, political stability, and global health indicators.

While the Houthis deserve their fair share of the blame — the militia, after all, has breached international humanitarian law multiple times through indiscriminate mortar attacks and detention of journalists — it is actually Saudi Arabia and the regional coalition it has assembled that has caused (and continues to cause) the vast majority of the civilian casualties and the most extensive destruction in terms of infrastructure.

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Saudi Army in serious trouble as Houthi forces advance north of the Yemeni border
By

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19/07/2016

The Saudi Royal Army is in serious trouble inside the Jizan Region, as the Houthi forces and Yemeni Republican Guard advance north of the Saudi-border city of Khubah.

According to the local Houthi activists, their forces have seized a large number of villages inside of Saudi Arabia these last 24 hours, while also surrounding the key town of Al-Qarn in the Jizan.

In response to this massive assault by the Houthi forces, the Saudi Royal Air Force has conducted non-stop airstrikes over the Jizan Region, targeting the Al-Jarra Valley that is located near Khubah.

If the Saudi Army cannot get it together in the coming hours, they could lose Al-Qarn to the Houthi forces, which would be an embarrassing loss for them.

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delft said:

I took the trouble to look outside Syria and its neighbours and found:

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We do live in interesting times and more is happening than I cannot quite comprehend. Why, for example, does KSA continue to destroy its own prestige by fighting a bunch of poor tribesmen it cannot defeat?

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Jura said:

I've watched recent Houthis' combat-videos which tried to make a point that Saudis are in trouble on their own territory:

• west to Najran, and
• south to Jazan,

shown on this map together with the north-western "corner" of Yemen, its capital in mid-bottom roughly 150 miles from there:

(I don't know Arabic, so I wasn't able to figure out anything more, like how much to west/south ... and there's no need to tell me I'm wrong or anything, I admit I only used one-sided info)

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Jura said:

I've watched recent Houthis' combat-videos which tried to make a point that Saudis are in trouble on their own territory:

• west to Najran, and
• south to Jazan,

shown on this map together with the north-western "corner" of Yemen, its capital in mid-bottom roughly 150 miles from there:

(I don't know Arabic, so I wasn't able to figure out anything more, like how much to west/south ... and there's no need to tell me I'm wrong or anything, I admit I only used one-sided info)

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Saudi Arabia has requested to buy General Dynamics Land Systems-made M1A2S Abrams tanks and M88A1/A2 Heavy Equipment Recovery Combat Utility Lift Evacuation System (Hercules) Armored Recovery Vehicles (ARV) in a foreign military sale worth approximately $1.15 billion, according to a Defense Security Cooperation Agency statement Tuesday.

Congress was notified yesterday of the possible sale, which the State Department has approved. The notice does not mean the sale has been concluded.

The kingdom’s request includes up to 153 M1A1/A2 tanks for conversion to 133 M1A2S Saudi Abrams-configured main battle tanks, along with 20 replacements for vehicles damaged in battle.

The Saudi Arabian government also wants 20 Hercules ARVs.

In addition to the vehicles, Saudi Arabia is requesting 153 M2 .50 caliber machine guns, 266 7.62mm M240 machine guns and 153 smoke grenade launchers.

The order would also include driver vision enhancers and night vision devices for the Abrams and rounds of training and live ammunition, among other items like binoculars and camouflage netting.

“This proposed sale will contribute to the foreign policy and national security of the United States by helping to improve the security of a strategic regional partner which has been and continues to be a leading contributor of political stability and economic progress in the Middle East,” the notice from the DSCA states. “This sale will increase the Royal Saudi Land Force’s (RSLF) interoperability with U.S. forces and conveys U.S. commitment to Saudi Arabia's security and armed forces modernization.”

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A hospital associated with Doctors Without Borders. A school. A potato chip factory. Under international law, those facilities in

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are not legitimate military targets. Yet all were bombed in recent days by warplanes belonging to a coalition

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, killing more than 40 civilians.

The United States is complicit in this carnage. It has enabled the coalition in many ways, including selling arms to the Saudis to mollify them after the nuclear deal with Iran. Congress should put the arms sales on hold and

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should quietly inform Riyadh that the United States will withdraw crucial assistance if the Saudis do not stop targeting civilians and agree to negotiate peace.

The airstrikes are further evidence that the Saudis have escalated their bombing campaign against Houthi militias, which control the capital, Sana, since peace talks

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on Aug. 6, ending a cease-fire that was declared more than four months ago. They also suggest one of two unpleasant possibilities. One is that the Saudis and their coalition of mostly Sunni Arab partners have yet to learn how to identify permissible military targets. The other is that they simply do not care about killing innocent civilians. The bombing of the hospital, which alone killed 15 people, was the fourth attack on a facility supported by Doctors Without Borders in the past year even though all parties to the conflict were told exactly where the hospitals were located.

In all, the war has killed more than 6,500 people, displaced more than 2.5 million others and pushed one of the world’s poorest countries from deprivation to devastation. A recent

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blamed the coalition for 60 percent of the deaths and injuries to children last year. Human rights groups and the United Nations have suggested that war crimes may have been committed.

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, which began the air war in March 2015, bears the heaviest responsibility for inflaming the conflict with the Houthis, an indigenous Shiite group with loose connections to Iran. The Saudis intervened in Yemen with the aim of defeating the Houthis and reinstalling President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, whom the rebels ousted from power. They consider Iran their main enemy and feared Tehran was gaining too much influence in the region.

Although many experts believe the threat to be overstated, Mr. Obama agreed to support the Yemen intervention — without formal authorization from Congress — and sell the Saudis even more weapons in part to appease Riyadh’s anger over the Iran nuclear deal. All told, since taking office, Mr. Obama has sold the Saudis $110 billion in arms, including Apache helicopters and missiles.

Mr. Obama has also supplied the coalition such indispensable assistance as intelligence, in-flight refueling of aircraft and help in identifying appropriate targets. Experts say the coalition would be grounded if Washington withheld its support. Instead, the State Department last week

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of $1.15 billion more in tanks and other equipment to Saudi Arabia to replace items destroyed in the war. Congress has the power to block this sale; Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, says he is discussing that possibility with other lawmakers. But the chances are slim, in part because of the politics.

Given the civilian casualties, further American support for this war is indefensible. As Mr. Murphy

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on Tuesday: “There’s an American imprint on every civilian life lost in Yemen.”

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