Yemen

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Re: Yemen

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Apr 07, 2018 10:28 am

Donté Stallworth

Your regular reminder that this same Saudi Prince is running the vicious war that is destroying Yemen — a war they could not continue without US support.

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https://twitter.com/DonteStallworth/sta ... 2846876672
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Re: Yemen

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Aug 05, 2018 1:30 pm

Yemen 'worst humanitarian crisis in the world': EU


The Saudi-Emirati alliance is accused of air raids that killed at least 55 civilians in Hodeidah last week [File: Abduljabbar Zeyad/Reuters]

Yemen has become the "worst humanitarian crisis in the world", the European Union said, demanding the protection of civilians who continue to die in the three-year-old conflict.

An EU statement on Saturday highlighted the Red Sea port city of Hodeidah, which recently witnessed a bloody assault that killed at least 55 people and was blamed on air strikes by the Saudi-Emirati coalition fighting there. An alliance spokesman denied responsibility for the carnage.

"The consecutive air strikes in the city of Hodeidah have once again claimed dozens of lives with many people injured," the EU statement said.

"This is a tragic reminder that in Yemen the international humanitarian law - in place to protect civilians and civilian infrastructure in times of war - continues to be broken on a daily basis."

Yemeni government forces - backed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates - launched a major operation to retake Hodeidah and its strategic seaport from Houthi rebels in June.

Hodeidah has been under the control of the Houthis since 2014, and was responsible for delivering 70 percent of Yemen's imports - mostly humanitarian aid, food and fuel.

The Saudi-UAE alliance accuses the Houthis of smuggling weapons through Hodeidah's port.

22 million in need

More than 121,000 people have fled the city since the start of the offensive, according to a United Nations report.

The EU condemned the bombing of densely populated areas and the destruction of "schools, medical facilities, residential areas, markets, water systems, ports and airports".

Impoverished Yemen has been wracked by violence since 2014 when the Houthis overran much of the country, including the capital Sanaa.

With logistical support from the US, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have carried out attacks inside Yemen since March 2015 in an attempt to reinstate the internationally recognised government of President Abu-Rabbu Mansour Hadi.

The coalition has repeatedly accused regional rival Iran of arming the rebels, allegations the Houthis and Iran deny.

At least 10,000 people have been killed in the fighting and more than 22 million are in dire need of assistance.

'Genuinely commit'

The UN had been trying to broker a deal in a bid to avert an all-out assault on the city, which it fears would further hinder Yemenis' access to food, fuel and medicine, worsening the crisis.

On Thursday, the UN's special envoy for Yemen Martin Griffiths said he plans to invite the country's warring factions to hold talks in the Swiss city of Geneva on September 6.

Griffiths said he hopes the meeting will allow the government and Houthi rebels to discuss "the framework for negotiations, to agree on relevant confidence-building measures and specific plans for moving the process forward".

The EU urged the combatants to "genuinely commit to the current UN diplomatic agreement".

"The only solution that can put an end to the extreme suffering of the Yemeni people is a negotiated political solution," it said.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/08/ ... 56555.html
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Re: Yemen

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Aug 10, 2018 8:39 am

Saudi coalition airstrike in Yemen kills 50, rebels say

CBS/AP August 9, 2018, 6:53 PM
Last Updated Aug 9, 2018 1:52 PM EDT

SANAA, Yemen -- An airstrike by the Saudi-led coalition fighting Shiite rebels hit a bus driving in a busy market in northern Yemen on Thursday, killing at least 50 people including children and wounding 77, Yemen's rebel-run Al Masirah TV said, citing rebel Health Ministry figures.

The Saudi-led coalition, meanwhile, said it targeted the rebels, known as Houthis, who had fired a missile at the kingdom's south on Wednesday, killing one person who was a Yemeni resident in the area.

Al Masirah TV aired dramatic images of wounded children -- their clothes and schoolbags covered with blood as they lay on hospital stretchers.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said on Twitter that its team at an ICRC supported hospital in Saada received the bodies of 29 children, all under 15 years old. It also received 48 wounded people, including 30 children, it said.

UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore called the attack on children "unconscionable" and said that it "should be a turning point in Yemen's brutal war," CBS News' Pamela Falk reports.

The Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, "urgently renews his call for a negotiated political settlement through inclusive intra-Yemeni dialogue."

The attack took place in the Dahyan market in Saada province, a Houthi stronghold that lies along the border with Saudi Arabia.

TOPSHOT-YEMEN-CONFLICT
Medics treat a Yemeni child who was injured in an airstrike at an emergency clinic in the Iran-backed Houthi rebels' stronghold province of Saada, Aug. 8, 2018.

Getty
There was no breakdown in the casualties and it was not immediately clear how many of the victims were on the bus itself and how many were pedestrians in the immediate area around it. It was also unclear if there were other airstrikes in the area.

The bus was ferrying local civilians, including many children, according to Yemeni tribal leaders who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.

Col. Turki al-Malki, a spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition, said the attack in Saada targeted the rebels who had fired a missile at the kingdom's south, killing one person and wounding 11 others. The coalition said Wednesday's projectile, fired toward the southwestern Saudi city of Jizan, was intercepted and destroyed but its fragments caused the casualties.

The statement, carried by the official Saudi Press Agency, also said the missile was launched "deliberately to target residential and populated areas."

Al-Malki insisted Thursday's attack carried out in Saada is a "legitimate military action" and is "in accordance with international humanitarian law and customs." He also accused the Houthis of recruiting children and using them in the battlefields to cover for their actions.

Saudi Arabia backs Yemen's internationally recognized government and has been at war with the Houthis since March 2015. The rebels control much of northern Yemen, including the capital, Sanaa.

U.S. may be "guilty of war crimes" in Yemen, expert warns
"Scores killed, even more injured, most under the age of ten," the head of the ICRC in Yemen, Johannes Bruwer, said on his Twitter account, adding that the ICRC in Yemen is "sending additional supplies to hospitals to cope with the influx."

Scores killed, even more injured, most under the age of ten. @ICRC_ye sending additional supplies to hospitals to cope with the influx. https://t.co/BBKoiO6bbS

— Johannes Bruwer (@JohannesBruwer1) August 9, 2018
Later on Thursday, airstrikes hit the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, and sounds of the blasts reverberated across the city's southern and western neighborhoods. It was not immediately clear if there were any casualties in those strikes.

Yemen's stalemated, three-year war has killed over 10,000 people, badly damaged Yemen's infrastructure and crippled its health system. The coalition faces widespread international criticism for its airstrikes in Yemen that kill civilians.

Impoverished Yemen, on the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, is now in the world's worst humanitarian crisis, with more than 22.2 million people in need of assistance.

Last week, Yemeni medical officials said the coalition conducted airstrikes in the rebel-held port city of Hodeida, killing at least 28 people and wounding 70. But the coalition denied carrying out any attacks in the city, saying it follows a "strict and transparent approach based on the rules international law."

The fight for the port of Hodeida, a key lifeline for supplies and aid for Yemen's population on the brink of starvation, has become the latest battleground in the devastating war.

The Iran-aligned Houthis regularly fire into Saudi Arabia and have targeted its capital, Riyadh, with ballistic missiles. They say their missile attacks on the kingdom are in retaliation for air raids on Yemen by the Western-backed coalition.

The U.N. special envoy for Yemen, Martin Griffiths, has been pushing to bring the warring parties to restart peace talks. He recently announced plans to invite Yemen's warring parties to Geneva on Sept. 6 to hold the first round of consultations.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/saudi-arab ... icrc-says/
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Re: Yemen

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Aug 10, 2018 8:47 am

U.S. BOMBS

UN chief calls for investigation into Saudi-led strike that killed Yemen children

People walk past damaged cars at the entrance of Al-Thawra hospital after an air strike in the Red Sea town of Hodeida on August 2, 2018. - At least 20 people were killed Thursday in an air strike at the entrance to a hospital and the bombardment of a fish market in Yemen's rebel-held port city Hodeida, medics and witnesses said. (Photo by ABDO HYDER / AFP) (Photo credit should read ABDO HYDER/AFP/Getty Images)
(CNN)UN Secretary-General António Guterres has called for an independent investigation into a Saudi-led coalition air strike in Yemen that killed dozens of children.

The airstrike on Thursday hit a bus carrying children from a summer camp in a busy market area in the northern Majz District, UN spokesman Farhan Haq said in a statement.
Condemning the attack, Guterres called for "an independent and prompt investigation" into the incident, Haq said.

In the statement, Guterres added that all parties must "respect their obligations under international humanitarian law, in particular the fundamental rules of distinction, proportionality and precautions in attack."

According to the area's Houthi-controlled Health Ministry, 50 people were killed and 77 injured in the strike. The International Committee for the Red Cross said a hospital it supports in northern Saada province had received 29 bodies of "mainly children" younger than 15, and 40 injured, including 30 children.
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Footage from Houthi-run Al-Masirah TV appears to show a boy, carrying a UNICEF backpack, being treated for injuries.


Houthi media broadcast graphic footage appearing to show the bodies of children. CNN has not independently verified these images.

A video from Houthi-run Al-Masirah TV shows several boys who appear to have lost their limbs. Two or more wounded children are seen sharing a single hospital bed, and one child -- soaked in blood -- screams as he is being treated at a health center.

In another video, which appears to show the immediate aftermath of the strike, several children's bodies lie under a blown-up bus. Some boys are seen regaining consciousness, their faces bloodied and limbs charred.

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The boy is treated in a hospital after the strike.


One boy, his face blackened by dust, is seen trying to hold his legs up, apparently unable to move. "My leg won't get up," he says.

The attack came a week after a Saudi-led airstrike hit a busy fish market and the entrance to the country's largest hospital, Al-Thawra, in the port city of Hodeidah, killing 55 civilians and wounding 170 others.
Since March 2015, Saudi Arabia has led a coalition of Gulf states against Houthi rebels in Northern Yemen, after the Iran-backed rebels drove out the US-backed and pro-Saudi government.

The war in Yemen is now the world's worst humanitarian crisis, with more than 22 million people -- three-quarters of the population -- in desperate need of aid and protection, the UN says.
After Thursday's strike, Guterres renewed his call for a negotiated political settlement ahead of consultations scheduled in Geneva in September.

Lise Grande, United Nations humanitarian coordinator in Yemen, urged all parties to come to the table.

"The UN is offering a way forward through a dialogue on peace. We hope that all belligerents get to the peace table and start negotiating an end to this terrible war," she said.

Saudi denies targeting children


Saudi Arabia denies targeting civilians and rejected a UN report last year that blacklisted the country for deaths and injuries to children in the Yemen war.

Earlier Thursday, the Saudi-led coalition defended the airstrike as a "legitimate military operation," and a retaliation to a Houthi ballistic missile that targeted the kingdom's Jizan province on Wednesday night, according to the country's official news agency. One person was killed in that attack, Saudi state media reported.

Col. Turki al-Malki, a spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition, said the airstrike that hit the bus was aimed at a "legitimate target."

"No, this is not children in the bus," he said. "We do have high standard measures for targeting (sic)."


Malki said those responsible for firing ballistic missiles and targeting civilians would "get what they deserve."

The United States called on the Saudi-led coalition to launch an investigation into Thursday's strike.

US State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said Washington did not have the "full details of what happened on the ground," but said "we're concerned about these reports."

"We call on the Saudi-led coalition to conduct ... an investigation," Nauert said.

The Pentagon, which provides support for the Saudi-led war, called on US allies to mitigate "noncombatant casualties."

"Our noncombat support focuses on improving coalition processes and procedures, especially regarding compliance with the law of armed conflict and best practices for reducing the risk of civilian casualties," it said in a statement.

More than 10,000 civilians have died and 40,000 have been wounded in the war, which has left 15 million Yemenis without access to clean water.
The country could also be facing its third major cholera epidemic, especially around Hodeidah, the World Health Organization has warned.
CNN's Waffa Munayyer contributed to this report.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/10/middleea ... index.html


SAUDI WAR CRIMES WITH U.S. SUPPORT

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Re: Yemen

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Aug 12, 2018 10:53 am

Yemen's parents search through the dead for their children after strike
Image
https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/10/middleea ... index.html



How to stop the war in Yemen?
Saudi-UAE coalition air raids killed dozens of people, many of them children, in northern Yemen on Thursday.
https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/in ... 41096.html
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
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Re: Yemen

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Aug 19, 2018 12:59 pm

EXCLUSIVE: Bomb that killed 40 kids in Yemen made in US


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndOJEVJufws
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
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Re: Yemen

Postby Grizzly » Mon Aug 20, 2018 2:12 am

^^^ Surely Dianne Goldman Berman Feinstein and her husband profited nicely from this one...
“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

― Joseph mengele
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Re: Yemen

Postby Iamwhomiam » Mon Aug 20, 2018 9:49 am

Earlier Thursday, the Saudi-led coalition defended the airstrike as a "legitimate military operation," and a retaliation to a Houthi ballistic missile that targeted the kingdom's Jizan province on Wednesday night, according to the country's official news agency. One person was killed in that attack, Saudi state media reported.

Col. Turki al-Malki, a spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition, said the airstrike that hit the bus was aimed at a "legitimate target."

"No, this is not children in the bus," he said. "We do have high standard measures for targeting (sic)."


The rationale for the bombing I heard reported was that this bus of children were being brought to a camp used to incite and inflame their hearts and fill their minds with a passion for jihad. Making them enemy future combatants worthy of destruction. A case of nipping it in the bud.

Our number one export seems to be terror, followed closely by weapons sales.
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Re: Yemen

Postby American Dream » Thu Aug 30, 2018 7:06 am

The Invention of a Master Terrorist

And the legend of a failson bomb-maker

IN LATE JULY, a little-noticed United Nations report on terrorist groups appeared with the news that one of the world’s most dangerous men may be dead. Citing UN “member states,” the report announced that Ibrahim al-Asiri, the chief bomb-maker for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), who had a $5 million bounty on his head, “may have been killed during the second half of 2017.” The likely cause—a U.S. airstrike—was not mentioned. The UN report added that al-Asiri’s death would be “a serious blow to [AQAP’s] operational capability.”

National security reporters soon picked up the tip. On August 17, the Associated Press, citing Yemeni government officials and tribal representatives, reported al-Asiri’s death; American sources quickly followed with confirmation. According to these vague reports, he was killed sometime in a six-month period in a drone strike in Maʾrib Governorate, an administrative region northeast of the country’s capital, San’a. (On May 23, 2017, not long before al-Asiri’s purported death, U.S. Navy SEALs raided a village in the Marib region and killed five people, including a child and a partially blind septuagenarian. The Defense Department claimed that there were “no credible indications” of civilian casualties.)

As Yemen expert Gregory D. Johnsen noted, “al-Asiri is not unique. He is simply the name we know.”

Forsaking typical practice, jihadist media outlets have not published histrionic tributes to al-Asiri’s martyrdom, leading to speculation that he might still be alive. Other more cautious commentators suggest, in any event, that the death of this thirty-six-year-old Saudi munitions expert wouldn’t mean the end of al-Qaeda’s insurgent bombing campaign. Al-Asiri presumably had many students, who likely learned the basics of bomb-making from the master. As Yemen expert Gregory D. Johnsen noted, “al-Asiri is not unique. He is simply the name we know.”

Still, given that an al-Qaeda operative of al-Asiri’s stature—a prime agent of global terror—may well have breathed his last, the American mainstream press has been distinctly muted in its response. When Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the notoriously vicious leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, was killed by U.S. forces in 2006 there was a celebratory barrage of coverage—and the killing of Osama bin Laden garnered a blizzard of stories, book-length accounts, and movie deals.

The intelligence community has been much more vocal in celebrating al-Asiri’s demise as one more exceptionalist victory in the never-ending war on terror. Speaking to CBS, former CIA deputy director Michael Morell described al-Asiri as “probably the most sophisticated terrorist bomb maker on the planet. Incredibly creative, incredibly innovative.” CBS’s own reporter, David Martin, speculated that al-Asiri “might well have been the single most dangerous terrorist in the world”—an appellation that also surfaced in a 2013 Time magazine story about his exploits. National Review, finding its sense of humor somewhere in the fetish bag where it keeps William F. Buckley’s most cutting racist witticisms, titled its report, “Some Asiri-ously Good News.” Quoting from the vast cadre of ever-anonymous U.S. officials, Reuters called it “a major symbolic blow to AQAP.”

And indeed, reports of al-Asiri’s bomb-making skills are legion. CNN’s Barbara Starr—as reliable a conduit for Pentagon thinking as there is in the American press—wrote that “Al-Asiri is widely credited with perfecting miniaturized bombs with little or no metal content that could make it past some airport security screening.” For that reason, he was considered “a direct threat to the U.S.” As Morell acknowledged, al-Asiri’s suspected abilities had an immense impact on airport and travel security. “A good chunk of what you have to take out of your bag and what has to be screened,” he told CBS, “is because of Asiri and his capabilities of putting explosives in very difficult to find places.” The short-lived laptop ban? That, too, was in response to al-Asiri’s work.

There’s just a wee problem with the Ibrahim al-Asiri narrative. Don’t let it bother you too much. In all likelihood, al-Asiri was not a pleasant person, and he would have killed scores of Americans if he had the chance or the competence. But the truth is that Ibrahim al-Asiri, one of the top enemies of the United States and a constant target of its vaunted intelligence services, has never been publicly linked to any successful plots against American targets. He’s never been pegged with killing an American. Not a single one. In fact, al-Asiri, while he designed and built his share of bombs, is known to have killed very few people at all. His most significant recorded kill? That of his brother, Abdullah al-Asiri.

The tale, if you haven’t heard it, is a classic from the literature of loser jihad. (Loser jihad, in case you’re wondering, is pretty much the Islamist world’s equivalent of the loser alt-right: like any movement targeting disaffected young men with a taste for violence, glory, and posthumous fame, jihad attracts its share of adherents who can be charitably described as layabouts, men who are notably short on accomplishment but nevertheless nihilistic in their ambitions. You might call them failsons, in the new American vernacular.) This theory, which is my own but is a little slapdash and likely unoriginal, borrows from French scholar Olivier Roy’s idea of the “Islamization of radicalism,” in which a profound break with society comes first, with Islamist jihad offering the now-radicalized outcast-in-question a retrospective salvific sense of purpose. To that end, Roy points to many French and Belgian jihadists, who started as petty criminals, drug users, and other fringe figures before committing themselves to religious violence.

Anyway, back to al-Asiri and his brother Abdullah. After some light dabbling in terrorist activity landed al-Asiri in prison, the brothers embarked from Saudi Arabia in 2006 to continue the righteous adventure of jihad in Yemen. In the summer of 2009, they devised a plan—a clever one, but one clearly in need of considerable fleshing out. Abdullah contacted some authorities back home in Saudi Arabia and claimed that he had changed his ways and wanted to give up jihadist terrorism. He would come back, he said, but only on the condition that he could meet with Muhammad bin Nayef, a Saudi prince and one of the country’s top counter-terrorism officials. The meeting was arranged, and at the appointed time, Abdullah’s body exploded, killing him immediately; the Saudi prince escaped with minimal injuries. The bomb, built by Ibrahim, had been kept somewhere on Abdullah’s person—probably in his rectum.

The bombing was a farce, but it put al-Asiri on the map, leading to widespread fears of bombs sewn into body cavities and a new generation of ingenious plastic-based explosive devices passing through metal detectors. Over the years, security officials in the west adopted a range of measures to respond to bombs purportedly cooked up by al-Asiri and other top bomb-makers. Hence the baroque protocols of airport security that require passengers to remove shoes and jackets, dump liquids, expose themselves to body scanners, along with all kinds of other subsidiary brands of security theater.

In the years since al-Asiri killed his brother, a strange thing happened: through a combination of intelligence derring-do and (likely more important) al-Asiri’s own incompetence, every plot concocted by the master Yemeni bomb-maker failed. The underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, wasn’t able to detonate his device, a screw-up that many analysts blamed on Abdulmutallab himself. A plot to blow up cargo jets with weaponized inkjet cartridges was foiled. No laptops laden with plastic explosives appeared. It is possible, of course, that this list of failures—well-publicized by an American leadership interested in inflating the AQAP threat—is only part of a longer litany, one that contains classified stories of CIA successes that can never be told. An old, self-pitying intelligence adage goes that the agency’s successes are never public, only its failures.


Continues: https://thebaffler.com/latest/invention ... -silverman
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Re: Yemen

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Sep 06, 2018 2:24 pm

War Crimes In Yemen
SEPTEMBER 3, 2018
PAUL PILLAR

by Paul R. Pillar

The war in Yemen has been for some time one of the worst current man-made humanitarian disasters. Now comes a report, from the United Nations Human Rights Council and based on extensive investigations of a group of experts examining the past four years of the war, documenting not only human suffering as a byproduct of warfare but also the commission of war crimes. By far the most destructive offenses have been committed by the principal external intervenors—Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—and the titular Yemeni government that they back.

The lead conclusion of the report is:

The Group of Experts has reasonable grounds to believe that the Governments of Yemen, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are responsible for human rights violations, including unlawful deprivation of the right to life, arbitrary detention, rape, torture, ill-treatment, enforced disappearance and child recruitment, and serious violations of freedom of expression and economic, social and cultural rights, in particular the right to an adequate standard of living and the right to health.
The most destructive element of the war has been indiscriminate bombardment by the air forces of Saudi Arabia and the UAE. On this, the report says, “Coalition air strikes have caused most of the documented civilian casualties. In the past three years, such air strikes have hit residential areas, markets, funerals, weddings, detention facilities, civilian boats and even medical facilities.” The report goes on to provide supporting detail. The bombing last month of a school bus, killing dozens of young boys, is among the most recent of what has become a string of aerial atrocities.

U.S. Involvement

The United States is implicated in the aerial destruction. U.S. assistance to the Saudi and Emirati air war includes mid-air refueling, targeting information, and voluminous sales of armaments. The United States provided the bomb that destroyed the school bus.

Disclaimers by Trump administration officials, such as Secretary of Defense James Mattis’s statement that U.S. aid “is not unconditional” and requires the Saudi-led coalition to “do everything humanly possible to avoid innocent loss of life,” do not square with the evidence of how this war is being fought. The evidence conforms much more with Aaron David Miller and Richard Sokolsky’s description of what they label as Donald Trump’s “slavish obeisance” to Saudi Arabia’s “dangerous and irresponsible policies.”

The U.N. report indicates that offensive behavior is found on all sides of the Yemeni war. Offenses by the Houthi rebels include the use of child soldiers. But in terms of the scale of human suffering, including suffering inflicted through violations of the international law of war, responsibility lies far more on the Saudi-Emirati side. That is also the side where the offenses should be of most concern to U.S. policy-makers and the American public because it is the side whose operations the United States is abetting.

As a matter of humanitarian values, the Trump administration’s policy toward the Yemeni war is not defensible. It isn’t much more defensible in terms of legal principles or broader political values. Mattis has talked about U.S. involvement in the war in Yemen as being intended to “restore the rightful government there.” Rightfulness should be assessed with awareness of how the ostensible head of that government, President Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi, came into his position. He assumed the title when President Ali Abdullah Saleh—long considered a friend of the United States—left office amid Arab Spring-style disorder in the streets. Hadi owes his presidency today at least as much to the patronage of his foreign sponsors in the Gulf Cooperation Council as to anything else. He was “elected” president in 2012 in an election in which he was the only candidate and remained in office after the end of what was supposed to be a two-year term. He fled to Saudi Arabia when the Houthis captured the capital Sanaa, returned to Yemeni soil when the coalition intervention made that possible, and remains today essentially a ward of the Saudis.

It should be noted that support for “rightful” governments has hardly been a hallmark of the Trump administration’s policies in the Middle East. It certainly is not apparent in support for rebel forces opposed to the Assad regime in Syria, and in destabilization efforts aimed at regime change there and elsewhere.

Neither does the administration’s policy toward the Yemeni war accord with a realist perspective of where U.S. interests in the area do and do not lie. The United States does not have a stake in the outcome of civil warfare in Yemen. The Houthi rebellion is rooted in very local issues involving what the Houthis contend has been insufficient central government attention to the interests of tribal elements in the north of the country. Nor do the Houthis pose more than a trivial threat to anyone else in the region. Although the Trump administration and Saudi Arabia have made a big deal about missiles that the Houthis have fired at Saudi Arabia, those firings are pinpricks compared to the aerial assault in the other direction for which the missiles have been an attempt at retaliation. Missiles would not be launched if the Saudis and Emiratis had never launched their destructive expedition.

An end to U.S. military aid to the Saudi-Emirati war effort would encourage the Saudis and Emiratis to find ways to extricate themselves from their quagmire and to attempt to sponsor a Yemeni peace settlement rather than an indefinite war.

Fixation on Iran

Obsessions are never a good basis for policy. The U.S. obsession with Iran drives the current U.S. policy on Yemen. Iran has given aid to the Houthis, and the U.S. urge—which the Trump administration exhibits to an extreme—is to oppose anyone and anything with a connection to Iran, and to support anyone opposing Iran.

This obsession, like others, muddies perceptions and thinking about where threats really lie. Although the Houthis commonly are described as Iranian proxies, they aren’t, notwithstanding how glad they may be to accept Iranian aid. The most significant thing the Houthis have done during this war—their capture of the capital city of Sanaa—they did against Iran’s advice.

Policy with such unfortunate roots also may be counterproductive. Yemen is not a critical theater for the Iranians, but their modest aid to the Houthi movement has been a low-cost way of making their Saudi rivals bleed. The more that the regime of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman seems distracted and flummoxed by its misadventure in Yemen, the more incentive Iran has to keep encouraging the bleeding. That a U.S. administration that is waging economic warfare against Iran and aiming to destabilize its regime is part of the Yemeni mess—and thereby shares in the Saudis’ international infamy that is documented in the U.N. report—gives Iran even more incentive to encourage the bleeding.
https://lobelog.com/war-crimes-in-yemen/
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Re: Yemen

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Sep 09, 2018 9:45 am

Yemen peace talks collapse in Geneva after Houthi no-show

Stephanie Nebehay
GENEVA (Reuters) - An attempt to hold peace talks for Yemen was abandoned on Saturday after three days of waiting for the Houthi movement’s delegation, but the United Nations envoy vowed to press ahead with diplomacy.

The U.N. is renewing efforts to end Yemen’s war under a peace plan that calls on the Iranian-aligned Houthis and the internationally recognized government, backed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, to work on a peace deal under a transitional governing body.

U.N. Special Envoy Martin Griffiths said the Houthis’ failure to come to Geneva for the first talks in three years did not signify that the peace process was deadlocked.

Griffiths, who held three days of talks with a Yemeni government delegation, said he would meet in coming days with the Houthi leadership in the Yemeni capital Sanaa and in Muscat, Oman.

“They would have liked to get here, we didn’t make conditions sufficiently correct to get them here,” Griffiths told a news conference, declining to elaborate.

Houthi leader Abdul Malik al-Houthi, whose forces control northern Yemen and the capital Sanaa, accused the Saudi-led coalition of blocking his movement’s delegation from traveling to the peace talks.

“We all know that the talks collapsed because of the obstruction of the national delegation from leaving and traveling to Geneva by the coalition forces,” he said in a speech broadcast on the group’s al-Masirah TV.

A Saudi-led military coalition intervened in Yemen’s war against the Houthis in 2015 with the aim of restoring the government of Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi. The humanitarian situation has worsened sharply since, putting 8.4 million people on the brink of starvation and ravaging the already weak economy.

GUARANTEES SOUGHT

The Houthi group said they had wanted guarantees from the United Nations that their plane, supplied by Oman, would not have to stop in Djibouti for inspection by the Saudi-led coalition, after being “sequestrated” there last time for months by the Saudi-led military coalition. They also wanted the plane to evacuate some of their wounded to Oman or Europe.

The coalition have controlled Yemen’s airspace since 2015.

UN envoy Martin Griffiths leaves after a news conference on Yemen talks at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland September 8, 2018. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse
Griffiths said on Saturday that the restart of a peace process was “a very delicate, fragile moment”.

“People are coming at a time when perhaps all of their constituencies are not fully engaged and don’t see ahead of time results that will come out of talks,” he said.

“So I don’t take this as a fundamental blockage in the process.”

Confidence-building measures such as prisoner releases, increasing humanitarian access, especially to the city of Taiz, and reopening Sanaa airport were discussed with the government, he said.

Agreement has been reached for medical evacuations from Sanaa, to start in a week with a flight to Cairo, he said, calling it an “early achievement”.

Yemeni Foreign Minister Khaled al-Yamani, who led the government delegation, accused the Houthis of being “totally irresponsible” and of “trying to sabotage the negotiations”.

“If they were sincere in reaching peace, they should have come, even if we were meeting in separate rooms,” he told a separate news conference before leaving the Swiss city.

Yamani also strongly criticized Griffiths, who took over as mediator in February.

“We want the U.N. to be firmer in bringing the other party to the negotiations,” he said.

Anwar Gargash, Minister of State for Foreign Affairs for the United Arab Emirates, a key member of the Saudi-led coalition of Sunni Arab states, tweeted: “Despite the serious setback in Geneva the way forward is still a political solution. What is perhaps clearer now to the international community is the unwillingness of the Houthis to engage in good faith with such a process.”

additional reporting by Aziz El Yaakoubi and Hadeel Al Sayegh in Dubai; Editing by Catherine Evans
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-yeme ... SKCN1LO08Z
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Yemen

Postby American Dream » Fri Sep 28, 2018 9:07 am

Soulayma Mardam: “But what about Yemen?

Image


It’s rather despicable to use some corpses to bury others. And quite daring to oppose the martyrdom of Yemeni children to the plight of Syria’s.

So don’t come telling supporters of the Syrian cause “but what about Yemen?” To serve yourself of Yemen—in the same way as some of your predecessors and many of your contemporaries have used Palestine—to whitewash Assad… I have to acknowledge that you certainly have a far-reaching capacity to be abject. It’s rather despicable to use some corpses to bury others. And quite daring to oppose the martyrdom of Yemeni children to the plight of Syria’s.

We could retort to your filthy campism, by saying that yes, indeed, many speak out about certain subjects more than about others. Yet, contrary to yourself, they do not deny neither the suffering of entire populations, nor the richness or multiplicity of local social dynamics.


More: https://revolutionarydemocracy.wordpres ... out-yemen/
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Re: Yemen

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Oct 16, 2018 10:14 am

A Middle East monarchy hired American former special ops soldiers as mercenaries to assassinate its political rivals in Yemen.

“There was a targeted assassination program in Yemen. I was running it. We did it.”



American Mercenaries Were Hired To Assassinate Politicians In The Middle East

“There was a targeted assassination program in Yemen. I was running it. We did it.”

Headshot of Aram Roston
Aram Roston
BuzzFeed News Reporter
Posted on October 16, 2018, at 5:53 a.m. ET

Cradling an AK-47 and sucking a lollipop, the former American Green Beret bumped along in the back of an armored SUV as it wound through the darkened streets of Aden. Two other commandos on the mission were former Navy SEALs. As elite US special operations fighters, they had years of specialized training by the US military to protect America. But now they were working for a different master: a private US company that had been hired by the United Arab Emirates, a tiny desert monarchy on the Persian Gulf.

On that night, December 29, 2015, their job was to carry out an assassination.

Their armed attack, described to BuzzFeed News by two of its participants and corroborated by drone surveillance footage, was the first operation in a startling for-profit venture. For months in war-torn Yemen, some of America’s most highly trained soldiers worked on a mercenary mission of murky legality to kill prominent clerics and Islamist political figures.

Their target that night: Anssaf Ali Mayo, the local leader of the Islamist political party Al-Islah. The UAE considers Al-Islah to be the Yemeni branch of the worldwide Muslim Brotherhood, which the UAE calls a terrorist organization. Many experts insist that Al-Islah, one of whose members won the Nobel Peace Prize, is no terror group. They say it's a legitimate political party that threatens the UAE not through violence but by speaking out against its ambitions in Yemen.

The mercenaries’ plan was to attach a bomb laced with shrapnel to the door of Al-Islah’s headquarters, located near a soccer stadium in central Aden, a key Yemeni port city. The explosion, one of the leaders of the expedition explained, was supposed to “kill everybody in that office.”

When they arrived at 9:57 at night, all seemed quiet. The men crept out of the SUV, guns at the ready. One carried the explosive charge toward the building. But just as he was about to reach the door, another member of the team opened fire, shooting back along the dimly lit street, and their carefully designed plan went haywire.


Obtained by BuzzFeed News

Drone footage of the operation in Yemen to assassinate a Yemeni leader of Al-Islah, an Islamist political party.
The operation against Mayo — which was reported at the time but until now was not known to have been carried out by American mercenaries — marked a pivot point in the war in Yemen, a brutal conflict that has seen children starved, villages bombed, and epidemics of cholera roll through the civilian population. The bombing was the first salvo in a string of unsolved assassinations that killed more than two dozen of the group’s leaders.

The company that hired the soldiers and carried out the attack is Spear Operations Group, incorporated in Delaware and founded by Abraham Golan, a charismatic Hungarian Israeli security contractor who lives outside of Pittsburgh. He led the team’s strike against Mayo.

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“There was a targeted assassination program in Yemen,” he told BuzzFeed News. “I was running it. We did it. It was sanctioned by the UAE within the coalition.”

The UAE and Saudi Arabia lead an alliance of nine countries in Yemen, fighting what is largely a proxy war against Iran. The US is helping the Saudi-UAE side by providing weapons, intelligence, and other support.

The press office of the UAE’s US Embassy, as well as its US public affairs company, Harbour Group, did not respond to multiple phone calls and emails.

The revelations that a Middle East monarchy hired Americans to carry out assassinations comes at a moment when the world is focused on the alleged murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi Arabia, an autocratic regime that has close ties to both the US and the UAE. (The Saudi Embassy in the US did not respond to a request for comment. Riyadh has denied it killed Khashoggi, though news reports suggest it is considering blaming his death on a botched interrogation.)

Golan said that during his company’s months-long engagement in Yemen, his team was responsible for a number of the war’s high-profile assassinations, though he declined to specify which ones. He argued that the US needs an assassination program similar to the model he deployed. “I just want there to be a debate,” he said. “Maybe I’m a monster. Maybe I should be in jail. Maybe I’m a bad guy. But I’m right.”

Spear Operations Group’s private assassination mission marks the confluence of three developments transforming the way war is conducted worldwide:

Modern counterterrorism combat has shifted away from traditional military objectives — such as destroying airfields, gun emplacements, or barracks — to killing specific individuals, largely reshaping war into organized assassinations.

War has become increasingly privatized, with many nations outsourcing most military support services to private contractors, leaving frontline combat as virtually the only function that the US and many other militaries have not contracted out to for-profit ventures.

The long US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have relied heavily on elite special forces, producing tens of thousands of highly trained American commandos who can demand high private-sector salaries for defense contracting or outright mercenary work.

With Spear Operations Group’s mission in Yemen, these trends converged into a new and incendiary business: militarized contract killing, carried out by skilled American fighters.

Experts said it is almost inconceivable that the United States would not have known that the UAE — whose military the US has trained and armed at virtually every level — had hired an American company staffed by American veterans to conduct an assassination program in a war it closely monitors.

One of the mercenaries, according to three sources familiar with the operation, used to work with the CIA’s “ground branch,” the agency’s equivalent of the military’s special forces. Another was a special forces sergeant in the Maryland Army National Guard. And yet another, according to four people who knew him, was still in the Navy Reserve as a SEAL and had a top-secret clearance. He was a veteran of SEAL Team 6, or DEVGRU, the sources told BuzzFeed News. The New York Times once described that elite unit, famous for killing Osama bin Laden, as a “global manhunting machine with limited outside oversight.”

“What vetting procedures are there to make sure the guy you just smoked is really a bad guy?”
The CIA said it had no information about the mercenary assassination program, and the Navy's Special Warfare Command declined to comment. A former CIA official who has worked in the UAE initially told BuzzFeed News there was no way that Americans would be allowed to participate in such a program. But after checking, he called back: “There were guys that were basically doing what you said.” He was astonished, he said, by what he learned: “What vetting procedures are there to make sure the guy you just smoked is really a bad guy?” The mercenaries, he said, were “almost like a murder squad.”

Whether Spear’s mercenary operation violates US law is surprisingly unclear. On the one hand, US law makes it illegal to “conspire to kill, kidnap, maim” someone in another country. Companies that provide military services to foreign nations are supposed to be regulated by the State Department, which says it has never granted any company the authority to supply combat troops or mercenaries to another country.

Yet, as BuzzFeed News has previously reported, the US doesn’t ban mercenaries. And with some exceptions, it is perfectly legal to serve in foreign militaries, whether one is motivated by idealism or money. With no legal consequences, Americans have served in the Israel Defense Forces, the French Foreign Legion, and even a militia fighting ISIS in Syria. Spear Operations Group, according to three sources, arranged for the UAE to give military rank to the Americans involved in the mission, which might provide them legal cover.

Despite operating in a legal and political gray zone, Golan heralds his brand of targeted assassinations as a precision counterterrorism strategy with fewer civilian casualties. But the Mayo operation shows that this new form of warfare carries many of the same old problems. The commandos’ plans went awry, and the intelligence proved flawed. And their strike was far from surgical: The explosive they attached to the door was designed to kill not one person but everyone in the office.

Aside from moral objections, for-profit targeted assassinations add new dilemmas to modern warfare. Private mercenaries operate outside the US military’s chain of command, so if they make mistakes or commit war crimes, there is no clear system for holding them accountable. If the mercenaries had killed a civilian in the street, who would have even investigated?

The Mayo mission exposes an even more central problem: the choice of targets. Golan insists that he killed only terrorists identified by the government of the UAE, an ally of the US. But who is a terrorist and who is a politician? What is a new form of warfare and what is just old-fashioned murder for hire? Who has the right to choose who lives and who dies — not only in the wars of a secretive monarchy like the UAE, but also those of a democracy such as the US?

BuzzFeed News has pieced together the inside story of the company’s attack on Al-Islah’s headquarters, revealing what mercenary warfare looks like now — and what it could become.


The deal that brought American mercenaries to the streets of Aden was hashed out over a lunch in Abu Dhabi, at an Italian restaurant in the officers’ club of a UAE military base. Golan and a chiseled former US Navy SEAL named Isaac Gilmore had flown in from the US to make their pitch. It did not, as Gilmore recalled, begin well.

Their host was Mohammed Dahlan, the fearsome former security chief for the Palestinian Authority. In a well-tailored suit, he eyed his mercenary guests coldly and told Golan that in another context they’d be trying to kill each other.

Indeed, they made an unlikely pair. Golan, who says he was born in Hungary to Jewish parents, maintains long-standing connections in Israel for his security business, according to several sources, and he says he lived there for several years. Golan once partied in London with former Mossad chief Danny Yatom, according to a 2008 Mother Jones article, and his specialty was “providing security for energy clients in Africa.” One of his contracts, according to three sources, was to protect ships drilling in Nigeria’s offshore oil fields from sabotage and terrorism.


Golan, who sports a full beard and smokes Marlboro Red cigarettes, radiates enthusiasm. A good salesman is how one former CIA official described him. Golan himself, who is well-read and often cites philosophers and novelists, quotes André Malraux: “Man is not what he thinks he is but what he hides.”

Golan says he was educated in France, joined the French Foreign Legion, and has traveled around the world, often fighting or carrying out security contracts. In Belgrade, he says, he got to know the infamous paramilitary fighter and gangster Željko Ražnatović, better known as Arkan, who was assassinated in 2001. “I have a lot of respect for Arkan,” he told BuzzFeed News.

BuzzFeed News was unable to verify parts of Golan’s biography, including his military service, but Gilmore and another US special operations veteran who has been with him in the field said it’s clear he has soldiering experience. He is considered competent, ruthless, and calculating, said the former CIA official. He’s “prone to exaggeration,” said another former CIA officer, but “for crazy shit he’s the kind of guy you hire.”

"For crazy shit he’s the kind of guy you hire.”
Dahlan, who did not respond to multiple messages sent through associates, grew up in a refugee camp in Gaza, and during the 1980s intifada he became a major political player. In the ’90s he was named the Palestinian Authority’s head of security in Gaza, overseeing a harsh crackdown on Hamas in 1995 and 1996. He later met President George W. Bush and developed strong ties to the CIA, meeting the agency’s director, George Tenet, several times. Dahlan was once touted as a possible leader of the Palestinian Authority, but in 2007 he fell from grace, accused by the Palestinian Authority of corruption and by Hamas of cooperating with the CIA and Israel.

A man without a country, he fled to the UAE. There he reportedly remade himself as a key adviser to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, or MBZ, known as the true ruler of Abu Dhabi. The former CIA officer who knows Dahlan said, “The UAE took him in as their pit bull.”

Now, over lunch in the officers’ club, the pit bull challenged his visitors to tell him what was so special about fighters from America. Why were they any better than Emirati soldiers?

Golan replied with bravado. Wanting Dahlan to know that he could shoot, train, run, and fight better than anyone in the UAE’s military, Golan said: Give me your best man and I’ll beat him. Anyone.

The Palestinian gestured to an attentive young female aide sitting nearby. She’s my best man, Dahlan said.

The joke released the tension, and the men settled down. Get the spaghetti, recommended Dahlan.


The UAE, with vast wealth but only about 1 million citizens, relies on migrant workers from all over the world to do everything from cleaning its toilets to teaching its university students. Its military is no different, paying lavish sums to eager US defense companies and former generals. The US Department of Defense has approved at least $27 billion in arms sales and defense services to the UAE since 2009.

Retired US Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal once signed up to sit on the board of a UAE military company. Former Navy SEAL and Vice Admiral Robert Harward runs the UAE division of Lockheed Martin. The security executive Erik Prince, now entangled in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference, set up shop there for a time, helping the UAE hire Colombian mercenaries.

And as BuzzFeed News reported earlier this year, the country embeds foreigners in its military and gave the rank of major general to an American lieutenant colonel, Stephen Toumajan, placing him in command of a branch of its armed forces.

The US draws the line at combat; it does not hire mercenaries to carry out attacks. But that line can get blurry.
The UAE is hardly alone in using defense contractors; in fact, it is the US that helped pioneer the worldwide move toward privatizing the military. The Pentagon pays companies to carry out many traditional functions, from feeding soldiers to maintaining weapons to guarding convoys.

The US draws the line at combat; it does not hire mercenaries to carry out attacks or engage directly in warfare. But that line can get blurry. Private firms provide heavily armed security details to protect diplomats in war zones or intelligence officers in the field. Such contractors can engage in firefights, as they did in Benghazi, Libya, when two contractors died in 2012 defending a CIA post. But, officially, the mission was protection, not warfare.

Outside the US, hiring mercenaries to conduct combat missions is rare, though it has happened. In Nigeria, a strike force reportedly led by longtime South African mercenary Eeben Barlow moved successfully against the Islamist militant group Boko Haram in 2015. A company Barlow founded, Executive Outcomes, was credited with crushing the bloody RUF rebel force in war-torn Sierra Leone in the 1990s.

But over spaghetti with Dahlan, Golan and Gilmore were offering an extraordinary form of mercenary service. This was not providing security details, nor was it even traditional military fighting or counterinsurgency warfare. It was, both Golan and Gilmore say, targeted killing.

Gilmore said he doesn’t remember anyone using the word “assassinations” specifically. But it was clear from that first meeting, he said, that this was not about capturing or detaining Al-Islah’s leadership. “It was very specific that we were targeting,” said Gilmore. Golan said he was explicitly told to help “disrupt and destruct” Al-Islah, which he calls a “political branch of a terrorist organization.”

He and Gilmore promised they could pull together a team with the right skillset, and quickly.

In the weeks after that lunch, they settled on terms. The team would receive $1.5 million a month, Golan and Gilmore told BuzzFeed News. They’d earn bonuses for successful kills — Golan and Gilmore declined to say how much — but they would carry out their first operation at half price to prove what they could do. Later, Spear would also train UAE soldiers in commando tactics.

Golan and Gilmore had another condition: They wanted to be incorporated into the UAE Armed Forces. And they wanted their weapons — and their target list — to come from uniformed military officers. That was “for juridical reasons,” Golan said. “Because if the shit hits the fan,” he explained, the UAE uniform and dog tags would mark “the difference between a mercenary and a military man.”

Dahlan and the UAE government signed off on the deal, Golan and Gilmore said, and Spear Operations Group got to work.

Standing in front of a UAE military plane are Gilmore (middle left), Golan (middle right), and two soldiers on their mercenary team.
Courtesy Abraham Golan
Standing in front of a UAE military plane are Gilmore (middle left), Golan (middle right), and two soldiers on their mercenary team.
Back in the US, Golan and Gilmore started rounding up ex-soldiers for the first, proof-of-concept job. Spear Operations Group is a small company — nothing like the security behemoths such as Garda World Security or Constellis — but it had a huge supply of talent to choose from.

A little-known consequence of the war on terror, and in particular the 17 combined years of US warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan, is that the number of special operations forces has more than doubled since 9/11, from 33,000 to 70,000. That’s a vast pool of crack soldiers selected, trained, and combat-tested by the most elite units of the US military, such as the Navy SEALs and Army Rangers. Some special operations reservists are known to engage in for-profit soldiering, said a high-level SEAL officer who asked not to be named. “I know a number of them who do this sort of thing,” he said. If the soldiers are not on active duty, he added, they are not obligated to report what they’re doing.

But the options for special operations veterans and reservists aren’t what they were in the early years of the Iraq War. Private security work, mostly protecting US government officials in hostile environments, lacks the excitement of actual combat and is more “like driving Miss Daisy with an M4” rifle, as one former contractor put it. It also doesn’t pay what it used to. While starting rates for elite veterans on high-end security jobs used to be $700 or $800 a day, contractors said, now those rates have dropped to about $500 a day. Golan and Gilmore said they were offering their American fighters $25,000 a month — about $830 a day — plus bonuses, a generous sum in almost any market.

Still, the Yemen gig crossed into uncharted territory, and some of the best soldiers declined. “It was still gray enough,” Gilmore said, “that a lot of guys were like, ‘Ah, I’m good.’ ”

Gilmore himself said he has an imperfect record. During a live-fire training mission he led, back in his Navy days, he says he accidentally shot another SEAL. Gilmore said that’s what prompted him to leave the Navy, in 2011. His last major job before joining Spear was as an executive at an artisanal Tequila company.

That stain on his military career, he said, is also what prompted him to take the risk with Spear: He was an outsider, he wasn’t in the reserves, and he didn’t have a pension to worry about.

By the end of 2015, Golan, who led the operation, and Gilmore had cobbled together a team of a dozen men. Three were American special ops veterans, and most of the rest were former French Foreign Legionnaires, who were cheaper: only about $10,000 per month, as Gilmore remembers it, less than half of what he and Golan said they budgeted for their American counterparts.

They gathered at a hotel near Teterboro Airport in New Jersey. They were dressed in an assortment of military fatigues, some in camouflage, some in black. Some were bearded and muscled, others tattooed and wiry.

When it was time to go, they convinced the hotel staff to give them the US flag flying outside, Gilmore said. In a makeshift ceremony, they folded it up into a small triangle and took it with them.

They also packed a few weeks’ worth of military “meals ready to eat,” body armor, communications gear, and medical equipment. Gilmore said he brought a utility knife with a special crimping tool to prepare the blasting caps on explosives. The team was sure to stock up on whiskey, too — three cases of Basil Hayden’s since it would be impossible to get any alcohol in Yemen, let alone the good stuff.

On December 15, they boarded a chartered Gulfstream G550. Once airborne, Gilmore walked to the cockpit and told the pilots that there was a slight change to their flight plan. After refueling in Scotland, they wouldn’t be flying to Abu Dhabi’s main commercial airport but to a UAE military base in the desert.


Left: Business cards for Spear Operations Group; Right: Gilmore's dog tags

From that base, the mercenaries took a UAE Air Force transport plane to another base in Assab, Eritrea. During that flight, Gilmore recalled, a uniformed Emirati officer briefed them and handed them a hit list — 23 cards with 23 names and 23 faces. Each card featured rudimentary intelligence: the person’s role in Yemeni politics, for example, or grid coordinates for a residence or two.

Gilmore said some were members of Al-Islah, some were clerics, and some were out-and-out terrorists — but he conceded he couldn’t be sure.

BuzzFeed News has obtained one of the target cards. On it is a man’s name, photograph, telephone number, and other information. At the top right is the insignia of the UAE Presidential Guard.


Obtained by BuzzFeed News
Conspicuously absent is why anyone wanted him dead, or even what group he was associated with. The man could not be reached for comment, and it is not known if he is alive or dead.

Assassinations have historically played a limited part in US warfare and foreign policy. In 1945, “Wild Bill” Donovan, the director of the CIA’s predecessor agency, the OSS, was handed a finalized plan to deploy kill teams across Europe to attack Nazi leaders such as Hitler, Himmler, and Goering, as well as SS officers with a rank of major or above, according to a biography of Donovan by Douglas Waller. But the OSS chief got queasy about the “wholesale assassination” project and canceled it.

During the Cold War, the CIA played a role in plots to assassinate foreign leaders, such as Patrice Lumumba of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, and Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam. Later in the Vietnam War, the US launched the Phoenix program, in which the CIA often teamed up with US military units to “neutralize” — or, critics say, assassinate — Viet Cong leaders. Even so, targeted killings were not a central pillar of US military strategy in Vietnam. And after Congress exposed CIA activities in the 1970s, the US banned assassinations of foreign leaders.

Then came the war on terror.

Under President George W. Bush, the CIA and the military used drones to kill terrorists, and the CIA developed covert assassination capabilities. President Barack Obama halted the agency’s secret assassination program but drastically ramped up the use of drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Somalia. Soon the CIA and the military were using the aircraft — piloted remotely using video monitors — to kill people whose names the US didn’t even know, through “signature strikes” based solely on a target’s associations and activities. President Donald Trump has further loosened the rules for drone strikes.

But while private contractors often maintain the drones and sometimes even pilot them, there is one action they reportedly cannot take: Only a uniformed officer can push the button that fires the drone’s missile and kills the target.

With organized assassinations having become a routine part of war in the region, the UAE developed its own appetite. The country had begun to flex more military muscle, and by 2015 it had become a major player in the war in Yemen. It quickly targeted Al-Islah, an Islamist political party that won more than 20% of the vote in Yemen’s most recent parliamentary election, held in 2003.

Elisabeth Kendall, an expert on Yemen at the University of Oxford, points out that unlike al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups, which try to seize power through violence, Al-Islah participates in the political process. But, she said, the US rationale for drone strikes has legitimized other countries’ pursuit of their own assassinations: “The whole very watery, vague notion of a war on terror has left the door wide open to any regime saying, ‘This is all a war on terror.’ ”

At the top of the deck of targets they got from the UAE, Gilmore and Golan said, was Mayo, Al-Islah’s leader in Aden. Mayo had close-cropped hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and a wisp of goatee to go with his mustache. He had spoken out against US drone strikes in Yemen, telling the Washington Post in 2012 that rather than stopping al-Qaeda they had instead fueled its growth.

Asked about the ethics and legality of killing unarmed Al-Islah political leaders, as opposed to armed terrorists, Golan responded, “I think this dichotomy is a purely intellectual dichotomy.”

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Golan said he models his assassination business on Israel’s targeted killing program, which has been underway since the country was founded, and which, despite some high-profile errors and embarrassments, he claims is done properly. He argues there are some terrorist enemies so dangerous and implacable — and so difficult to arrest — that assassination is the best solution.

He insists his team is not a murder squad. As evidence, Golan recounted how, as their mission continued, the UAE provided names with no affiliation to Al-Islah or any group, terrorist or otherwise. Golan said he declined to pursue those individuals, a claim that could not be verified.

The people Spear did target, he and Gilmore said, were legitimate because they were selected by the government of the UAE, an ally of the United States that was engaged in a military action supported by the US. Gilmore said that he and Golan told the UAE they would never act against US interests. And Golan claimed that, based on his military experience, he could tell if a target was a terrorist after just a week or two of surveillance.

Still, Gilmore acknowledged that some of the targets may have been people who merely fell out of favor with the ruling family. Referring to the country’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, Gilmore said, “There is the possibility that the target would be someone who MBZ doesn’t like. We’d try to make sure that didn’t happen.”


Obtained by BuzzFeed News
When they reached Aden, the mercenaries were issued weapons. They were surprised at the low quality — shitty Chinese assault rifles and RPGs, according to Gilmore and Golan.

At some point, they also received their official designation in the Emirati military. Golan was named a colonel and Gilmore a lieutenant colonel, a heady “promotion” for a man who had been discharged from the Navy as a petty officer.

Gilmore still has his UAE dog tag, a rectangle of white gold imprinted with his blood type, AB-negative. His name is in English on one side and in Arabic on the other.

Using sources handed to them by the UAE’s intelligence network, Gilmore said, the team established Mayo’s daily life pattern — the home he lived in, the mosque he prayed at, the businesses he frequented.

Christmas passed with the mercenaries sharing their whiskey and plotting how exactly they should kill Mayo. A raid, a bomb, a sniper? “We had five or six courses of action to go after him,” Gilmore said.

Christmas passed with the mercenaries sharing their whiskey and plotting how exactly they should kill Mayo.
After some quick surveillance of the Al-Islah headquarters, they decided on explosives. Gilmore said he drew the mission plan out on the floor of the tent, with a black Sharpie. It showed the angles of approach, the attack, and, most important, the escape route.

After he briefed his colleagues, Gilmore took out his knife, cut through the tough tent fabric, and burned the mission plan. “I don’t want any of that with my handwriting on it floating around,” he said.

Two days later, Gilmore recalled, they got the word that Mayo was in his office for a large meeting.

Golan gathered with Gilmore, another ex-SEAL, and a former Delta Force soldier, for the mission. They had left behind their wallets and all identifying information, and they wore an assortment of motley uniforms — Gilmore said he wore a baseball hat and Salomon Speedcross trail-running shoes, with a chest rig full of spare ammunition magazines. All held AK-47s, and one had the bomb loaded with shrapnel.

Gilmore, Golan, and two others climbed into an armored SUV with a plainclothes Emirati soldier at the wheel. The French Foreign Legion soldiers were in another SUV, which would stop a short distance from the attack site, ready to rush in should the Americans get into a jam. The gates of their base opened and they pulled out onto the nighttime streets of Aden.

Golan with a member of his mercenary team.
Provided to BuzzFeed News
Golan with a member of his mercenary team.
It’s unclear exactly what went wrong.

Right before the mercenary reached the front door, carrying the explosive charge meant to kill Mayo, one of his fellow fighters at the back of the SUV opened fire, shooting along the backstreet.

There was a drone high overhead, and the video, obtained by BuzzFeed News, shows gunfire but not what the American is shooting at. The drone video doesn’t show anyone shooting back at the mercenaries.

Gilmore said he himself fired at someone on the street, but his gun jammed. He said he wasn’t sure who was firing at them. In any case, the mercenary carrying the explosive to the building carried on despite the commotion around him — for a full 20 seconds, the video shows.

To make their escape, the mercenaries ran into UAE military vehicles. Then suddenly there was an explosion — the bomb on the door — followed by a second, bigger one. The second explosion was the mercenaries’ SUV. Gilmore and Golan say they booby-trapped it to disguise the source of the bomb, confuse Al-Islah, and add to the destruction.

The team returned to base without something they all knew they needed. US special operations forces call it positive identification, or “PID” — proof that Mayo was dead. A photo, for example, or DNA.

“That caused some problems with Dahlan,” Gilmore recalled.


Obtained by BuzzFeed News
Still, Mayo seemed to have vanished. He rarely posted on his Facebook page, and for a time, Gilmore and Golan said, he wasn’t seen in public.

Yet Al-Islah didn’t announce his death, as it would when other members got assassinated. The reason, a spokesperson for Al-Islah said in a phone interview, is that Mayo is alive — he had left the building 10 minutes before the attack and as of July was living in Saudi Arabia. No one, the spokesperson said, died in the mercenaries’ assault.

Mayo seems to have reemerged in Yemeni politics. In May he was nominated to a post by the president of Yemen, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, according to Charles Schmitz, a specialist on the Middle East and Yemen at Towson University in Maryland. Schmitz said he found a recent photo of Mayo standing in a group with the UN envoy to Yemen.

Golan maintains that, at the very least, Mayo was neutralized for a time. “For me it’s a success,” he said, “as long as the guy disappeared.”

Soldiers from the United Arab Emirates stand guard as military equipment is unloaded from a UAE military plane at the airport in Aden, Aug. 12, 2015.
Nasser Awad / Reuters
Soldiers from the United Arab Emirates stand guard as military equipment is unloaded from a UAE military plane at the airport in Aden, Aug. 12, 2015.
Even though it failed to kill Mayo, the mercenaries’ bomb attack seems to have ushered in a new phase in the UAE’s war against Al-Islah. “It was the exclamation point that set the tone that Al-Islah was now going to be targeted,” said Schmitz.

The Al-Islah spokesperson who spoke to BuzzFeed News recited the date by memory: December 29, 2015. “It was the first attack,” he said.

As 2016 progressed, those watching the deteriorating situation in Yemen began to notice that members of Al-Islah, and other clerics in Aden, were dropping dead at an alarming pace. “It does appear to be a targeted campaign,” said Gregory Johnsen of the Arabia Foundation, who in 2016 served on a UN panel investigating the Yemen war. “There have been 25 to 30 assassinations,” he said, though a few appear to be the work of ISIS. (Johnsen used to write for BuzzFeed News.)

“There is a widespread belief on the ground,” said Kendall, the University of Oxford expert, “that the UAE is behind the assassination of Al-Islah officials and activists.”

Golan said his team killed several of the dead but refused to give an exact number or names.
When BuzzFeed News read Gilmore the names of some of the dead, he nodded in recognition at two of them — “I could probably recognize their faces” — and said they were among the team’s targets. But he said he hadn’t been involved in killing them.

Golan said his team killed several of the dead but refused to give an exact number or names. But after their first semi-botched mission, the mercenaries rebooted.

They got rid of the French Foreign Legionnaires, replacing them with Americans. The Emiratis also provided them with better weapons and better equipment, Golan and Gilmore said: C4 explosives, pistols fitted with silencers, and high-end American-made M4 rifles. They were also outfitted with motorbikes they could use to scoot through Aden’s traffic and affix magnetized bombs to cars. All the equipment, they said, came from the UAE military.

Gilmore stayed on for only a short time. He said he left Spear in April 2016. He and Golan declined to say why, but Gilmore said he wishes he had been more aggressive in Yemen. “If I could do it over again we would have been less risk-averse,” he said. “We could have done some amazing things — although we also could have done some amazing things and all ended up in jail.”

One new member of the team, hired in early 2016, was the veteran of SEAL Team 6, Daniel Corbett, according to three sources and confirmed by photos. Corbett was a superb soldier, say those who know him, and had served multiple combat tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. He was still in the reserves, so the US military could deploy him at any moment; he collected a government salary; and he was supposed to report for monthly drills. And yet he was in Yemen on a private contract to work for a foreign military. It is unclear if he himself was involved in missions to assassinate anyone.

In a mysterious development, Corbett is currently in jail in Serbia, where he is being investigated for illegal handgun possession. The American veteran has been held there since February 2018. Corbett could not be reached, and his lawyer did not respond to calls seeking comment.

As they went about their work in Yemen, the mercenaries stayed in huts, sleeping in cots. Some carried distinctive weapons for potential close-in fighting. One, according to photographs, carried two knives on his belt that he could draw cross-handed. Another carried a small tomahawk.

The team began to develop what Gilmore called “esprit de corps.” They flew a makeshift flag featuring a skull and crossed swords — a kind of Jolly Roger on a black background — and painted that emblem onto their military vehicles and their living quarters.

Much about the Spear mercenary team remains unknown, and some who participated made clear they have no desire to shed light on what went down. Asked if he’d been deployed in the Yemen mission, one of the Americans replied, “If I was, you know I can’t discuss it.” The former Green Beret who was sucking a lollipop during the mission sent BuzzFeed News a text message: “A big story for you could be a tragic story for the cast of characters; especially if they are good men doing what was right but not necessarily legal.”

For his part, Gilmore said he “would have preferred that this stay off the radar.” But he decided to speak to BuzzFeed News because “once this comes out there’s no way that I’m going to stay out of it, so I’d prefer to own it. And I’m not going to try to hide from what I did.”

“It’s still,” he said, “some variety of the future of warfare.”

Gilmore is out of the mercenary business. He has since found himself in another gray-zone line of work, albeit one that’s far less dangerous. He said he’s with a California company that plans to make cannabis oil for vaporizers.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ar ... lan-dahlan



'Worst Famine in 100 Years' Could See 13 Million People Starve if Saudi-Led Coalition Keeps Bombing Yemen: U.N.

By Jason Lemon On 10/15/18 at 5:07 PM
Between 12 and 13 million people are at risk of starvation within the next three months if the Saudi Arabian-led coalition continues its bombing of Yemen, the United Nations has warned.

The Yemeni Civil War, which began in 2015, has led to what could likely become the worst famine in a century. Activists and U.N. monitors have long warned of the growing humanitarian crisis in the country, but the assault has continued.

“I think many of us felt as we went into the 21st century that it was unthinkable that we could see a famine like we saw in Ethiopia, that we saw in Bengal, that we saw in parts of the Soviet Union—that was just unacceptable,” Lise Grande, the U.N.’s humanitarian coordinator for Yemen, told the BBC on Sunday. “Yet the reality is that in Yemen that is precisely what we are looking at,” she warned.

GettyImages-1042761418 A Yemeni child suffering from malnutrition is seen on a hospital bed in the district of Aslam in the northwestern Hajjah province on September 28. ESSA AHMED/AFP/Getty Images

The conflict began when Iran-backed Houthi rebels seized control of the majority of the country, including the capital, Sanaa. Saudi Arabia and its coalition allies have fought to support the internationally recognized government, which has gone into exile. The U.S. has provided military assistance to the coalition, expanding the support under the administration of President Donald Trump.

In three years, at least 10,000 people have died and millions have been displaced. Civilians have found themselves caught in the middle, trapped between airstrikes, land mines and bullets. The country is also suffering from the worst cholera outbreak in the world, with 10,000 new suspected cases each week, a crisis made worse due to sanitation facilities being destroyed by airstrikes.

“There’s no question we should be ashamed,” Grande said, directing her comments at the international community. “And we should, every day that we wake up, renew our commitment to do everything possible to help the people that are suffering and end the conflict.”

GettyImages-1043567642 Displaced Yemeni children from Hodeida province sit on water containers in a street in the southwestern Yemeni city of Taez on September 30.
AHMAD AL-BASHA/AFP/Getty Images

Rights groups and humanitarian workers have frequently criticized the Saudi-led coalition for killing civilians in the conflict. A recent airstrike killed 15 people near the port city of Hodeidah and left some 20 others injured. In October 2016, Saudi warplanes bombed a community hall hosting a funeral in Yemen’s capital, leaving at least 140 dead and hundreds wounded.

Despite international condemnation, the Saudi-led coalition has “failed to curb violations,” according to a Human Rights Watch report published in August. The watchdog alleged that although Saudi Arabia claimed to be investigating war crimes, these claims could not be trusted.

“Governments selling arms to Saudi Arabia should recognize that the coalition’s sham investigations do not protect them from being complicit in serious violations in Yemen,” Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, said at the time.


With the recent high-profile disappearance of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was a critic of the war in Yemen and who went missing after entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, some Republicans and Democrats have argued that the U.S. should cut military aid to the kingdom. Many politicians had already raised concerns about the U.S. support of Riyadh amid the catastrophe facing civilians in Yemen.

“Certainly our involvement in Yemen with Saudi Arabia will be affected. That barely, that involvement barely survived in the last go-around with the National Defense Authorization Act. It certainly won't survive with this kind of accusation [of Saudi Arabia killing Khashoggi], if it is true,” Republican Senator Jeff Flake told ABC's This Week.

Trump has voiced reluctance to stop selling the kingdom weapons however, saying the Saudis will simply buy from China or Russia instead.
https://www.newsweek.com/worst-famine-y ... ve-1171063
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Re: Yemen

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Oct 26, 2018 9:44 am



Amid famine, anger at Khashoggi murder, will Saudis be pressed to end Yemen war?

Laura Rozen October 25, 2018
WASHINGTON — A convergence of factors, including the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and growing fears of massive famine in Yemen, could drive Congress to press the Donald Trump administration to force the Saudis to end their war in Yemen, former US officials who work on the region said this week.

“Now is the time for Congress to take the big step and compel an end to this war,” Bruce Riedel, a former CIA and National Security Council official and columnist for Al-Monitor’s Gulf Pulse, said at a Brookings Institution forum today.

While Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has linked his prestige with the war in Yemen he championed as a new Saudi defense minister in 2015, his reputation has been badly damaged in Washington because of his widely presumed role in authorizing the plot that the Saudis now admit killed Khashoggi at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul Oct. 2.

“There is an opportunity in all this for us,” Riedel said. “Refocus attention on Yemen and on quitting the war as quickly as possible.”

The proposal came as the United Nations’ top humanitarian officer issued an unusually dire warning about the scale of potential famine emerging in Yemen, declaring some 14 million people — half the Yemeni population — now entirely dependent on aid for their survival. The revised UN assessment since just September comes as food and fuel prices have risen there in the last four months of intensified fighting around the key Red Sea port of Hodeidah, and people’s purchasing power has become exhausted after three and a half years of conflict.

“There is now a clear and present danger of an imminent and great big famine engulfing Yemen: much bigger than anything any professional in this field has seen during their working lives,” Mark Lowcock, the UN undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs, said in a stark briefing to the UN Security Council Oct. 23.

“Our revised assessment … is that the total number of people facing pre-famine conditions, meaning they are entirely reliant on external aid for survival, could soon reach … 14 million,” Lowcock said. “That is half the total population of the country.”

The UN humanitarian chief warned that with another 500,000 people displaced since fighting intensified around Hodeidah four months ago, and damage to the port facilities, aid agencies simply will not be able to provide the scale of relief needed to feed the 14 million people dependent on it.

“In the absence of a cessation of hostilities, especially around Hodeidah, where fighting for more than four months now has damaged the key facilities and infrastructure on which the aid operation relies, the relief effort will ultimately be simply overwhelmed,” Lowcock said. “The time, surely, has come for all the parties to heed these warnings.”

“With so many lives at stake, we call upon the belligerents to seize this moment to engage fully and openly with the special envoy to end the conflict,” Lowcock pleaded.

UN special envoy for Yemen Martin Griffiths, in Washington this week for consultations, met with Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan Oct. 23, the State Department said.

“The deputy secretary and the special envoy discussed the dire humanitarian situation and latest steps being taken to alleviate the suffering of the Yemeni people, as well as the urgent need for de-escalation and dialogue throughout Yemen,” State Depatment spokeswoman Heather Nauert said in a statement. “Deputy Secretary Sullivan reiterated US support for special envoy Griffiths as he continues his consultations. The deputy secretary and the special envoy expressed hope that all sides can work toward a comprehensive political agreement that brings peace, prosperity and security to Yemen.”

The sharp rise in the scale of famine in Yemen has grown in recent weeks for multiple reasons, including rising food and fuel prices, and fighting in the province where the port of Hodeidah is located, said Dafna Rand, a former State Department official, now with Mercy Corps.

“There is food available, but people have no money to buy food,” Rand said at the Brookings Institution forum today. “There is food, but no one can afford it.”

She said there has been a 25% increase in basic food prices in Yemen just since January. Then, since July, a UAE-backed offensive to try to push the Houthi rebels from the port of Hodeidah has spread fighting across the province, impeding road access between the port city and the rest of northern Yemen, including the capital city of Sanaa. And the number of internally displaced people in the province has increased by half a million. Meantime, Sanaa airport has been closed by the Saudi-led coalition, further reducing the capacity of aid groups.

“There has been a decrease in humanitarian capacity,” Rand said. “The solution is access.”

The United States needs to “find a way to bring the regional conflict to a halt, [but] recognize that [Yemen’s] internal conflict is not likely to end,” Riedel said.

Riedel noted that in one of his final columns for the Washington Post, Khashoggi last month proposed that the Saudi-led military coalition declare a unilateral cease-fire in Yemen, lift the blockade and convene a peace conference of all the Yemeni parties to try to come up with a new solution.

“Peace talks will provide Saudi Arabia with a golden opportunity. Riyadh will almost certainly find international support if it enters into a cease-fire as negotiations take place,” Khashoggi wrote in the Washington Post Sept. 11, 2018. “Obviously, Riyadh will not get all of what it wants and would leave Yemenis to sort out their differences with their fellow Houthis in a National Congress — instead of on bloody battlefields.”

https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/origin ... hoggi.html

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Re: Yemen

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Nov 11, 2018 12:23 pm

Pentagon launched new classified operation to support Saudi coalition in Yemen


People inspect a building in Sanaa, Yemen, destroyed in airstrikes carried out by warplanes of the Saudi-led coalition after the U.N. Special Envoy to Yemen, Martin Griffiths, departed on June 6, 2018. (Photo: Mohammed Hamoud/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Even as the humanitarian crisis precipitated by Saudi Arabia’s more-than-three-year war in Yemen has deepened, the Pentagon earlier this year launched a new classified operation to support the kingdom’s military operations there, according to a Defense Department document that appears to have been posted online inadvertently.

The existence of the new classified operation, code-named Yukon Journey, was partially revealed in a Defense Department inspector general report posted online earlier this month, which noted that “the Secretary of Defense designated three new named contingency operations: Operation Yukon Journey, and operations in Northwest Africa and East Africa.”

The three operations, which focus on al-Qaida and ISIS, are classified, the report notes, and the Pentagon has not publicly disclosed their location beyond saying they are in the Middle East and Africa.

But another document posted earlier this year on a Pentagon-affiliated website identifies Yukon Journey as a Central Command operation supporting the “Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Partner Nations in Yemen.”

The existence of a classified operation in Yemen raises the possibility that even as the Pentagon scales back unclassified operations, such as refueling Saudi-led coalition aircraft, covert support, to include possible U.S. special forces on the ground, could continue.

The document, marked for official use only, was posted on the All Partners Access Network, an unclassified website the Defense Department uses to share information with NGOs and humanitarian organizations.

Though it’s unclear what type of support Yukon Journey provides to Saudi Arabia, it has long been suspected that the Defense Department has special operations forces on the ground in Yemen, where the Saudis are fighting Iranian-backed Houthi rebels.


A photo distributed by the Houthi Military Media Unit shows the launch by Houthi forces of a ballistic missile aimed at Saudi Arabia, March 25, 2018. (Photo: Houthi Military Media Unit/Handout via Reuters)
“My guess — and purely a guess — is it’s something to do with going after Houthi ballistic missiles,” Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer and now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, tells Yahoo News. “That’s probably the thing the administration worries about the most, that the Houthis’ ballistic missile will cause a mass casualty event in Saudi Arabia or the UAE.”

Riedel pointed to previous reports of special forces assisting in the hunt for ballistic missiles. “My guess is that’s some part of that, but there may be some more aggressive part of it. Maybe operations inside Yemen, instead of just along the border,” he said.

U.S. Central Command declined to answer questions on Yukon Journey or confirm its location.

“The United States is currently providing limited support to the coalition in the form of logistical assistance (to include air-to-air refueling), intelligence sharing, best practices and other advisory support,” a spokesperson for the command wrote when asked about current unclassified support.

The Defense Department inspector general also declined to confirm that Yukon Journey was for support to the Saudi coalition in Yemen.

It “is indeed accurate to say that the location of Operation Youkon [sic] Journey is classified and is therefore not being discussed publicly,” a spokesperson for the inspector general wrote.

But the Pentagon’s refusal to name the location of operations appeared to bother the Pentagon’s top watchdog. The Pentagon “did not answer the question as to why it was necessary to designate these existing counterterrorism campaigns as overseas contingency operations or what benefits were conveyed with the overseas contingency operation designation,” the inspector general’s report noted.

While the Defense Department argued that the operations were classified to protect U.S. forces operating abroad, the inspector general did not sound convinced, writing that it was “typical to classify such tactical information in any operation even when the overall location of an operation is publicly acknowledged.”

Steven Aftergood, who runs the Secrecy News blog of the Federation of American Scientists and was the first to call public attention to the Yukon Journey designation in the inspector general’s report, said he wasn’t surprised by the secrecy. “When it comes to classified operations, I think the default position is to withhold all information unless there is a requirement to disclose it or a foreseeable benefit from doing so,” he said.


Women walk past graffiti denouncing strikes by U.S. drones in Yemen, painted on a wall in Sanaa, Yemen, Feb. 6, 2017. (Photo: Khaled Abdullah/Reuters)
There is, he pointed out, no specific requirement to disclose the location of the operations. “What’s interesting here — and actually somewhat encouraging — is that the DOD inspector general is not overly impressed by the military rationale for secrecy and seems determined to press for better answers,” he added.

The Trump administration has come under increasing pressure over its long-standing support for the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, which began under former President Barack Obama. In September, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo certified that the Saudis were attempting to minimize civilian casualties, a finding that allowed the U.S. military to continue refueling the coalition aircraft operating over Yemen.

But U.S. patience may be wearing thin amid mounting civilian casualties in Yemen and the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey at the hands of Saudi intelligence officers.

Despite the September certification, on Friday night, just hours after the Washington Post reported that the Defense Department was considering halting its refueling of the Saudi-led coalition’s aircraft, the Pentagon issued a formal statement confirming the decision. “We support the decision by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, after consultations with the U.S. Government, to use the Coalition’s own military capabilities to conduct inflight refueling in support of its operations in Yemen,” Defense Secretary James Mattis said in a statement.

That decision would appear not to affect Yukon Journey’s classified activities, however.

While previous attempts in Congress to halt U.S. support have failed, opponents of the war believe they may now have the votes to take action on a resolution introduced in late September that would bring U.S. support for the coalition to an end.

“In the wake of the Khashoggi murder and the Pompeo certification, that left a lot of members upset,” said one congressional aide.

The prospect of classified operations in Yemen only deepens those concerns, according to the aide. “There’s also concern among some members that the Pentagon has not been fully transparent about our role in the war against the Houthis in Yemen,” the aide said.


Boys demonstrate outside the offices of the United Nations in Sanaa, Yemen, to denounce an airstrike that killed dozens, including children, in the northwestern province of Saada in August. (Photo: Khaled Abdullah/Reuters)
While a Democratic House of Representatives in January could put even more pressure on the administration, opponents might seek action before then. The aide said that when Congress comes back into session, it will vote on a resolution introduced earlier this year by Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) that would end U.S. involvement in the war.

When the bill was introduced in late September, before Khashoggi’s murder, it had high-level support among Democrats, but only a few Republicans supported it.

The calculus now may have changed, said Riedel, the former CIA official.

“I think they’ve got the votes now,” he said.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/pentagon-lau ... soc_trk=tw
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