Yemen Crisis/Conflict & the "Decisive Storm" Coalition

Iran dispatches planeload of humanitarian aid to Yemen

The Iranian Red Crescent Society (IRCS) has dispatched a planeload of humanitarian aid to Yemen where Shia mosques were recently targeted by terrorist attacks.

The IRCS sent its 13-ton consignment of humanitarian aid and medical supply on Monday.

Meanwhile, 52 people injured in the recent deadly bomb attacks in Yemen were flown to Iran on Monday and taken to hospital for treatment.
An Iranian medical official said the patients have sustained such injuries as fractures, burns and amputation.

Soleiman Heidari added that six of the victims are in critical condition.

He noted that Iran sent a six-member medical team to Yemen following the terrorist attacks to treat the victims.

Three bomb attacks were carried out at two mosques in Sana’a on Friday. At least 142 people were killed and 351 suffered injuries in the blasts targeting Badr and al-Hashoosh mosques.
A branch of the ISIL terrorist group in Yemen claimed responsibility for the bombings in an online statement, warning that the attacks were “just the tip of the iceberg.”

The blasts came against the backdrop of intense gun battles between supporters and opponents of fugitive President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi in the southern port city of Aden. More than a dozen people died in the fighting, which also forced closure of the Aden International Airport.

Hadi, along with members of Prime Minister Khaled Bahah’s cabinet, stepped down in late January, but the parliament did not approve the president's resignation. The president fled his home in Sana’a on February 21, after weeks under effective house arrest and went to Aden, Yemen’s second largest city, where he officially withdrew his resignation and highlighted his intention to resume duties. This came after the Houthi fighters took control of Sana’a in September 2014.

Houthi forces took full control over city of Zinjibar after driving ISIL and pro Hadi man out.Reportedly Houthis are accompanied by 115th Brigade of Yemeni army who is under their command.This forces are now heading east towards Al Mukalla

Houthi forces have taken control on Bab El Mandeb.Military base that overlooks the strait is captured as well as entire 17th Armoured Division.From here the whole strait can be controlled.

Fighting along border begins

Houthis claim they are fighting against "Zionist Saudi regime"

War in Yemen

Saudi Arabia starts bombing its southern neighbour
Mar 28th 2015 | DUBAI

SAUDI ARABIA was only going to tolerate the advances of the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels for so long. Early on the morning of March 26th the kingdom said it had started a military operation in neighbouring Yemen to push back the Houthis and reinstate the legitimate government of President Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi.
The first air strikes hit Houthi positions in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, including the airport and the groups political headquarters. They also targeted military bases controlled by loyalists of Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemens former president, who was ousted in 2011 and has been backing the Houthis, a Shia militia that occupied Sanaa in September and has rapidly taken over swathes of the country.

Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi ambassador to America, says the strikes are the opening salvo in a campaign involving ten countriesmainly Gulf states as well as Jordan and Egypt. America said it was providing logistical and intelligence support.

The Saudi-led intervention comes after an advance by forces loyal to Houthis and Mr Saleh towards Aden, a strategic southern port to which Mr Hadi had fled earlier this year after the fall of the capital. The Houthi advance worries Saudi Arabia because the militiamen are backed by Iran, its main strategic rival for influence in the region (see article). As the Houthis have moved south, so Irans support for them has increased. Tehran recently announced twice-daily flights to Sanaa and said it will supply Yemen with oil.
When the Houthis advanced, taking an important military installation 60km (35 miles) northwest of Aden, Mr Hadi was rumoured to have fled again, this time to Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia. He called for military intervention before he left. Yemenis fear that the Saudi action will catalyse the countrys long-predicted collapse into what Jamal Benomar, the UN envoy to Yemen, has described as an Iraq-Libya-Syria scenario.

The air strikes have laid bare the divisions caused by the Houthis rise. In the south of the country and in northern tribal areas populated by Sunnis, who fear dominance by the Houthis Zaydi sect (a subset of Shia Islam), people are cheering the Saudi-led campaign.
But in Sanaa even the Houthis sternest critics are dismayed by the foreign bombardment. Many Yemenis believe it will only lead to more fighting. Saudi Arabia is fucking our country, says a Sunni tribesman who spent the night cowering with his family in Sanaa as blasts echoed through the capital.
The anti-Houthi groups wish is not to bring back Mr Hadia man who ceded control of the capital without a fight six months ago; it is that the Houthi menace be brought to heel.
Yet Saudi Arabias attempt to bring this about risks leading to an expansion of sectarian violence between Sunni and Shia. That is because Yemen will inevitably become a proxy battleground for Saudi Arabia, a Sunni bulwark, and Iran, the main Shia power.
Extremist Sunni groups are already active. Yemen is home to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), al-Qaedas deadliest branch, and an affiliate of Islamic State, which claimed responsibility for the suicide bombings of two Zaydi mosques in Sanaa on March 20th, leaving at least 137 people dead.
Before he left the country, Mr Hadi was in the process of forming a 20,000 strong Saudi-backed militia. His opponents accuse him of arming and funding some Sunni extremist groups.
For the Houthis, the Saudi-led operation is a public-relations coup. In a vitriolic and paranoid speech on March 20th, their leader, Abdelmalek al-Houthi, accused the Gulf Arab states and America of plotting to destabilise the country in order to reinstall Mr Hadi as a puppet leader.
The Houthis have evolved into a highly effective guerrilla force after a decade of war against Mr Saleh and Saudi Arabia. With the backing of Saleh loyalists they are likely to prove a tough enemy.


They control the skies and we control the ground, says a Houthi man in Sanaa. This will be just like the sixth war in Saada when the Saudis lost Saudi territory, he says, referring to an earlier bombing campaign by the kingdom in 2009. Houthis responded to that by crossing the border and humiliating the Saudi army by seizing dozens of towns and villages. On March 26th, after threatening revenge against the Zionist Saudi regime, they said that they had fired rockets across the border into Saudi territory. As so often in the Middle East, the Saudis may find that joining a war is easier than winning one.

Have to wonder what is the Houthi end game. They must realize they don't have the legitimacy to rule in the south. Neither the southern tribes or the southern separatists would accept Houthi rule. Saleh and the military units loyal to him may be allied with Houthi now, but Saleh really only care about Saleh and wouldn't hesitate to stab the Houthi in the back if he can make a deal with Saudi. Another Syria like stalemate in the making?

Bab-al-Mandab falls to Houthis:

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Air strike on Sanaa Airport









Back to bottling my Grenache

I wasn't going to post this initially, but I found it to be well written and an honest observation of Realpolitik colliding with Morality, from someone who spent time in Yemen:

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Thanks to our oil-drenched arms deal with Saudi Arabia, British planes could have dropped those bombs. So we cannot say it has nothing to do with us

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A Eurofighter Typhoon fighter jet. 'The coalition government has licensed £3.8bn of arms to the Saudi dictatorship.' Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images


Wednesday 1 April 2015 13.28 BSTLast modified on Wednesday 1 April 201513.30 BST

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On Monday, a Saudi-led coalition apparently dropped bombs on a refugee camp

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. It’s perfectly likely that,

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, the Saudis may have used jet fighters that were made in the UK. After all, Saudi Arabia is the UK defence industry’s

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. More than 40 innocent people died. Around 200 were injured, many seriously. The Yemeni state news agency showed pictures of dead children laid out on the floor.

Apparently, the Saudis were trying to hit a nearby Houthi rebel position. “It could have been that the fighter jets replied to fire, and we cannot confirm that it was a refugee camp,”

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for the Saudi regime, lamely. Well yes, it was a refugee camp, confirmed the UN. And if the Saudis invade Yemen, thus further extending the widening gyre of Sunni/Shia conflict, expect a lot more of the same. For if you think the Middle East could not get any worse, think again. And if you think it has little to do with us, that’s because we do not choose to remind ourselves that it may well be

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, made in Derby, that will be roaring through the sky, and Eurofighters assembled

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, that will be doing the bombing. We say little because we have a multibillion pound conflict of interest. We supply the weapons, then throw up our hands in horror when they are used.

Perhaps I also ought to declare an interest. I fell in love with Yemen back in the 90s. Its searing heat, its desert, its ancient architecture, its fearsome mountains. I would lie on the top of our flat roof in

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and hear the call to prayer floating over the city, echoed by the barking of wild street dogs. There was little to distinguish any of this from the middle ages – except for trucks, a few Aston Villa football tops, lots of dodgy looking eastern European weaponry and the cigarettes that my friend was flogging out of the back of his Toyota Land Cruiser.

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David Cameron watches a Eurofighter Typhoon during a visit to BAE Systems in Warton, Lancashire. Photograph: Martin Rickett/PA
Yes, Yemen was a political basket case. Indeed, the very idea of some overarching national entity called Yemen hardly shaped the local consciousness. This was a collection of semi-autonomous tribes and communities, especially up in the mountains. They were keep-themselves-to-themselves kind of people. Most of the men spent much of their time lying around chewing

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, a sort of pointless amphetamine version of spinach. I passed my time playing chess with the lepers up at the leper colony run by Mother Teresa’s nuns. Despite the dysentery, despite the humidity, despite the suicidal driving and terrible food, I loved it. It had a wild, epic grandeur and the people a fierce independent mindedness. It doesn’t deserve to be a geo-political battleground for a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Indeed, where does?

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I offer this personal reminiscence because I want to try to humanise a place that can easily seem like little more than a name on a map. Not many people from the UK have reason to visit the Yemen. But this is not to say that we are not up to our necks in this war – worse, we are massively profiting from it. Back in 2012 David Cameron and Lord Stephen Green (of HSBC fame)

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, flogging our weapons of war. The coalition government has licensed

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of arms to a Saudi dictatorship that regularly decapitates its subjects, retains the death penalty for conversion to Christianity, prevents women from having basic human rights, and has exported its extreme version of Wahhabi Islam to other parts of the Middle East, inspiring the likes of Islamic State, to catastrophic effect. “Ethics and values are important to us. They define how we behave towards others and play a major part in how we’re creating a responsible business,” says BAE Systems, who manufactures Eurofighter. That’s a sick joke.

Think about it: if

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had dropped bombs on a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, it would be on the front page of every paper. But when the Saudis do it, there is hardly a bat-squeak of interest.

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. Even a supine Westminster Abbey pathetically follows suit. And all because of Saudi oil money. We ought to be thoroughly ashamed.

Click to expand...

Saudi air campaign fails to halt rebel advance in Yemen


WASHINGTON – A Saudi-led air campaign has failed to halt the advance of Iranian-backed rebels in Yemen, where growing violence is plunging the country deeper into chaos and further undermining the U.S.-backed government.

Houthi rebels continued to advance toward the port city of Aden, where forces loyal to President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi are attempting to make a stand. Friday, the Arab coalition dropped weapons and supplies for the first time to forces battling Houthis around Aden.

Michael Knights, an analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said the Saudis have hit fixed military installations and weapons caches, but they lack the sophisticated intelligence and other capabilities that would allow them to react quickly to fast-moving and widely dispersed forces.

"A lot of what they're doing is of cosmetic effect," Knights said. "It's hard to imagine the coalition becoming effective enough unless the United States becomes much more involved."

U.S. help is limited largely to surveillance and planning support. American drones provide the general location of the Houthis and other forces but not specific targeting information.

The Pentagon has offered to provide aerial refueling capabilities to the coalition, which would allow pilots to remain in the air longer to track targets. U.S. tanker aircraft would not enter Yemen airspace.

Analysts say Saudi Arabia and other Gulf nations improved pilot training over the past decade to match the billions of dollars they have spent on sophisticated American warplanes. Analysts credit the countries for being able to mobilize a complex coalition quickly and begin airstrikes.

"Arab countries are stepping up to take care of their own issues," said Charles Wald, a retired Air Force general. "This is something we ought to be applauding."

Initially, several hundred airstrikes a day disrupted the Houthis' advance. More recently, the rebels appear to have regrouped and continued their advances.

Knights said the air campaign is reminiscent of the 1990s-era NATO airstrikes in the Balkans. He said the Saudi coalition lacks precision strikes based on immediate intelligence.

The fighting is growing increasingly complex. The airstrikes on Houthi forces help a powerful al-Qaeda terror affiliate, a rival in Yemen. Al-Qaeda is a Sunni organization, and the Houthis are Shiites.

Thursday, al-Qaeda militants overran Mukalla, a major port city in southern Yemen, the Associated Press reported.

The Houthis are allied with military forces who remained loyal to Ali Abdullah Saleh, the president ousted from power after protests in 2011. As a result, the airstrikes have targeted military installations and army units that would be needed to help stabilize the country should fighting cease.

"At the end of the day, were going to have a force that might not be able to reunite," said Katherine Zimmerman, an analyst at the American Enterprise Institute. "Most units have been rendered combat-ineffective."