Category Archives: Middle East and North Africa

Trump says US response to oil attack depends on Saudi Arabia’s assessment

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US secretaries of state and energy both explicitly blamed Iran for the attack but Trump suggests US did not have definitive evidence

Donald Trump has said the US response to the attack on Saudi oil facilities will depend on the assessment in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, and downplayed US dependence on Middle East energy supplies.

The US secretaries of state and energy both explicitly blamed Iran for the attack. Unnamed US officials were also quoted in US media outlets as saying Iranian cruise missiles were used in Saturday’s attack on an oil field and processing plant. Estimates of the number of missiles used ranged from “nearly a dozen” to “over two dozen”.

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Donald Trump says Iran appears to be responsible for Saudi oil attacks – video

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Donald Trump has hinted that the US believes Iran is responsible for attacks on oil plants in Saudi Arabia over the weekend that raised fears of a fresh conflict in the Middle East. "It would look the most like it was Iran," he told reporters at the White House. 

Iran has denied responsibility for the attacks which damaged the world's biggest crude processing plant in Saudi Arabia and triggered the largest jump in crude prices in decades. Iran's president, Hassan Rouhani, suggested on Monday that "Yemeni people" were to blame.

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‘Nobody can stop it’: Saudi oil attack signals an escalating crisis

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Trump is letting Riyadh decide about whether to retaliate against Iran – and if that happens, Iranians would likely raise the stakes

The attack on Saudi oil facilities is the latest, most violent, example of an escalating series of gambits rival powers in the Gulf aimed at achieving their objectives by all measures short of all-out war.

But the chances of avoiding such a devastating conflict diminish each time the stakes are raised.

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Middle East drones signal end to era of fast jet air supremacy

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Tiny, cheap, unmanned and hard-to-detect aircraft are transforming conflicts across region

In the history of modern warfare, “own the skies, win the war” has been a constant maxim. Countries with the best technology and biggest budgets have devoted tens of billions to building modern air forces, confident they will continue to give their militaries primacy in almost any conflict.

Tiny, cheap, unmanned aircraft have changed that, especially over the battlefields of the Middle East. In the past three months alone, drones have made quite an impact in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and possibly now Saudi Arabia, where half the country’s oil production - and up to 7% of the world’s global supply – has been taken offline by a blitz that caused no air raid sirens and seems to have eluded the region’s most advanced air warning systems.

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Everything you need to know about the Saudi Arabia oil attacks

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Saturday’s drone attacks severely disrupted global energy infrastructure and sent oil price soaring

Saudi pipelines, oil installations and tankers have occasionally been attacked over the past two years, but analysts say what happened in eastern Saudi Arabia in the early hours of Saturday morning is a much larger escalation: a hit to the jugular of the kingdom’s oil industry.

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Saudi Arabia oil attack: Trump hints at action as US points finger at Iran

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US president says he has ‘reason to believe we know the culprit’, as oil prices rise

Everything you need to know about the Saudi Arabia oil attacks

Donald Trump has said the US is “locked and loaded” and ready to respond to attacks on a petroleum processing facility in Saudi Arabia, as US officials said the evidence pointed to Iranian involvement.

The US president did not mention Iran, but wrote on Twitter that he had “reason to believe that we know the culprit” behind the series of attacks on the Abqaiq facility, which is the world’s largest petroleum processing plant. The attacks disrupted more than half of the kingdom’s oil output and will affect global supplies.

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Iran denies launching drone attacks on Saudi oil facility

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Foreign ministry counters accusations from US secretary of state with threats to US bases

Iran has dismissed US accusations that it was responsible for a series of explosive drone attacks on the world’s largest petroleum processing facility in Saudi Arabia that disrupted more than half of the kingdom’s oil output and could affect global supplies.

Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthi rebel group claimed responsibility for launching waves of drones at state-owned Saudi Aramco facilities early on Saturday morning. But the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, said there was no evidence the drones were launched in Yemen and accused Iran of “an unprecedented attack on the world’s energy supply”.

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Saudi attack dampens faint chance of a Trump-Iran meeting

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Despite no specific evidence of Iranian involvement, the US treat Yemen’s Houthi rebels as tame creatures of Tehran

The US secretary of state Mike Pompeo’s bald claim this weekend that Iran was responsible for the attack on the Saudi oilfields came with no marshalled public evidence, but dampens any likelihood that Donald Trump will countenance a meeting with Tehran in the near future or press ahead with tentative peace talks with Houthi rebels in Oman.

Lindsey Graham, one of Trump’s foreign policy supporters in the Senate, was clear talks with Iran are now off the agenda saying: “The Iranian regime is not interested in peace – they’re pursuing nuclear weapons and regional dominance.”

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Netanyahu holds cabinet meeting in occupied West Bank ahead of election

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Government meeting is the first in Palestinian territories for almost two decades

Benjamin Netanyahu has held his final pre-election cabinet meeting in the Palestinian territories, in a clear appeal to hardline nationalists two days before a vote in which he is fighting for his political life and possibly his freedom.

Locked in a knife-edge race and facing the prospect of criminal corruption charges, the Israeli prime minister promised last week to extend Israeli sovereignty over the Jordan Valley and settlements in the occupied West Bank. The move would likely leave its Palestinian inhabitants completely encircled and largely trapped in isolated enclaves.

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Tunisian exit polls suggest shock victory for political outsiders

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Kaïs Saïed and media mogul Nabil Karoui appear to have taken the top two spots and will progress to a runoff

The first exit polls in Tunisia’s presidential elections suggest a shock victory for two political outsiders, law professor Kaïs Saïed and media mogul Nabil Karoui, who is on remand in prison on corruption charges he denies.

The early results indicate that faced with widespread disillusion over the country’s progress in the past eight years since its revolution, Tunisians have rejected politicians associated with the country’s two main political trends who have dominated for the last years, including the moderate Islamist Ennahda party.

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Drone attacks on Saudi plant could hit global oil supplies

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Explosions halve Saudi output and reduce global production by 5%

Global supplies of oil are likely to suffer a “major jolt” following Saturday’s attack by a swarm of explosive drones on the world’s biggest oil processing plant in Saudia Arabia.

Major fires engulfed the Abqaiq processing facility and the Khurais oil field after the attack, for which Houthi rebels in Yemen claimed responsibility. They said they launched 10 drones with “intelligence cooperation from people inside Saudi Arabia”, according to the rebel-run Saba news agency. The rebels’ spokesman Yahya Saree said their operations “will expand and would be more painful as long as the Saudi regime continues its aggression and blockade” on Yemen, he said.The fires are now under control at both facilities, Saudi state media said.

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Major Saudi Arabia oil facilities hit by Houthi drone strikes

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Yemen’s rebel movement says it launched strikes that sparked huge fire at processing facility

Houthi rebels have claimed responsibility for a drone attack on the world’s largest oil processing facility in Saudi Arabia which is vital to global energy supplies.

The attacks on the processor and a major oilfield, operated by Saudi Aramco, on early Saturday sparked a huge fire, the kingdom’s interior ministry said.

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My young cousin fled the bombs … only to be held in a camp alongside Isis supporters

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A 15-year-old girl from my family was among thousands of traumatised innocents dumped at the notorious al-Hawl displacement facility in Syria

In April, a 15-year-old female relative of mine attempted to escape from al-Hawl camp, the displacement facility in eastern Syria that hosts families of Islamic State fighters. My cousin was one of thousands of civilians displaced from areas previously held by Isis and kept at the camp as they fled the group’s last strongholds.

My relative never joined the organisation, nor did any member of her family. But when she was caught, the guards noticed she was wearing a burqa, the face veil that Isis imposed on women living under its so-called caliphate. Since she was no longer living under Isis, the Kurdish interrogators accused her of being a “Daeshiyah” – a pejorative word to describe female Isis sympathisers. Rather than defending herself as a civilian with no association or sympathy to Isis, she opted for a defiant tone: “This is Islam, like it or not.”

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Saudi Arabia: major fire at world’s largest oil refinery after drone attack – video

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Houthi drones attacked the world's largest oil processing facility in Saudi Arabia and a major oilfield operated by Saudi Aramco early on Saturday, sparking a huge fire at a processor vital to global energy supplies. It was not clear if there were any injuries in the attacks, nor whether they would affect the country's oil production

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Kylie Moore-Gilbert named as Australian-British academic jailed in Iran since 2018

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Cambridge-educated lecturer in Islamic Studies at Melbourne University has been in prison in Tehran for almost a year

The third foreign national revealed this week to be imprisoned in Iran has been named by the Australian government as Dr Kylie Moore-Gilbert, a Melbourne academic who has published work on the 2011 Arab uprisings and on authoritarian governments.

Moore-Gilbert, a dual UK-Australian national, is Cambridge educated and worked as a lecturer in Islamic Studies at Melbourne University. She has been in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison for almost a year.

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Benjamin Netanyahu in close election fight for power in Israel

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‘Nastiest, most racist campaign ever’ as Likud shores up vote with divisive pledges

Benjamin Netanyahu remains neck and neck with his main election challenger after a widely condemned vow to annex parts of the occupied West Bank, before a vote that could bring an end to his time as Israeli prime minister.

In the last polls before election day on Tuesday, neither Netanyahu’s Likud party or the opposition Blue and White alliance, run by his former army chief Benny Gantz, appeared to have a clear route to the premiership.

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‘Tunisia’s Berlusconi’ the wild card as nation goes to the polls

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Jailed Nabil Karoui hopes to appeal to voters disillusioned by lack of progress since Arab spring

Campaigning ends on Friday in Tunisia’s presidential election before Sunday’s first round of voting, pitting more than two dozen candidates against each other, including a media mogul running for office from jail.

Tunisia is the last of the Arab spring countries still on a democratic track, after Egypt slipped back toward authoritarianism and Syria and Libya descended into conflict.

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Russia denounces Netanyahu’s West Bank annexation plan

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Moscow says proposal could increase regional tensions, as Israeli PM meets Putin

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, flies into Sochi on Thursday for talks with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, that come after Moscow added its voice to criticism of his pre-election pledge to annex occupied Palestinian territories.

Netanyahu said on Tuesday that he would annex up to a third of the West Bank if he is re-elected in next week’s parliamentary polls. His announcement was condemned by the Palestinians, Arab countries, the UN and the EU.

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Israel accused of planting spying devices near White House

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Surveillance devices planted over past two years, says report citing former US officials

Israel is likely to have planted mobile phone spying devices near the White House and other sensitive locations in the US capital over the past two years, according to a report from Politico that cited three former US officials.

The miniature surveillance devices mimic telecommunications towers to gather information, including the contents of phone calls. The US government concluded Israeli operatives were most likely to have put them in place to spy on Donald Trump and his associates, the news website reported.

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Australia left with few diplomatic levers after three citizens detained in Iran

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Canberra’s adherence to a hawkish US policy has undermined its ability to negotiate with the paranoid and sanctions-squeezed regime in Tehran

It was the trip of a lifetime, a globe-trotting adventure halfway across the world, chronicled online for family and friends back home and for followers online.

But in the eyes of the regime in Tehran – squeezed by sanctions and paranoid about the motives of outsiders – the act of flying a drone near a military installation on the outskirts of the Iranian capital appeared as an act of espionage.

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