Since the beginning of the war, the U.S. has backed the coalition bombing campaign with weapons sales and, until recently, midair refueling support for aircraft. But the French report suggests that U.S. drones may also be helping with Saudi munitions targeting.

“If the RSAF benefits from American support, in the form of advice in the field of targeting, the practice of Close Air Support (CAS) is recent and appears poorly understood by these crews,” the document says. A footnote after the word “targeting” specifies that the possible U.S. “advice” refers to “targeting effectuated by American drones.”

Though the U.S. has denied engaging directly in hostilities against the Houthis, American MQ-9 Reaper drones – a reconnaissance drone with hunt-and-kill capabilities – have flown over Houthi occupied territory. After the Houthis shot down one of the drones in October 2017, it led to speculation that the U.S. could be using them to collect intelligence for the Saudis. Targeting being effectuated by American drones could mean that U.S. drones play a more active role in coalition targeting, like laser-sighting precision-guided munitions drops, for example.

U.S. Central Command strongly denied that U.S. drones have any operational role in coalition targeting. “The U.S. military does not provide that type of support to the Saudi-led coalition,” a CENTCOM spokesperson told The Intercept by email. “Our role with the Saudi-led coalition is advisory only. We provide intelligence and advise the coalition on best practices, air-to-ground space awareness, and the law of armed conflict.”
 

French-made Leclerc tanks of the Saudi-led coalition are deployed on the outskirts of the Yemeni port city of Aden on Aug. 3, 2015, during a military operation against Shiite Houthi rebels and their allies.
Photo: Saleh Al-Obeidi/AFP/Getty Images

Dated September 25, 2018, the report was written to brief an October meeting of the French “restricted council,” a meeting of cabinet-level officials that included French President Emmanuel Macron, Minister of the Armed Forces Florence Parly, and Minister of European and Foreign Affairs Jean-Yves Le Drian. Its publication is likely to have significant political implications for the Macron government, which has steadfastly defended arms sales to Saudi Arabia, while simultaneously downplaying its own knowledge of how French weapons are used in Yemen.In January, Parly told a host on France Inter, a major French public radio station, that she had “no knowledge as to whether [French] weapons are being used directly in this conflict,” and that “we have recently sold no weapons that could be used in the course of the Yemen conflict.” She has also told journalists that French weapons “have not been used against civilians,” and described the country’s weapons exports as “relatively modest,” adding that “we don’t sell weapons like they’re baguettes.”

But the report shows that the Saudis and Emiratis have made much wider use French military hardware than the French government has admitted. Since the war began in 2015, the coalition has used French tanks and armored vehicles to reinforce the Saudi border and defend Emirati military outposts in Yemen. The Saudis have stationed French long-range artillery guns along its border, capable of firing deep into Yemen’s northern governorates, while the Emiratis have piloted French multiengine fighter planes, equipped with French laser-targeting technology. And both Saudi Arabia and the UAE have used French warships to enforce the coalition blockade against the country.

Though the report lists the French arms used by Saudi Arabia and the and UAE, it consistently notes that French intelligence has not observed the same weapons on “active fronts” with coalition ground forces, which are largely made up of Yemeni fighters loyal to former President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, as well as foreign mercenaries. One map notes the presence of French Leclerc tanks at a coalition base near the battle of Hodeidah, but the report also says that the UAE uses Leclerc tanks generally for defensive purposes.

In response to a detailed list of questions sent by Disclose, the French prime minister’s office sent a lengthy statement about France’s arms sales and its alliance with Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The statement says that French arms sales are thoroughly reviewed and consistent with French and international law.

“France is a responsible and reliable partner,” the statement reads. “Offensive actions are regularly taken from Yemen against the territory of our regional partners – we have seen this with ballistic missile attacks or drones carrying explosives, for example. France maintains a constant dialogue with these partners to respond to their defense needs.”

It continues: “Moreover, to our knowledge, the French weapons available to the members of the coalition are mostly placed in a defensive position, outside Yemeni territory or on coalition holdings, but not on the front line, and we are not aware of civilian casualties resulting from their use in Yemeni theater.”

At no point does the report assess whether French arms have been used against civilians. One map, however, estimates that more than 430,000 Yemeni people live within range of French artillery guns on the Saudi-Yemen border.

The report is primarily concerned with the location of French weapons among coalition forces and says nothing about origin of Houthi weapons, some of which are known to have come from Iran. An appendix catalogues the major weapon systems used by the Saudis and Emiratis, but is not a complete list; it does not mention munitions, rifles, or several types of armored vehicles spotted by monitoring groups.

Overall, the appendix reinforces a point that observers of the war have made since the intervention began: that the military capability of the coalition has been created and sustained almost entirely by the global arms trade. In addition to the U.S., the U.K., and France, the report mentions radar and detection systems from Sweden; Austrian Camcopter drones; defensive naval rockets from South Korea, Italian warships, and even rocket launcher batteries from Brazil.
 

Y
Yemeni fighters aligned with the Saudi-led coalition-backed government man a frontline position at Kilo 16, an area which contains the main supply route linking Hodeidah city to the rebel-held capital Sanaa, on Sept. 21, 2018.
Photo: Andrew Renneisen/Getty Images

The report describes the Saudi-led air war in Yemen as “a campaign of massive and continuous airstrikes against territories held by the Houthi rebellion.” The coalition carried out a total of 24,000 airstrikes from the beginning of the war through September 2018, according to the report — a number that falls within the range estimated by the Yemen Data Project, an independent monitoring group.French intelligence has observed five types of piloted fighters flying over Yemen, all of which are NATO aircraft. The only non-NATO aircraft mentioned in the report is the Wing Loong, a Reaper drone knockoff produced by the Chinese. Export controls have prevented the U.S. from selling armed drones to the UAE, so Abu Dhabi turned to China to acquire them. Last year, the UAE used a Chinese drone to kill Saleh al-Samad, president of the Houthi Supreme Political Council, who was widely viewed as an advocate for engaging in the U.N.-led peace process.

Despite their vast technological superiority, the Saudis in particular are failing to meet their military objectives, the report says, identifying Saudi targeting as in need of improvement. And it describes the Saudis as less effective participants in air and sea missions, noting that the Emiratis are largely responsible for the blockade. It speaks more favorably of Emirati pilots, saying that they have a “proven” ability to use guided munitions, and that they perform up to NATO standards during bombing missions.

The report opens with a discussion of the battle to retake Hodeidah, a port city on the Red Sea and the entry point for most commercial goods and humanitarian aid into Yemen. The UAE predicted a decisive victory in Hodeidah, where fighting began last summer. But the intelligence report assessed that the “taking by force of [Hodeidah] appears still out of reach” for UAE-backed militias, despite their having nearly twice as many forces on the ground as their adversaries at the time it was written. However, the report notes them slowly moving to encircle and besiege the city by trying to retake critical junctions on the road between Hodeidah and Sana’a, the capital, which the Houthis control.

Before the offensive began, humanitarian groups identified a protracted siege as a worst-case scenario because it could largely stop the flow of aid to some of the regions of the country most in need.

“Commercial and humanitarian shipments coming through Hodeidah port are a lifeline, not just for people in Hodeidah city, but for much of Yemen,” said Scott Paul, a humanitarian policy lead at Oxfam America. “Setting up a long-term front-line and siege on the perimeter of the city would have a dramatic impact on national commodities markets and endanger anyone struggling to pay for basic necessities like food, fuel, and medicine.”

Despite calls from aid groups, the U.S. did not pressure the Emiratis to back off the attack. One U.S. official told the Wall Street Journal that U.S. policy was to display a “blinking yellow light of caution,” and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a statement asking parties to respect the “free flow of humanitarian aid” but stopping short of calling on coalition forces to back off.
 

Humedan Hussin Abdullah, left, sits with his father at a government hospital on Sept. 23, 2018 in Aden, Yemen. Abdullah is waiting to have shrapnel removed from his leg, an injury he sustained in an attack in Hodeidah province that killed two of his family members.
Photo: Andrew Renneisen/Getty Images

Hodeidah saw some of the worst fighting of 2018, and the Norwegian Refugee Council estimated a total of 2,325 civilian casualties as a result. Aid groups also sounded the alarm about thousands of civilians who were trapped because of the fighting. An internationally brokered ceasefire in December slowed the pace of coalition airstrikes, but the ceasefire broke down in January and violence resumed.The French intelligence report also describes a massive operation by the Saudis to secure their border with Yemen, and says that five brigades of the Saudi army and two brigades of the Saudi National Guard — about 25,000 men — are deployed along the border. The troops are reinforced by 300 tanks and a battalion of 48 French-made Caesar self-propelled Howitzer guns capable of firing dozens of miles into Yemeni territory.

The “unspoken goal” of this border operation is to penetrate Houthi-controlled areas and eventually advance on Houthi strongholds in the Yemeni governorate of Saada, the report says. But it says the Saudis’ lack of mobility leaves them highly vulnerable to guerrilla attacks and that their strikes are too imprecise be effective against the nimbler Houthi forces.

“Despite the defensive means deployed, the rebels maintain their nuisance capability: artillery salvos, missile shots, improvised explosive devices, ambushes and infiltrations into Saudi territory,” the report says. “The addition of infantry combat vehicles in empty spaces between the tanks, in the summer of 2016, did not allow for an improvement in the efficiency of Saudi tactics.”

Disclose is the first nonprofit newsroom of investigative journalism in France. Its mission is to reveal abuses and hold the powerful to account. Disclose supports strong and independent journalism that is focused on the public interest.

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Our leading weapons dealers have developed a business model that feeds on war, terrorism, chaos, political instability, and human rights violations.

The ruins of a school in Taiz, Yemen. (Shutterstock)

The Saudi bombing of a school bus in Yemen on August 9, 2018 killed 44 children and wounded many more. The attack struck a nerve in the U.S., confronting the American public with the wanton brutality of the Saudi-led war on Yemen. When CNN revealed that the bomb used in the airstrike was made by U.S. weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin, the horror of the atrocity hit even closer to home for many Americans.

But the killing and maiming of civilians with U.S.-made weapons in war zones around the world is an all too regular occurrence. U.S. forces are directly responsible for largely uncounted civilian casualties in all America’s wars, and the United States is also the world’s leading arms exporter.

Pope Francis has publicly blamed the “industry of death” for fueling a “piecemeal World War III.” The U.S. military-industrial complex wields precisely the “unwarranted influence” over U.S. foreign policy that President Eisenhower warned Americans against in his farewell address in 1961.

The U.S. wars on Afghanistan and Iraq and the “global war on terror” served as cover for a huge increase in U.S. military spending. Between 1998 and 2010, the U.S. spent $1.3 trillion on its wars, but even more, $1.8 trillion, to buy new warplanes, warships, and weapons, most of which were unrelated to the wars it was fighting.

Five U.S. companies — Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and General Dynamics — dominate the global arms business, raking in $140 billion in weapons sales in 2017, and export sales make up a growing share of their business, about $35 billion in 2017.

In a new report for Code Pink and the Divest from the War Machine campaign, we have documented how Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Egypt have systematically used weapons produced by these five U.S. companies to massacre civilians, destroy civilian infrastructure, and commit other war crimes. The bombing of the school bus was only the latest in a consistent pattern of Saudi massacres and air strikes on civilian targets, from hospitals to marketplaces, and U.S. arms sales to Israel and Egypt follow a similar pattern.

U.S. laws require the suspension of arms sales to countries that use them in such illegal ways, but the U.S. State Department has an appalling record on enforcing these laws. Under the influence of Acting Assistant Secretary of State Charles Faulkner, a former lobbyist for Raytheon, Secretary Pompeo falsely certified to Congress that Saudi Arabia and the UAE are complying with U.S. law in their use of American weapons.

The U.S. sells weapons to Saudi Arabia and other allies to project U.S. military power by proxy without the U.S. military casualties, domestic political backlash, and international resistance that result from direct uses of U.S. military force, while U.S. military-industrial interests are well-served by ever-growing arms sales to allied governments.

These policies are driven by the very combination of military-industrial interests that Eisenhower warned Americans against, now represented by Secretary Pompeo, Acting Assistant Secretary Faulkner, and a cabal of hawkish Democrats who consistently vote with Republicans on war and peace issues. They ensure that the “war party” always wins its battles in Congress no matter how catastrophically its policies fail in the real world.

Republicans derided President Obama’s doctrine of covert and proxy war as “leading from behind.” But the Trump administration has doubled down on Obama’s failed strategy, surrendering even more power over U.S. policy to foreign clients like Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Egypt, and to the “unwarranted influence” of the U.S. military-industrial complex.

Lockheed Martin is earning $29.1 billion in sales from the $110 billion Saudi arms package announced in May 2017, a deal struck as the war on Yemen was already killing thousands of civilians. Yet no conflict of interest is too glaring for Lockheed executives like Ronald Perrilloux Jr., who has taken part in public events to promote the war and defend Saudi Arabia and its allies, arguing that the U.S. should “help them finish the job” in Yemen.

Not to be outdone, Boeing, the second largest arms producer in the U.S. and the world after Lockheed Martin, has also been linked to the deaths of hundreds of civilians in Yemen. Fragments of Boeing JDAM bombs were found in the debris of a 2016 attack on a marketplace near the Yemeni capital of Sana’a that killed 107 civilians, including 25 children. Human Rights Watch found that the airstrike caused predictably indiscriminate and disproportionate civilian deaths, in violation of the laws of war, and called for a suspension of arms sales to Saudi Arabia.

To profit from wars on some of the poorest, most vulnerable people in the world, from Yemen to Gaza to Afghanistan, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and General Dynamics have developed a business model that feeds on war, terrorism, chaos, political instability, human rights violations, disregard for international law, and the triumph of militarism over diplomacy. Real diplomacy to bring peace and disarmament to our war-torn world poses the most serious “threat” to their profits.

But the American people have never voted to funnel the largest share of our taxes into endless war and ever-growing profits for the “industry of death.” It is time for the sleeping giant, what President Eisenhower called “an alert and knowledgeable citizenry,” to wake from its slumber, take responsibility for our country’s foreign policies and act decisively for peace.
 

The post In Yemen and Beyond, U.S. Arms Manufacturers Are Abetting Crimes against Humanity appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The United States is helping Oman militarize its border with Yemen, trapping refugees from the U.S.-backed bombing of the country.

Shutterstock
 

This article was jointly produced by Foreign Policy In Focus and In These Times.

By now, the images are infamous: stunned, bloodied Yemeni children arriving at the hospital after their summer camp bus was bombed by Saudi aircraft. The United States is deeply implicated in that August 9 attack, which killed 54 people — most of them children
Fragments from the bomb bear the labels of U.S. weapons manufacturers. The indefensible nature of the bombing — there were no combatants anywhere in sight — has garnered headlines and even attention on Capitol Hill, opening a new conversation about U.S. involvement in the years-long siege of Yemen by a coalition headed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The coalition frames its war as an intervention on behalf of Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, the man they recognize as the legitimate president of Yemen. Saudi Arabia and the UAE claim to be targeting the Houthis, the opposition group on the other side of Yemen’s civil war that controls the country’s capital, and that has alleged ties with Iran. The images from the school bus attack, however, reveal the actual targets of the coalition’s air power.

While both the Houthis and the coalition take actions with destructive consequences for Yemen’s population, the overwhelming blame for the devastation and the humanitarian crisis lies with the United States, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

The United States is supplying the aircraft to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, the precision munitions they’re dropping, intelligence and mid-air refueling of the coalition war planes. The United States also continues to carry out military operations in Yemen directly, with its own special forces and air strikes. But even when American personnel are not personally dropping the bombs, they seem to be involved in all of the other steps of the coalition’s operations.

On the same day of the attack on the school bus, and not far away, U.S. personnel were finishing up another, quieter activity that has received far less attention.

From August 5 through 9, a unit of the Wisconsin National Guard that was assigned to U.S. Army Central conducted a week-long training with members of the Royal Army of Oman’s Border Guard Brigade in Haima, Oman. The exercises were part of Oman’s militarization of its border with Yemen — with funding and other assistance from the United States.

In other words, not only is the United States. helping the coalition bomb Yemeni civilians. It’s helping trap the refugees fleeing that bombing.

Walls around the world
Before, it was clear that the American government wanted no Yemeni refugees in the United States. Yemen has been listed in all three iterations of the Trump administration’s anti-Muslim travel ban. That was unjust enough. In Oman, the United States is helping to prevent Yemenis from leaving their country at all.

In August, Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) — its military budget — for the fiscal year of 2019. The Act calls on the Secretary of State to certify that Saudi Arabia and the UAE are taking steps to minimize civilian casualties, among other measures to assuage qualms that Congress may have about continuing the U.S. mid-air refueling program.

The restrictions laid out in the Act have come into the spotlight as Trump has signaled his refusal to abide by them, sparking a dispute between members of Congress and the White House about who has the authority to make decisions about foreign affairs — a fight that has been fueled by the horrendous school bus bombing.

But the same Act also quietly expands the list of countries that the United States supplies aid to for the purpose of militarizing their borders. A provision was added to the military budget in 2016 that appropriates such funding to “certain foreign countries for border security operations.” The list of countries — each of which is eligible for up to $150 million in the program — includes Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan. The 2019 budget includes Pakistan and Oman.

What do these states have in common? They share borders with countries from which millions of refugees emerge or flow through. Egypt, Tunisia, Lebanon and Jordan neighbor Libya, Syria and Iraq. Pakistan borders Afghanistan.

Oman’s steps to “secure its border” sound familiar. In a trend taken up by states around the world — and championed by the White House — Oman is building a wall. Construction began five years ago and is slated to continue for another three years.

The U.S. has promised $2.5 million in aid to Oman for 2019 in a package under the heading “Peace and Security.” And a flurry of meetings between U.S. and Omani officials suggest deeper coordination could be underway.

In March, Defense Secretary Mattis met with Omani Sultan Qaboos bin Said Al Said and Defense Minister Badr bin Saud al Busaidi in Muscat to discuss enhancing military cooperation. At the end of July, Omani Foreign Minister Yusuf bin Alawi traveled to Washington and met with Mattis at the Pentagon, Secretary of State Pompeo, and members of Congress. Conversations focused on the bilateral relationship in regard to the ongoing crisis in Yemen.

And then there was the joint training in Haima.

Beyond the Bombings
Migration is difficult for Yemenis. Yemen was the poorest country in the Middle East before the war began in 2015. While there are more than 2 million internally displaced people in Yemen, poverty prevents Yemenis from leaving the country.

Despite the many obstacles, more than 190,000 Yemenis have fled to neighboring countries according the UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency. Many of those who have left are in Oman, so the measures the country is taking with its U.S. ally will put up new obstacles to would-be refugees.

Remarkably, despite the nightmarish conditions that the United States, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have made in Yemen, it’s also the case that more than 280,000 people—mostly from the Horn of Africa—have sought refuge in Yemen. The measures that the United States is supporting with its allies, then, are not only devastating Yemenis. The cruelty of those actions extends to refugees from outside of Yemen who are now effectively stuck in the same conditions that are displacing — but imprisoning — Yemenis.

The wars that the United States is carrying out and supporting include wars on the freedom of movement and those who seek to exercise it. From the caging of children and adults at the border with Mexico to the bombing of children in Yemen with American weapons, this summer has demonstrated to the world that the United States isn’t only driving people from their homes — it’s preventing them from escaping to safety.

It is significant that U.S. support for the Saudi bombing is getting more critical attention. But from walls to travel bans, our government’s disastrous activities extend beyond the bombings alone. We need to identify and expose Washington’s many attacks on people around the world—and resist them all.

The post The U.S. Isn’t Just Backing the Yemen War — It’s Helping Trap Those Forced to Flee appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Thus the entire onus of integrating into the Chinese mainstream is on the Muslim minority, who have seen their land inundated by the majority ethnic Han Chinese. In fear of becoming minority in their own land and losing their cultural markers, the Uighurs took solace in religion but then even that becomes a problem as it is emblematic of separatism for Chinese authorities. The Chinese mainstream and the state do not think or they do not want to acknowledge that they are part of the problem.

What was perhaps more amazing was that the Chinese did not deny any of the allegations except saying that these were not detention but re-education centres where criminals were being kept for the express purpose of reforming them. So from being ‘astray’, now Muslims are being defined as criminals. The next logical step will perhaps be to put all of them in jails. There are even reports of mosques being demolished in the Xinjiang province apart from periodic curbs on religious expression such as those during Ramzan. And yet, the Muslim world is silent. We did not hear even a whimper of protest from the Muslim world. Where is the rage, the slogans of Muslim being oppressed when we have a real situation in China where Muslims are actually being oppressed?

Let us assume that China is too far down the horizon and that many in the Muslim world may not be aware of what is going on there, although it hard to be believe this lack of information in a world satiated with information. But for a moment let us assume, this is the case but then what about the Saudi invasion of Yemen which is happening right under the watch of the whole Muslim community. Saudi Arabia has for long treated Yemen as its colony and even a slight hint of Yemen’s autonomy makes them nervous. So under the pretext of fighting Iranian militias, the Saudis have not just armed the opposition but have actual military presence in that country. Its air force is free to bomb the country at will and yet there is no international outcry. More recently, the Saudis bombed a school bus carrying children which led to scores being dead. Any civilised nation would have expressed remorse for this wanton killing of children or at least constituted an inquiry committee to look into such allegations. Not the Saudis. Not only did they not express remorse, they in fact justified the killings saying that these children were enemy combatants.

Compare this with the statement of Taliban militants who killed children at school in Pakistan and one finds that there is no difference between the two. And yet, we are being increasingly led to believe that Saudis want to be in the forefront of fighting terror and extremism. But then if Saudi Arabia can sit in the human rights council at the United Nations, then perhaps anything is possible.

What is more astounding perhaps is the silence of the Muslim world in relation to the both the issues highlighted above. So far there have been no fiery speeches after Friday prayers; there have been no street marches and no protests in front of the Chinese embassy. Pakistan, which loses no chance to deride India over human rights abuses in Kashmir, has been completely silent over the Chinese treatment of Muslims. But then every state has its compulsion.

However, what about the religious players within Pakistan who are not part of the state? Why are they completely silent over the issue? Or is it that China has bought their silence too? Children being killed in broad day light in Yemen on the pretext of being enemy combatants and yet the whole Muslim world is silent? Don’t we repeat ad nauseam that the Prophet forbade killing of children and women even during war? Then why is it that we are silent? Just because the perpetrator happens to be the leader of the Sunni world? This must make us ponder whether the Muslim outrage is reserved only against the Jews and Christians? If such a thing as killing of innocent children would have been done by the state of Israel, would we be silent? How many protests would have been organised to condemn it?

Moreover, we would have been definitely joined by our leftist friends in the condemnation of Israel and its benefactor America. The overall silence in this case also points to a certain collusion of interests between the orthodoxy within the Muslim world and the leftists who today are supposedly the conscience keepers of the world. This is absolutely reprehensible. And equally reprehensible is the hypocrisy of the Muslim world.

Next time when there is Muslim rage on the street, I would think twice before offering my unqualified solidarity. I will think whether this rage is genuine or sponsored in the interest of a particular regime and religious order. I will think how this rage fits into maintaining the hegemonic power of Saudi Arabia within the Muslim world. I will think why they did not express the same rage when the Saudis killed innocent children in Yemen. And I will think hard whether the Muslim anger against Israel and the West is sponsored by a sinister politics whose ultimate aim is to generate sympathy and support for a criminal regime like Saudi Arabia.

—-
Arshad Alam is a NewAgeIslam.com columnist

Courtesy: New Age islam
 

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American taxpayers are helping to fight someone else’s war in Yemen, and the blood is on our hands.

Yemeni refugees wait in line for food. (Photo: IRIN / Flickr)

We’re helping fight someone else’s war in Yemen — and the blood is on our hands.

Since March 2015, the United States has supported a military coalition led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) that’s intervening in a civil war in Yemen. The war has resulted in massive civilian casualties and the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.

The war has killed more than 10,000 Yemenis and wounded more than 40,000, the majority of them civilians. Over 3 million Yemenis are displaced, millions more have contracted cholera, and some 14 million are at risk right now of starving to death.
These aren’t empty statistics. They’re crimes, which we’re enabling.

American weapons — including American bombs — are helping to wage the war in Yemen. Saudi Arabia is a close U.S. ally in the Middle East, so many American lawmakers have turned a blind eye to American involvement in this humanitarian crisis of epic proportions.

“This war has created refugees, orphans, and widows,” said Senator Bernie Sanders as he took the Senate floor recently to call for an end to U.S. support for a war most Americans know nothing about.

Sanders, an independent, and Senator Mike Lee, a Republican, recently co-authored a bipartisan resolution to pull the U.S. out of this three-year-old war. Unfortunately, that resolution failed in the Senate, despite significant support from outside organizations and in the House of Representatives.

Yemen’s fate hangs in the balance as the world watches heart-wrenching scenes of hospitals being bombed and stick-thin children crying because they’re hungry. There’s another major cholera outbreak, and medical officers lack enough supplies to treat people.

This isn’t the country Yemenis know and love. Yemenis and Yemeni Americans like Mokhtar Alkhanshali, a coffee merchant known the Monk of Mokha, have shared haunting stories of their lives in Yemen and the country they remember — and the war that’s taken so much from them.

We’ve been here before. The United States has given foreign allies supplies, funding, and weapons that have supported human rights atrocities around the world.

Most Americans can’t even point out Yemen on a map, but that hasn’t stopped us before. It’s not even our war, but that hasn’t stopped us before either.

We’re helping our allies in Saudi Arabia and the UAE create the most horrific humanitarian crisis on earth. And when innocent Yemenis flee, they face the prospect of being barred from the United States, where the Trump administration is still trying to enforce its travel ban against Yemen and other Muslim countries.

It’s time to end our participation in this carnage. The United States supplies a significant portion of the money, intelligence, weapons, and logistical support that fuels the Saudi-led bombing campaign. If we withdraw that support, we could potentially force our allies to abandon the war entirely.

As taxpayers, we’re complicit if we stay silent. Our lawmakers have the power to end this humanitarian crisis, and they must act before it’s too late.
For too many people, it already is.
 

Olivia Alperstein is the Deputy Director of Communications and Policy at Progressive Congress

Courtesy: http://fpif.org/
 

The post It’s on Us to Stop the War in Yemen appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Young students play in the ruins of the Aal Okab school in Saada City, Yemen. Giles Clarke for UNOCHA. All rights reserved.

On 26 December, a crowded market in the Al Hayma district in Yemen was hit by airstrikes from a Saudi-led coalition that left 54 civilians dead, including eight children with 32 others injured. 

It was the latest bloody episode in a conflict that has been raging for a thousand days and claimed 10,000 victims with 20 million more (from a population of 28 million) in dire need of assistance.  

The United Nations Humanitarian Co-ordinator for Yemen, Jamie McGoldrick, has described the conflict as “absurd” and “futile”, characterised by “the destruction of the country and the incommensurate suffering of its people.”  

The Saudi Coalition airstrikes began in March 2015 in response to Houthi rebels’ seizing control of much of Yemen in late 2014. There was widespread disillusionment in Yemen with Saudi-backed president, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, whose transitional administration was dogged by corruption, unemployment and food insecurity.

The Houthi uprising forced Mr Hadi to flee abroad in March 2015 which signalled the start of Saudi airstrikes. On the larger canvass of Middle-East relations and current tensions, the Sunni Saudis accuse the Houthis of being proxies for Shia Iran, their main regional rival.  
 

Targeting civilians

Yemen’s impoverished civilian population has been caught in the middle of this contagion of hostilities with Human Rights Watch finding in 2016 that 60 per cent of civilian deaths resulted from air strikes. 

It reported that “[a]irstrikes have damaged or destroyed numerous civilian objects including homes, markets, hospitals, and schools, as well as commercial enterprises” which “appear to be in violation of international law.”

This assessment is based on the monitoring of attacks that “do not discriminate between military targets and civilian objects.” “Taken together”, the report argues, “the attacks on factories and other civilian economic structures raise serious concerns that the Saudi-led coalition has deliberately sought to inflict widespread damage to Yemen’s production capacity.”  

The effects of the conflict have been compounded by an air, land and sea blockade of Yemen imposed from November 2017 by Riyadh allegedly “to stem the flow of arms to the Houthis from Iran.”

The war and blockade has pushed some seven million people to the brink of famine and left nearly 900,000 infected with cholera.

The blockade of Yemen’s Hodeida port in particular has been disastrous for a country “90 per cent dependent on imports“, 70 per cent of which came through the port.

The war and blockade has pushed some seven million people to the brink of famine and left nearly 900,000 infected with cholera. 

Mark Lowcock, who co-ordinates humanitarian affairs and emergency relief for the UN, has said that without urgently needed humanitarian aid, Yemen would be subject to “the largest famine the world has seen for many decades with millions of victims.”

Jamie McGoldrick has denied that Yemeni rebels are smuggling arms through Hodeida port saying that a UN verification mechanism had “never found any weapons” on arriving ships. 

As with the Israeli ten-year siege of the Gaza Strip, we are witnessing the collective punishment of a civilian population in Yemen for political ends. 

The blockades of both Gaza and Yemen are causing enormous humanitarian suffering, are man-made disasters and could easily be lifted with political will.
 

Western complicity

Western governments have been fuelling the Yemeni crisis through lucrative weapon sales to Riyadh used in Saudi’s three year bombing campaign. Amnesty International has argued that:
 

“Countries such as the USA, UK and France, which continue to supply coalition members with arms, are allowing Saudi Arabia and its allies to flagrantly flout international law and risk being complicit in grave violations, including war crimes.” 

Amnesty urges these countries to: “immediately halt the flow of arms and military assistance to members of the Saudi-led coalition for use in Yemen. This includes any equipment or logistical support being used to maintain this blockade.”

The UK has licensed $4.6 billion worth of arms sales to the Saudi regime, a relationship described as ‘shameful’ by Campaign Against Arms Trade, given Riyadh’s record as “one of the world’s most authoritarian regimes.”  

France, too, has sold “€9 billion of weaponry to Saudi Arabia from 2010-2016, amounting to 15-20 per cent of France’s annual arms exports.” 

And the United States has “designed and negotiated a package totalling approximately $110 billion” with Riyadh in 2017 following on from a total of $115 billion approved in arms sales by the Obama administration in 2009-2016.   

Su-ming Khoo has argued that “[i]n conflict situations, the deliberate, indiscriminate and criminal targeting of civilians and civilian structures such as hospitals and schools marks an all-time low in respect for the most basic humanitarian norms and laws.” This is underscored by the Human Rights Watch World Report 2017 which warns against a “global assault on human rights.”

Yemen appears to be a prime example of this deterioration in the climate for human rights which, perhaps, really took root in the ‘war on terror’ that followed the 9 September 2001 attacks on Washington and New York. 

Even in the context of new ‘lows’ in the application of international laws and norms, the scale of the Yemeni crisis should cause international alarm and provoke immediate action to end hostilities, particularly the Saudi airstrikes and blockade. 

A besieged and starved population has been pushed to the brink of famine and is already subject to malaria, dengue fever, diphtheria, and cholera. This is a moment when the UK, US and France should re-evaluate its relationship with Riyadh and the diplomatic and humanitarian poisoning caused by their trade in arms.

Stephen McCloskey is Director of the Centre for Global Education, a development non-governmental organisation based in Belfast. He is editor of Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review, an online, open access, peer reviewed journal. He is co-editor of From the Local to the Global: Key Issues in Development Studies (Pluto Press, 2015). He manages education projects for young people in the Gaza Strip and writes regularly on a range of development issues for books, journals and online publications.

Courtesy: https://www.opendemocracy.net
 

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Image Courtesy: Anton_Ivanov / Shutterstock.com

Last Thursday, the head of the UN Children’s Agency (UNICEF), Anthony Lake, arrived in Amman, Jordan after a heart-wrenching tour of war-ravaged Yemen. ‘Stop the war,’ said Lake. It was a clear message. No subtlety was needed. ‘All of us,’ he said, ‘should feel ‘immense pity, even agony, for all of those children and others who are suffering, and they should feel anger, anger that this, our generation, is scarred by the irresponsibility of governments and others to allow these things to be happening.’

Lake’s message has gone unheeded. As is the voice of all those who have tried to raise discussion of the atrocity done to Yemen. Last night, the charity group Save the Children raised the alarm once more. In a brief report, Save the Children said that more than a million children who suffer from acute malnutrition live in the areas where cholera has swept the country.

‘After two years of armed conflict,’ said Tamer Kirolos, Save the Children’s country director for Yemen, ‘children are trapped in a brutal cycle of starvation and sickness. And it’s simply unacceptable.’ Kirolos’ teams in the hardest hit areas find ‘a horrific scenario of babies and young children who are not only malnourished but also infected with cholera.’ The combination is deadly. What lies ahead is apocalyptic: mass deaths of children from a combination of hunger and disease.

In June, UNICEF reported that a Yemeni child dies every 10 minutes. These deaths are not tragedies. They are crimes.

The war in Yemen, prosecuted by Saudi Arabia and its allies and backed with weaponry from the West, has destroyed the country’s food, water and health infrastructure. In January 2016, Saudi aircraft bombed a water desalination plant north of al-Mocha. This bombing run, which lasted minutes, left the million residents of the Yemeni city of Taiz without water. Piped water is no longer an option for most Yemenis. They rely upon water tankers; this water has become more expensive as fuel prices have skyrocketed. Last month, Gabriel Sánchez of Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in Yemen said that in one district, ‘our teams are seeing an extremely poor sanitation situation and insufficient access to clean drinking water.’ Absence of clean drinking water has helped fuel the cholera epidemic which broke out this March.

Aid groups, from the UN and elsewhere, as well as citizens groups across Yemen have tried to address the crisis, but the scale of this human-made disaster is enormous. Four out of five children in Yemen need some humanitarian aid. No aid agency can solve this crisis if the war continues – particularly if the fragile infrastructure continues to be bombed and if repair of this infrastructure continues to be prevented. Saudi Arabia has blockaded this country and bombed its main port. This has not only hampered the work of charity groups, but it has also meant much needed supplies for repair have cannot reach Yemen. The country is being isolated into desolation.

On Tuesday, the country director for Yemen of the UN Development Agency (UNDP) Auke Lootsma said that 60 per  cent of Yemen’s population does not know where their next meal will come from. Lootsma, who is based in Sanaa (Yemen), spoke to reporters via a videoconference. Save the Children said that a million children are near death by cholera. Lootsma offered double the figure. ‘We expect the cholera outbreak to continue to wreak havoc despite the best efforts of the UN agencies’, he said. Over 90 per cent of Yemen’s food is imported. With a combination of Saudi Arabia’s blockade, depleted foreign exchange reserves and poverty in the country, food is out of the reach of families. Yemen, Lootsma said chillingly, ‘is like a bus racing towards the end of a cliff.’

Terrible stories come from the edge of the cliff, including that desperate Yemeni families have begun to sell their children for food. When the UN’s coordinator for emergency aid, Stephen O’Brien, came to brief the UN Security Council in May, he said, ‘Families are increasingly marrying off their young daughters to have someone else care for them, and often use the dowry to pay for necessities.’ Such survival tactics, on the backs of children, will have a long-term impact on Yemeni society. This war is driving people to great barbarity.

Saudi Arabia’s war aims can never be met in Yemen. That is now clear. It simply cannot bomb the country into submission and it does not have the ground forces to enter Yemen and defeat the various rebel groups that defy it. An attempt to get the Pakistani military to enter the conflict on its side failed in 2015 when the Pakistani parliament took a neutral position on the war. In March of this year, the Pakistanis sent a brigade to defend Saudi Arabia’s southern border. This shows that Saudi Arabia, by far the best equipped military power in this conflict, now fears the war will move northward into its own territory. Yemeni rebels have fired crude scud missiles into Saudi Arabia and at both Saudi and Emirati ships that enter Yemen’s coastal waters. These attacks—one against an Emirati ship yesterday—show that defeat of Yemen’s resistance to Saudi Arabia is not on the cards.

Meanwhile in the Hadhramawt region of Yemen, al-Qaeda in the Arabia Peninsula (AQAP) continues to make gains. In February, the International Crisis Group released a report that said that AQAP ‘is stronger than it has ever been.’ AQAP and its allies have become indispensable to the Saudi air war, providing crucial ground troops in Aden and elsewhere. Fighting units such as Humat al-Qidah and al-Hassam Brigade are well-supplied by the UAE and Saudi Arabia to protect Aden. They are direct beneficiaries of this war. The Crisis Group suggests that AQAP ‘is thriving in an environment of state collapse, growing sectarianism, shifting alliances, security vacuums and a burgeoning war economy. Reversing this trend requires ending this conflict that set it in motion.’ The point about state collapse is important. 1.2 million Yemeni civil servants have not been paid since September 2016.

Meanwhile, the West continues to sell arms to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, offering these arms sales as a way to sanctify the war. The West with these sales is utterly complicit in the Saudi-led war.
The West’s complicity extends to the manner in which it has allowed Saudi Arabia to yoke this obscene war with its paranoia about Iran. Saudi Arabia argues that the rebel Houthi group in Yemen is a proxy of Iran and that Houthi capture of Yemen cannot be permitted. It is the impetus for this war. What is needed, however, is not a war to destroy Yemen, but the opening of a serious process for Saudi Arabia and Iran to talk about their broad disagreements.

In Istanbul, during an emergency meeting of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation around Israel’s actions in Jerusalem, the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia and Iran shook hands and spoke for a few minutes. Adel al-Jubeir (Saudi Arabia) and Javad Zarif (Iran) later offered warm words about their meeting. These are little gestures. But they need to be magnified. Tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran not only fuel the war on Yemen, but also the war on Syria. They will certainly be a major factor in October when US President Trump has to offer his recertification of the nuclear deal with Iran. If the US goes to war against Iran, it will partly be because of Saudi pressure to do so.

How to prevent the atrocity that is taking place in Yemen? The war must end. That is now a consensus position among the humanitarian community. Arms sales by the West must be stopped. Pressure for a grand bargain between Saudi Arabia and Iran must increase. A million to two million Yemeni children’s lives are stake.
 
Vijay Prashad is professor of international studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He is the author of 18 books, including Arab Spring, Libyan Winter (AK Press, 2012), The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (Verso, 2013) and The Death of a Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution (University of California Press, 2016). His columns appear at AlterNet every Wednesday.

This article was made possible by the readers and supporters of AlterNet.

Courtesy: Alternet
 

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Villagers scour rubble for belongings scattered during the bombing of Hajar Aukaish, Yemen, in April 2015. (A. Mojalli/VOA)

Just as the invasion of Iraq eventually produced the Islamic State (ISIS or IS), the killing of innocent Yemenis for no moral reason at all is providing a recruitment tool for terrorist organizations throughout the Middle East and Africa. And just as the Iraq invasion was predicated on a false claim of weapons of mass destruction, the war in Yemen rests on the bogus argument that Iranians are supporting terrorism in that country. In the first two years of the conflict in Yemen, the United States was not able to point to any evidence of Iranian weapons delivery to Yemen. Yet, the United States joined with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States with weapon sales, intelligence, and a U.S.-enforced naval blockade. Trump’s recent sale of arms to the Saudis was worth $125 billion.

The results of all this has been catastrophic. Take a look at the suffering of the Yemeni people in the past few years.

Yemen is one of the poorest countries in the Arab region. It has gone through conflicts for a variety of reasons: religion, ideology, and resources. In 1990, Yemen unified, but conflicts remained. The Zaidis (a branch of Shia Islam) are located in the mountains of northern Yemen where the Houthis are the major tribe/group. The remainder of the population of the country are Sunni. In 2014, the Houthis surged south and took control of the capital, Sanaa, and most of the surrounding area. The president of the country, Abdo Rabbu Mansour Hadi, escaped to Saudi Arabia in 2015. In six months, the Saudis and Hadi formed an army and took back part of the area but not Sanaa.

The Saudi-led war against the Houthis brings together troops from Saudi Arabia, President Hadi’s supporters in the Yemeni military, Emirati countries, Islamist militants and some smaller tribes. Saudi allies are intervening to support the Hadi’s Saudi-installed puppet regime, with the United States, Britain, France, Turkey, and Belgium joining in the effort. Regional countries – Kuwait, Bahrain, United Arab Republic (UAE), Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and Sudan – are also providing support to the Saudis.

The Saudis are not just waging war against Houthi soldiers. They are bombing hospitals, schools, medical clinics and other civic places. The Houthis, outgunned, have resorted to fighting the war with child soldiers and, more recently, using smuggled weapons from Iran.
Yemen, a country of 25 million people, has lost 10,000 lives so far in this conflict. It has also experienced widespread human rights violations and disease, and nearly half the population is in a food crisis. “There is no food, no pure water, no electricity, nothing,” a a Yemini woman says. “One day, a businessperson came to us and give us dishes and spoons but I told him sarcastically, ‘what should we do with these? Eat the soil?’”

The dire situation in Yemen has become even more severe since the recent outbreak of cholera. The lack of sanitation, clean water, and medical care are fertile ground for the spread of the disease. This current outbreak reportedly infected 269,608 people and has caused the deaths of over 1,600. This number of fatalities in Yemen due to cholera is larger than all the cholera deaths in the world in 2015, as reported by the World Health Organization.

The current civilian slaughter, chaos, and daily indignities in Yemen create the perfect recruitment tool for the expansion of terrorist organizations. Al-Qaeda has been operating in Yemen for a long time. Known as al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), they are augmenting their presence with technological savvy and are now considered one of the most dangerous al-Qaeda groups. In addition, IS has begun to make their presence felt in Yemen.

The Islamic State is on the verge of defeat. But U.S. analysts, most recently Ashton Carter in a Washington Post op-ed, continue to overlook how U.S. policies created the blowback of terrorism and entities like IS. In Yemen, the United States is repeating the same errors it made in Iraq. And the results, in terms of breeding terrorist backlash, will be the same. Until the United States learns to be more humane and severs ties with corrupt and ruthless dictators for the sake of oil or other commodity interests, this cycle will never end.
 

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