September
26th marks four and a half years of the Saudi and Emirati war
in Yemen. With US support! Below is a link to a piece from April 2015, a month
after that intervention started.
Titled
US generals: Saudi intervention in Yemen ‘a bad idea’. Some
flag officers at CENTCOM and at Special Ops argued strenuously against
supporting the Saudi-led intervention because
the "Houthi movement has been an effective counter to
Al-Qaeda." Those Special
Ops guys were also clairvoyant in noting that Saudi/UAE intervention was doomed
– even as the Saudis were saying it would take a few weeks. Supposedly
some in SOCOM still “favor the Houthis, as they have been successful in rolling
back AQ and IS.”
The Saudis labeled it 'Operation Decisive
Strike', a criminal misnomer IMO. There are 91,000+ dead Yemenis many
of them civilians, hundreds of thousands devastated by cholera and malnutrition, three
million displaced, 54 months of indiscriminate bombing of marketplaces & funerals
& weddings et al, and billions of dollars down the toilet. Just glad it is Saudi and Emirati dollars,
except for the million or two US $$ for refueling flights. But it looks like the T-Rump is going to increase
that by an order of magnitude with this new force package he is sending to
protect the House of Saud and their pinheaded prince.
And recently in Aden some Saudi supported factions and Emirati supported
factions started killing each other.
Yemen is now looking worse than the goat-rope in Syria.
There are at least five different wars-within-war
going on there:
1] Saudi Arabia and the UAE and their minions against the Houthis and their
tribal allies. The minions later included some help from Egypt, Sudan, Morocco,
Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain.
This
is the main fight, and was meant to restore the propped up president, Abdrabbuh
Manṣūr Hādī (who like an absentee landlord lives in luxury in Riyadh, Saudi
Arabia)
-
and thrash the Houthis who
they consider heretical and convert them to a creed more in line with
Wahhabi thinking.
2] Add in Iran support to the Houthis.
Although I don’t believe they were ever outright proxies of Tehran.
Reportedly Iran advised the Houthis NOT to
take over the Yemen capitol of Sana’a back four and a half years ago.
But
they did anyway.
And after the bombing
campaign started Iran gave what support they could.
Undoubtedly there is funding and IRGC connivance in
weapons supply.
And probably targeting intel
within KSA via the Saudi Shia resistance, which is infiltrated by Iran.
But bin-Salman and bin-Zayed and our neocons seem
to believe the entire Houthi movement started at the behest of the Ayatollahs.
I object, but those guys get paid much more
than I.
.
3] Another conflict is the battle for influence and control between the
Saudis and Emiratis.
Both back factions opposed
to one another.
Current shoot-em-ups are
between the Saudi-supported Yemeni government in exile (Hadi) and southern
separatists backed by the UAE (the STC or Southern Transitional Council).
The STC wants a two state Yemen like it was
during the period from the early 1960s up until unification in 1990.
4] The fourth war pits al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and/or Ansar al-Sharia against everybody
else. With a few US drone strikes against known or supposed hi-value AQ targets.
5] This one is kinda like the fourth, but it is the
Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant – Yemen
Province (ISIL-YP) instead of AQ.
 |
| As of July. Houthis in green, Saudi backed govt in exile in pink, UAE backed STC in khaki, AQ in white, IS in gray |
Numbers 3, 4, and 5 have been mostly underreported, if reported at all in
the western media.
