Aletho News

War without mercy in Yemen

Towards the end of Saudi Arabia?

By Sayed Hasan | July 7, 2015

The Saudi-American war against Yemen, led by a coalition of the richest Gulf monarchies (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, etc. along with their servants like Egypt and Morocco) against the poorest Arab country, enters its fourth month. According to the United Nations, it has killed ​​more than 3,100 and wounded 15,000, displaced 1 million and created 245,000 refugees, and created an unprecedented humanitarian crisis which the United Nations has declared to be on the level of maximum humanitarian alert. Ruthless and indiscriminate strikes target all civilian infrastructure, up to residential areas, markets, granaries, water tanks, hospitals, schools, mosques, and even archaeological remains and tombs – which recalls that the destructive ideology of the Islamic State takes its roots in Saudi Arabia – without sparing civilian convoys fleeing violence. A merciless siege has been imposed in Yemen, a country which imports 90% of its food, and Relief Organizations are prevented from delivering supplies to the country, and even see their workers targeted while providing humanitarian assistance. More than 21 million people (80% of Yemen’s population) are without adequate access to staples and essential services such as food, clean water, medical care, electricity and fuel. Already, it appears that Saudi Arabia has used unconventional weapons (cluster munitions, and perhaps even chemical weapons) and has committed war crimes and perhaps even crimes against humanity.

However, this war remains largely ignored by the mainstream media, both in the West and in the Arab-Muslim world (with the exception of Iran and the media close to Hezbollah in Lebanon). The US sponsors this illegal and criminal military intervention that they provide full support for, putting all their resources at the service of the Gulf monarchies who have acquired the most modern weapons to the tune of $115 billion for the single year 2014: they can therefore destabilise the region without sending their armed forces, conforming to the Obama no-boots-on-the-ground doctrine that favours proxy wars. It is the same for the other NATO member countries – United Kingdom, France, etc., which is not surprising coming from the supporters and apologists of terrorism in Syria. Regarding Riyadh, Wikileaks has recently unveiled the procedure of Saudi censorship of the entire Arab world, between corruption and intimidation. All these actors provide direct support to Al Qaeda and to the Islamic state, which has appeared on the Yemeni scene and is now on the border of Saudi Arabia, their long-time goal. The Saudi blindness seems to know no bounds.

The Saudi assault was not to repel an alleged advance of Iran and/or Shiism, but to break the attempts towards independence of this country that historically has been a vassal of Riyadh. So far, this war has not realised any of its stated objectives. On the contrary, the Yemeni resistance has taken hold of most major Yemen cities, and it takes more and more initiative by carrying the war into the territory of Saudi Arabia, bombing its border towns and attacking its military bases and convoys, and causing dozens of casualties among the Saudi forces – of which the extent of the losses is inviolable military secret. Moreover, the attacks resulted in uniting the country – the regular armed forces of former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, Houthi rebels and other popular committees – behind the slogan “Death to the House of Saud”, an unprecedented development in the Middle East, and revealed both the barbarism of the Wahhabi regime and its vulnerability and powerlessness on the purely military field. Held in check despite the benefit of the steady stream of Western weaponry, Riyadh already sees its influence wane in the Middle East.

In a message to the combatants dated 1^st July 2015 – that evokes those of Hassan Nasrallah to Hezbollah fighters during the 2006 war –, Abd-al-Malik al-Houthi, head of the Yemeni resistance, denounced the collusion of the Washington-Tel Aviv-Riyad Axis, denouncing the war and the siege imposed in Yemen as even more barbaric than the Israeli crimes in Gaza. He agrees with the analysis of the Secretary General of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, who recalled that even the Zionists did not have a systematic policy of targeting hospitals, tombs and archaeological remains. Abd-al-Malik al-Houthi brandished nothing less than the slogan of the holy war against the cradle of Islam, equated to the “devil’s horn”, which is, according to a famous prophetic tradition, an evil heresy called to arise in the Najd region – where Wahhabism emerged. Again, this is an unprecedented development: Saudi Arabia, which, since March 2015, broke with its policy of underground action and now acts without cover, has never been so violently shaken.

Riyadh is now in an impasse: its air campaign is a bitter failure, as was predictable given the six previous offensives since 2004 by the forces of President Saleh (yesterday supported by Saudi Arabia and now allied with the Houthi rebels), which all ended up in a failure, as well as the Israeli experiences in Lebanon and Gaza, which constitutes the perfect model of the Saudi aggression. As for the option of a ground operation, all data indicates that it would be absolutely disastrous and would end with a rout of Saudi forces. But there is no question for the House of Saud, blinded beyond any possible return, of accepting a cease-fire that would be a victory for Yemen; rather it must continue this fanatic war of terror at all costs, by torpedoing all attempts of agreement or truce, at the risk of rushing towards the abyss. As for the forces of the Yemeni resistance, they are far from having exhausted all their possibilities, and multiply the incursions into enemy territory. They could even question its territorial integrity by claiming Yemeni provinces formerly annexed by Saudi Arabia. And as a last resort, they could close the strategic Strait of Bab al-Mandeb – which they are quite capable of –, one of the largest global maritime passages, especially for hydrocarbons, which would have severe global repercussions. If, like Syria, Iraq and Libya, Yemen is threatened with disintegration, Saudi Arabia itself is now on the way to becoming destabilised, and even dismantling.

Will the Saudi crusade push into the Axis of Resistance a new country, Yemen – about which Hassan Nasrallah declared that the awakening and resistant spirit of its people were such that he could without hesitation send 100,000 or 200,000 men to fight Israel? Whatever the case may be, already the Ansarallah movement has reached the extent of a new Hezbollah, and the Saudi war is doomed to failure. It announces with certainty the inevitable fall of the House of Saud, whose Wahhabi ideology and foreign policy have been the cancer of Islam and of the Arab world for decades, and ultimately, the end of the US-Israeli hegemony in the Middle East. More than one of the region’s peoples will rejoice.

Sayed Hasan (contact: 7asan.saleh@gmail.com )

Translated from French by Jenny Bright

July 7, 2015 - Posted by aletho | Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Egypt, Hezbollah, Israel, Middle East, Saudi Arabia, United States, Yemen