Yemen militant group says it captured further 2,000 troops in operation in Saudi Arabia
Houthi rebels in Yemen say they have killed 500 Saudi soldiers, captured a further 2,000 and seized a convoy of Saudi military vehicles.
The extraordinary claims at a press conference on Sunday, involving still photographs and inconclusive videos of captured soldiers, many not in uniform, could not be corroborated, and there was no independent confirmation from Saudi Arabia.
Continue reading...Proposal by Iran-backed rebels ‘could send message of the will to end the war,’ says Martin Griffiths
The United Nations envoy for Yemen has welcomed an offer from the country’s Houthi rebels to halt all attacks on Saudi Arabia, saying it could bring an end to years of bloody conflict.
Implementation of the initiative by the Houthis “in good faith could send a powerful message of the will to end the war,” special envoy for Yemen Martin Griffiths said.
Continue reading...Foreign minister’s comments further inflame tensions in Persian Gulf after oil attacks
Iran’s foreign minister has warned that any attack on his country after a series of missile strikes on Saudi Arabia’s oil industry would result in “all-out war”.
Javad Zarif also demanded that Riyadh hand over the evidence that it claimed proved the attack came from Iran, and not from Houthi-occupied Yemen.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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”.
Continue reading...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.”
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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
Continue reading...Panel lists 160 key actors in Yemen war who could face charges, adding to pressure on UK to end Saudi arms sales
Britain, the US and France may be complicit in war crimes in Yemen by arming and providing support to a Saudi-led coalition that starves civilians as a war tactic, a United Nations report has said.
A UN panel of experts has for the first time compiled a list of 160 military officers and politicians who could face war crimes charges, including from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the Houthi rebel movement and Yemeni government military forces. A secret list of those most likely to be complicit has been sent to the UN.
Continue reading...Saudi-led coalition claimed it targeted a military storage facility run by Houthi rebels
More than 100 people are believed to have been killed in an airstrike by the Saudi-led military coalition on a detention centre in Yemen, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
The coalition said it had targeted a facility run by Houthi rebels that “stores drones and missiles”, but the rebels said the attack had levelled a building they used as a prison.
Continue reading...Donald Trump’s offer to talk peace with Iran sent a shiver of alarm through Israel’s political and security establishment last week. With a too-close-to-call general election looming on 17 September, Benjamin Netanyahu is counting on his hardline anti-Tehran alliance with Washington – and fear of conflict – to win him crucial votes. A North Korea-style Trump tryst with Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, was the prime minister’s “ultimate horror scenario”, one analyst noted.
Yet after a recent series of escalatory strikes against Iran-linked forces in Iraq, Lebanon and Syria, Israel’s voters may reflect that if one thing is worse than peace with Iran, it’s war with Iran. Trump’s policy of “maximum pressure” on Tehran, strongly backed by Netanyahu and fellow Tel Aviv hawks, is placing Israel squarely in the firing line. The intensifying confrontation is also sucking in regional states, notably Iraq.
Continue reading...Multiple attacks in region suggest drone warfare could extend to distant battlefields
A spate of drone attacks in Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and now Lebanon has raised the spectre of a new era of conflict in the region, due to the ability of stealth-like weapons to penetrate distant battlefields and hit closely guarded targets.
Drone warfare has become an instrumental factor in the escalating conflict between Israel and Iran, now being fought over both sides of the Israeli border and in skies across the region.
Continue reading...Will Swanson has been photographing displaced people in southern Yemen and at the conflict frontline in Ad Dhale for two years, and describes some of the terrible conditions they endure
All photographs: Will Swanson/International Rescue Committee
Escaping poverty and drought, Ethiopians are making the dangerous sea crossing from Djibouti to Yemen and then on foot to the Saudi border. Many only realise they are crossing a conflict zone when they are picked up by gangs or militias
Photographs by Susan Schulman
Continue reading...Two US officials say drone was brought down on Tuesday south-east of the capital Sana’a
A US military MQ-9 drone has been shot down in Yemen’s Dhamar governate, south-east of the Houthi-controlled capital Sana’a, two US officials have said.
A Houthi military spokesman had earlier said that air defences had brought down a US drone.
Continue reading...Clashes between forces backed by former Gulf allies UAE and Saudi threaten ‘new civil war within a civil war’, says thinktank
“Scores” of people were killed and hundreds wounded during recent fighting in Yemen’s key port of Aden when southern separatists – trained by the UAE – seized key locations of the city from Saudi-backed government forces.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Aden told the Guardian that large parts of the city were also left without electricity and water during the fighting after services were targeted. Humanitarian staff warned that any further fighting between forces allied with the two coalition partners would be “devastating”.
Continue reading...The jubilation of women in Saudi Arabia was real – and understandable. Last Friday, the kingdom announced that it is allowing women to apply for passports, to travel without permission and to have more control over family matters – registering a marriage, divorce or child’s birth, and being issued official family documents. These changes to the guardianship system should be genuinely transformative. But celebration can only be partial when women’s rights remain so tightly constricted and the activists who have fought hard for such changes are paying so high a price.
Women will still need permission from a male relative to marry or divorce, or to leave prison or domestic violence refuges. The system needs not reform but abolition. Other laws still hold women back. And as Ms Saffaa, an Australia-based Saudi artist and activist, warned: “When women become equal to men, Saudi Arabia is still going to remain an authoritarian dictatorship that violates countless human rights.”
Continue reading...Pentagon’s top general says group of nations would ensure freedom of navigation in Straits of Hormuz
The United States hopes to enlist allies in the coming weeks for a military coalition to safeguard strategic waters in the Persian Gulf where Washington blames Iran and Iran-aligned fighters for attacks, the Penatgon’s most senior general has said.
Under the plan, which has only been finalised in recent days, the US would provide command ships and lead surveillance efforts for the military coalition in seaas off Iran and Yemen. Allies would patrol waters near those US command ships and escort commercial vessels with their nation’s flags.
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