21st Century Wire
SPECIAL REPORT
As 21WIRE previously outlined back in January, it was only a matter of time before a new full-blown conflict would break out in the geostrategic hot pot of Yemen.
Yesterday we saw Saudi Arabian troops massed along the Yemeni border, which could only mean one thing.
This afternoon the region’s worst fears were realized, as a Saudi Arabian-led coalition of 10 Arab states launched airstrikes in Yemen, including the destruction of the country’s main airport in the capital, Sanaa.
After receiving the full-blessing of Washington DC on Monday, Saudi Arabia began its final preparations to try to wipe-out a competing faction in Yemen, the predominantly Shia-oriented Houthi rebels, who had recently forced Washington and Saudi-backed puppet regime President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi out of power in Sanaa. He fled later south to take refuge in the southern city of Aden. This latest military intervention is seen as a last-ditch effort to try to preserve the possibility of reinstalling back into power, Hadi, and avoiding a ‘exiled ruler’ situation.
The fact that Yemen did not attack Saudi Arabia or any of the other GCC allies means that Saudi and its GCC partners are now in direct violation of international law, specifically the Nuremberg Principles and the Geneva Conventions. Far from a ‘self-defense’ action, this latest operation which is being managed out of Washington DC , is strictly designed as a type of proxy war with Iran, whom the Washington-Tel Aviv-Riyadh regional axis power has accused of “aiding the Houthis” and of ‘sowing sectarian strife’ within what Saudi Arabia considers its Sunni sphere of influence.
Washington and Riyadh’s public relations defense of this latest act of aggression seems to be spun around what Saudi claims is fighting ‘spilling into Saudi Arabia’. Reuters explained this yesterday as, “the risk of the turmoil spilling across its porous 1,800 km (1,100 mile)-long border with Yemen and into its Shi’ite Eastern Province where the kingdom’s richest oil deposits lie.”
There’s much more than meets the eye here. In reality, inserting a foreign coalition military force into the country will increase the risk of spill-over. Looking at the harsh sectarian war brimming in Yemen, is it possible that Saudi Arabia and its ‘Sunni coalition’ may be attempting to provide air support and military assistance to its Islamic militant ‘affiliates’ inside Yemen? Recently, we exposed Saudi’s funding and supporting of al Qaeda in Yemen, in an attempt to remove the Shia Houthis who have just seized power. Perhaps Saudi is afraid that al Qaeda and AQAP (al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) will be wiped out by the Shia Houthis if they did not intervene now. If this is indeed the case, it reveals just how important these extremist Sunni Islamic militant terrorist groups (including ISIS) are to Saudi Arabia in its strategy subterfuge to maintain its position as the ranking power in the region.
As 21WIRE also informed its readers in January, Washington has been planning a major operation in Yemen for months, as far back as August 2014, and reports back in January of a massive ordnance onload of the USS John C. Stennis (CVN 74) at the US Navy’s primary ordnance storage and handling station on the West Coast, transferring six million pounds of ammunition between Jan. 13-15.
The Pentagon has been very high on Yemen as a potential conflict zone because it considers the country a ‘soft target’ with no real standing army, and more importantly as a location with tremendous geographical and geopolitical value for an approaching military confrontation with Iran in 2016-2017. The US has recent bombing experience in Yemen, as well as ‘warm-up’ operations with CIA drone strikes launched from across the water, out of Djibouti, Africa.
If this conflict continues to escalate, fighting could not only destroy the country of Yemen, but also spill over to neighboring countries , or worse – across the Gulf of Aden to Iran.
Stay tuned for more updates.
READ MORE YEMEN NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Yemen Files
