Westerners, especially Atlanticists, are great at advocating for the setting of wildfires, and for starting those wildfires, but they seldom give much thought to what happens once they set a conflagration in motion
Iran & Its Allies Are Threatening Every Route for Saudi Oil
Daniel Davis / Deep Dive – September 15, 2026
‘40,000 tons of bombs’: Report shows Trump planning ‘largest bomb transfer in modern US history’ to Israel
Press TV – September 15, 2026
The Trump administration is preparing a $2.8-billion package to provide the Israeli regime with 40,000 2,000-pound bombs, a report says.
The package includes 20,000 MK-84s, 20,000 BLU-117s, and 20,000 I-2000 penetrator warheads, The Washington Post reported on Tuesday, citing a US official.
Although described as a sale, it would be financed through the US Foreign Military Financing program, under which Washington provides the funds the regime uses to purchase American weapons.
‘Trump pressing Congress to rubber-stamp package’
The proposed transfer has been informally notified to congressional committees, with the Trump administration pressing congressional officials to approve it.
Remarking on the report, conservative commentator Tucker Carlson sharply criticized the planned transfer, focusing particularly on its unprecedented scale.
“This appears to be the largest transfer of conventional explosive ordnance from the United States in modern history,” Carlson wrote on X.
Carlson compared the proposed 40,000 tons of bombs with major US bombing operations during World War II, noting that the Eighth Air Force’s March 1945 raid on Berlin involved about 3,000 tons of bombs, while Operation Meetinghouse over Tokyo involved about 1,600 tons.
He argued that the scale of the proposed transfer had no historical precedent and questioned the military justification for deploying such weapons in the region.
“Nor is there a justification,” Carlson wrote, saying the transfer was such in scale that made one think that the Israeli regime was waging “World War Two.”
Carlson also argued that the weapons’ destructive power made their use in populated areas particularly consequential. He cited the MK-84’s ability to collapse buildings and create deep craters, and reminded that the regime had used hundreds of such bombs in Gaza.
‘Taxpayer-funded gift to Israel’
The commentator further characterized the transfer as a taxpayer-funded gift rather than a conventional arms sale, pointing to the Foreign Military Financing mechanism.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen said he intended to oppose the sale, arguing likewise that the administration was sending taxpayer-funded bombs, while Israeli forces continued to wage aggression in Gaza and Lebanon.
The administration has declined to comment specifically on the pending transaction.
Why Algeria finally shut the door on the UAE
Abu Dhabi’s alliance with Tel Aviv has pushed its rivalry with Algiers from quiet hostility into open regional confrontation
By Anis Raiss | The Cradle | September 14, 2026
On 10 September 2026, Algeria severed diplomatic relations with the UAE, giving the Emirati ambassador in Algiers 48 hours to leave. From midnight the following day, Algerian airspace was closed to UAE-registered aircraft, although commercial flights to and from Algiers were exempt until the end of the year.
The rupture had been signaled in advance. During a televised interview in July, Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune described a Gulf state he declined to name in five words: “Wherever they set foot, blood flows.” He was referring to its role in Libya, Sudan, and Yemen.
Abu Dhabi answered within hours through Anwar Gargash, diplomatic advisor to Emirati President Mohammed bin Zayed (MbZ). Relations between states, he wrote, are managed “through reason, communication and clarity of interests, not through riddles and signals that require decoding.”
One week earlier, a UN fact-finding mission on Sudan had found “reasonable grounds to believe” that external networks, including some operating through the UAE, were supplying the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Darfur with fighters, weapons, and training.
The source of Algiers’s anger was therefore no riddle. Algeria had become the third government in nine months to take direct action against Abu Dhabi’s regional reach.
Abu Dhabi’s nine-month reckoning
The sequence began on 30 December, when a Saudi-led coalition struck weapons and vehicles that had arrived at Yemen’s Mukalla Port aboard two ships from Fujairah. Riyadh called its national security a red line and accused Abu Dhabi of arming Southern Transitional Council (STC) separatists who had swept into Hadhramaut and Al-Mahra.
The UAE denied that the shipment contained weapons but announced the withdrawal of its remaining forces after Yemen’s Saudi-backed presidential council issued a 24-hour ultimatum. A week later, STC leader Aidarous al-Zubaidi reportedly fled by sea toward Somaliland, then flew through Mogadishu before reaching Abu Dhabi.
Five days after that flight, Somalia’s federal government annulled its agreements with the UAE covering ports, security cooperation, and defense. Mogadishu cited “strong evidence” of actions undermining the country’s sovereignty, national unity, and political independence. The decision included Berbera, Bosaso, and Kismayo, although enforcement in Somaliland and Puntland remained uncertain. Two regional diplomats told Bloomberg that Saudi officials had pressed Mogadishu to act.
The same pattern surfaced in Sudan through an 83-page Human Rights Watch (HRW) report published in May, which found evidence that the Abu Dhabi-based Global Security Services Group appeared to have hired hundreds of Colombian contractors who fought alongside the RSF around El-Fasher.
On 3 September, the UN mission reported that as many as 2,000 former Colombian soldiers may have joined the conflict, some of whom had trained at a military-style facility in Ghayathi in the UAE before operating drones and artillery in Darfur. Abu Dhabi dismissed the findings as a “false media campaign.”
Kabylie enters Israel’s periphery map
Kabylie is the Amazigh mountain region east of Algiers, home to several million people with their own language and a long history of friction with the central state. Its separatist wing, the Movement for the Self-Determination of Kabylie (MAK), operates from Paris and was designated a terrorist organization by Algiers in 2021.
Algerian state media now alleges that UAE diplomats have been in contact with the movement, although no supporting evidence has been made public. Even a Semafor column written by a former Emirati government official conceded that point. The Kabylie project does, however, have documented patrons elsewhere.
On 14 December 2025, MAK’s government-in-exile proclaimed a “Federal Republic of Kabylie” at a ceremony in Paris. Twelve days later, Israel recognized Somaliland, becoming the first UN member to do so.
On 14 January 2026, Dan Illouz, a Likud member of the Knesset of Moroccan Jewish descent, tabled an urgent motion calling for a study of recognition for Kabylie and described Algeria as part of the “Iranian evil axis.”
The Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security had already advocated “principled political support, leading over time to diplomatic recognition.” Ferhat Mehenni, the folk singer who founded MAK and styles himself as its president-in-exile, had addressed Knesset members as early as 2012.
The Somaliland precedent is where Abu Dhabi and Tel Aviv converge. The UAE became the first Gulf state to normalize relations with Israel in 2020, while its port operator DP World holds a 30-year concession at Berbera, Somaliland’s main harbor, alongside a longstanding Emirati security presence.
When Arab and Islamic states issued a joint statement condemning Israel’s recognition, the UAE declined to sign. Reports have since pointed to an Emirati role in facilitating the move, leaving the breakaway territory recognized by Tel Aviv anchored to infrastructure controlled from Abu Dhabi.
These moves draw on a doctrine older than the states now applying it. David Ben Gurion’s periphery strategy sought to contain the Arab core through alliances with non-Arab states and minorities on its edges, including Iran under the Shah, Turkiye, Ethiopia, and Kurdish movements. Israel recognized Somaliland in December, and Kabylie reached the Knesset agenda the following month.
Rabat arms the western flank
The corridor linking Abu Dhabi and Tel Aviv passes through Rabat, where, in November 2020, two months after the UAE signed the Abraham Accords, Abu Dhabi became the first Arab government to open a consulate in Laayoune, in occupied Western Sahara, whose independence Algeria has supported since 1975. Morocco restored its own relations with the occupation state one month later.
Military procurement soon gave that alignment material form. In early January 2026, the third session of the Morocco–Israel Joint Military Committee met in Tel Aviv to set the year’s work plan, while Israeli officials described Morocco to the Jerusalem Post as Israel’s most important security partner in Africa.
Rabat operates IAI’s Barak MX air defense system, Elbit’s ATMOS howitzers, and Hermes 900 drones. In November 2025, BlueBird Aero Systems, half-owned by IAI, opened a plant in Benslimane, outside Casablanca, to produce SpyX loitering munitions, described as the first facility of its kind in North Africa.
Spanish defense outlet Escudo Digital has also reported that Israeli-built surveillance and strike drones are stationed at Mahbes, a forward airstrip in Western Sahara close to the Algerian border. If accurate, it would place Israeli platforms within reach of Tindouf, where the Sahrawi refugee camps and Polisario leadership are based.
The economic leg of this alignment extends south through Morocco’s Atlantic Initiative, which offers landlocked Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, and Chad access to the sea through the $1.6 billion Dakhla Atlantic Port, reported to be 70 percent complete in November 2025.
The port lies in the same occupied territory where the Emirati consulate stands. On 24 July 2026, Bamako reaffirmed its commitment to the corridor, 13 days after restoring diplomatic relations with Algiers. Normalization has thus acquired its own infrastructure, running from the Gulf through the Maghreb and into the Sahel.
Algeria raises the military stakes
Algeria’s answer has centered on air power rather than competing corridors. Footage that surfaced in February 2026 appeared to show an Su-57 over northern Algeria, reinforcing reports that Algiers had become the first foreign operator of Russia’s fifth-generation fighter – a development that would alter the military balance in the Maghreb.
United Aircraft Corporation (UAC) had announced the delivery of two aircraft to an unnamed foreign customer in November 2025. Su-35 deliveries were reported to have begun in January 2025, followed by a fresh batch of Su-34 bombers in June 2026, even as Russia’s own air force continued to absorb wartime losses.
The hardware was accompanied by a senior Russian commander whose presence surfaced on 9 May 2025, when the Russian embassy in Algiers published photographs of a Victory Day wreath-laying led by an unnamed “head of the group of Russian military specialists in Algeria.”
Kommersant identified him as Sergei Surovikin, an assessment later echoed by British military intelligence. Surovikin had directed Russia’s Syrian air campaign, commanded its forces in Ukraine through the Kherson withdrawal, and vanished after the Wagner mutiny of June 2023. Moscow sent one of its most notorious commanders to Algiers without naming him in the caption.
Washington responded on 3 February 2026, when Robert Palladino, head of the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Algeria’s Su-57 purchase was “problematic” and could trigger CAATSA sanctions.
Marco Rubio – who is now the US secretary of state – had demanded sanctions over Algeria’s Russian arms purchases in 2022. Regional alignments do not divide cleanly. Moscow and Abu Dhabi both back Khalifa Haftar in Libya, while Russia’s Africa Corps supports the Malian junta whose drone Algeria shot down in April 2025. Across Western Sahara and the Maghreb, however, the fault lines are more clearly drawn.
The defense of Abu Dhabi
Abu Dhabi’s official response expressed hope that the break would be “temporary.” A fuller defense appeared the next day in Semafor‘s Gulf section, where a column said the government had “run out of enemies to blame for the dismal state of its economy.”
It portrayed Algeria’s decision as a domestic maneuver, arguing that Algiers needed a new adversary after decades of blaming Morocco and had chosen a wealthy, distant state unlikely to retaliate. The Kabylie allegation was treated as a pretext for rallying the street.
Absent from that account were Mukalla, Mogadishu, El-Fasher, and Ghayathi, along with the Saudi strike on an alleged Emirati shipment, Somalia’s annulment of its agreements with Abu Dhabi, and the UN mission’s findings on UAE-linked networks in Darfur eight days before the column appeared. The nine-month record that helps explain Algiers’s actions went unmentioned.
The column’s author, Tareq Alotaiba, is a fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center and a master’s student at Georgetown. According to his biography, he previously spent 12 years working in economic policy, foreign affairs, and national security for the Abu Dhabi and UAE federal governments. Algiers has its own weaknesses, including a parliamentary election turnout of 21.24 percent in July, the lowest recorded since independence. The column did not mention that figure either.
Algeria’s break with Abu Dhabi marks growing resistance to the network of ports, proxies, and separatist movements through which Emirati and Israeli power is projected across the region. Tel Aviv’s periphery doctrine depends on such footholds and on governments prepared to host them. Algiers has closed one more door.
The Crippling Effects of Unnecessary War
By Ron Paul | September 14, 2026
In California, gas stations are facing a unique challenge. The station signs are only configured to go up to $9.99 per gallon and at several stations the price of diesel has reached that maximum. Diesel prices are higher than they have ever been in history.
Worse, according to some news reports the advertising of the maximum price of $9.99 per gallon is meant to signal to truck drivers that they have run out of diesel altogether. Expensive diesel is a hit to the economy, but running out of the fuel at any price is a whole different kind of crisis.
Our highways are filled with semi-trucks burning diesel to bring the products we depend on to the markets. Our freight trains use diesel to transport what is not transported by truck. When the price of diesel increases, the cost of everything moved by that diesel also increases. This is one reason we are seeing much more inflation than the government wants to admit.
The diesel crisis is getting so serious that even President Trump has been forced to admit it. Of course, instead of taking at least part of the blame over his war of choice against Iran and his continuation of the proxy war against Russia through Ukraine, he is blaming Ukraine’s military strikes on Russian energy infrastructure.
President Trump is now asking Ukraine to stop attacking Russian energy resources because diesel is a global commodity and the scarcity produced by the attacks is hitting us here at home. But the strikes deep inside Russia are guided by US intelligence, which provides the targeting data for Ukraine.
The Russia/Ukraine war is only part of the problem. Despite President Trump’s bluster about controlling the Strait of Hormuz, the fact is Iran is in control and very little oil – or anything else – makes it out without Iranian approval.
Yemen’s Iran-allied Houthis joining the fight only makes matters worse. Over the weekend they attacked Saudi Arabia’s bypass pipeline, taking much more oil off the market.
The real problem here is not oil or diesel. The real problem is that wars of choice spin out of control and destroy the economies of those who launch them. Empires throughout history have been undone by endless overseas wars. No amount of bragging about the size and strength of our military can change this reality.
Now we are seeing the chickens coming home to roost.
President Trump has justified tanking the US economy by claiming the attack on Iran was essential because they were about to get a nuclear weapon. Our intelligence community disagreed, but he refused to listen and took his cue from Netanyahu instead.
It turns out Iran actually does have a “nuclear weapon.” That weapon is the ability to control the world’s oil flows at a margin high enough to cripple the economies of any country seeking to conquer it. According to press reports, former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard tried to warn President Trump that Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz if attacked but he didn’t want to hear it.
The Founders were determined to prevent the executive branch from being able to start wars for this very reason. The “people’s branch” of government – Congress – is where they placed the power to launch wars. We are now seeing the consequences of ignoring their very wise advice.
Trita Parsi: Massive Houthi Victory Transforms U.S.-Iran War
Glenn Diesen | September 12, 2026
Trita Parsi is the co-founder and Executive Vice President of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Follow the Substack of Trita Parsi: https://tritaparsi.substack.com/
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Invoking 9/11 to justify war against Iran is ‘utterly absurd’: Tehran
Press TV – September 12, 2026
Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman has rejected US attempts to invoke the anniversary of the September 11 attacks to justify a “reckless and unlawful war” against Iran, saying Washington’s narrative on terrorism is riddled with fundamental contradictions.
In a post on X early Saturday, marking the anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Esmaeil Baghaei criticized remarks by the US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth on terrorism and Iran.
“The narrative advanced by the US Secretary of War on the anniversary of 9/11 is riddled with fundamental contradictions,” he said.
Baghaei said the US could not simultaneously wage aggression, carry out assassinations, and cause civilian casualties while claiming exclusive authority to define terrorism and determine whose violence was legitimate.
“The perpetrators of 9/11 were not Iranians; they were the very same people whom the US itself had armed, organized, or otherwise cultivated in the preceding decades,” he said.
He also criticized the US-led “war on terror,” saying the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq had brought years of war, occupation, civilian deaths, and widespread devastation.
“Against this backdrop, invoking the anniversary of 9/11 to justify a reckless and unlawful war against Iran is utterly absurd,” Baghaei said.
He further rejected attempts to justify the US war against Iran through counterterrorism rhetoric, stressing that the war involved the assassination of officials of a sovereign state and attacks on civilians, including women and children.
“A criminal war that has involved the assassination of officials of a sovereign state and the targeting of civilians, including women and children, cannot be made morally coherent simply by wrapping it in the language of counterterrorism,” he said.
The American invasion of Afghanistan began on October 7, 2001, less than a month after the September 11 attacks killed 2,977 people in the United States. Washington presented the foolhardy military adventure as the opening battle in a so-called “war on terror.”
Yet after 20 years of brutal military occupation, trillions of dollars spent, and enormous human suffering resulting from the US-led coalition’s horrendous war crimes, the occupiers have not achieved a political settlement or eliminated the forces they had vowed to defeat.
Why the Israelis are so afraid of a liberated Yemen
By Robert Inlakesh | Al Mayadeen | September 12, 2026
The liberation of Yemen by a staunchly pro-Palestinian movement is a nightmare scenario for the Zionist Project in the region, it ensures that the cause of occupied al-Quds will remain alive and that a new power will emerge to champion it. To the Israelis, what they are looking at is like the birth of a new Iran in the Arab World.
For long the Ansar Allah-led government of Yemen had been underestimated and treated as little more than a nuisance, one that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were handed the task of dealing with. In 2022, this dynamic began to shift, as the Yemeni Armed Forces demonstrated advanced missile and drone capabilities that shook vital targets in Saudi Arabia, even reaching as far as the United Arab Emirates.
The stalemate of the Marib offensive of 2021 may have also worked to deceive the US-Israeli alliance in the region, who clearly failed to take the armed forces of the Ansar Allah-led government in Sanaa seriously. However, Riyadh did end up taking them seriously in early 2022, as did Abu Dhabi, hence their decision to agree to a United Nations mediated temporary ceasefire.
Since then, Yemen’s leadership has become the only government on earth to directly order its military to open fire on the Zionist entity in order to support the people of Gaza. From the very beginning of the Genocide, the Yemeni Armed Forces began firing missiles at the Israelis, before imposing a blockade on them in the Red Sea.
These measures would have been notable had they come from any nation, let alone one that had suffered 400,000 deaths in brutal conflict and suffered through an illegal and inhumane siege themselves. There was nothing material that the Ansar Allah-led government sought to gain from its tangible and unapologetic support of the Palestinian Resistance in the Gaza Strip, which is what made it all the more unpredictable in the eyes of the US-Israeli alliance.
Because Sanaa had been so underestimated, the Israelis and the US were essentially left blind inside of Yemen, not having anywhere near the required intelligence to deal a serious blow to Ansar Allah. Instead, the Zionist regime did the predictable thing: it bombed civilian targets and then called in its US allies to launch three separate military operations in an attempt to break the blockade established in support of Gaza.
Yemen is a nation that, if fully liberated from the proxy forces of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, would undoubtedly dedicate its foreign policy to opposing the Zionist entity and supporting the Palestinian Resistance. This alone is a major threat to the Israeli regime.
Yet, it will also mean something else. It will be the only Arab country that has an independent government which is not allied with the United States. In other words, it will serve as an example to the entire region and will represent the spirit of Arabism. For Riyadh, Damascus, Amman, Cairo and beyond, this is a major problem, because once the example is set, their own populations could begin getting ideas about what their future should look like.
Yemen’s liberation will represent the only truly successful revolution of the Arab Spring. In the case of every other example, the nation has ended up under US domination, with the latest example being the case of Syria.
A Yemen that can gain access to its own resources, live free of blockade and have influence over the Bab al-Mandab Strait could become a major powerhouse, especially while allied with the Islamic Republic of Iran. It is a major gain for the regional resistance to US imperialism and an enormous strategic loss to the Zionist regime, along with a blow to the Washington-backed Arab dictatorships.
The only means of combating the gains made on the ground by the Yemeni Armed Forces, is to try and spread as much sectarianism throughout the region as possible. This, the Gulf Arab regimes and US-Israeli alliance, may believe to be an effective means of combating the revolutionary fervor of the Arab public who have been greatly agitated by the Gaza Genocide.
Part of the reason why the majority of the Arabic-language media, along with the entirety of the Western corporate media refer to the Ansar Allah-led government as the “Houthi rebels” is for this very reason. They hope to paint the movement as a band of Shia rebel fighters that are “proxies of Iran”. It works to both delegitimize the Yemeni Armed Forces and government based in the Capital City of the country, while also selling a false sectarian narrative.
To the great misfortune of the US-Israeli-Arab aligned bloc, their attempts to pull the wool over the eyes of the public is wearing thin. The Gaza Genocide exposed where everyone stands, and now the truth is clear for everyone to see.
Sana’a strikes back: How Yemeni military’s lightning advance redrew the Red Sea’s strategic map
Territory liberated by Yemeni Armed Forces during the recent operation, including the ports of Al-Mokha, Dhubab, and Al-Khokha, and towns such as Hays and Maqbanah.
By Mohammad Molaei | Press TV | September 12, 2026
In the span of roughly one week, the Yemeni armed forces accomplished what eight years of attritional warfare had failed to achieve.
In a military operation officially named “God Is Strongest in Might and Severe in Punishment,” the Yemeni military, backed by the Ansarullah resistance forces, liberated more than 5,400 square kilometers of territory along Yemen’s Red Sea coast, capturing strategically vital ports, towns, and geographic features that Saudi-backed forces had seized and held since 2017 and 2018.
The speed, coordination, and depth of the advance stunned military and security observers, shattered a carefully constructed Saudi media narrative, and fundamentally altered the strategic geometry of the war imposed on Yemen.
The ports of Al-Mokha, Dhubab, and Al-Khokha fell. Key towns, including Hays, Maqbanah, and Al-Mafraq, were liberated. The entire Jabal Habashi region came under Sana’a’s control.
These were no minor outposts but positions that the former Saudi-backed regime had spent four months capturing during the so-called “Golden Arrow” operation in 2017 and an entire summer offensive in 2018, backed by heavy Saudi air support and financial resources.
The intelligence that started it all
The roots of the operation lie in a body of intelligence and an assessment reached in Sana’a months before the first shot was fired. It was believed that Saudi Arabia, in coordination with the United States, was preparing to launch a major offensive under the diplomatic pretext of securing international navigation in the Red Sea at some point in the near future.
The Saudis aimed, first, to create operational space for Washington to assert dominance over the Bab al-Mandab Strait, a strategic waterway whose leverage Ansarullah-backed Yemeni military had wielded with increasing effect since joining the Gaza solidarity front two years earlier.
Second, they sought to neutralize that leverage by igniting a land conflict along the western coast and driving northward toward Hodeidah, effectively diverting the Yemeni military’s attention from maritime operations and drawing it back into a costly ground war.
The broader context matters. Since early 2016, Saudi Arabia had gradually sidelined the UAE across provinces outside the Yemeni government’s control, consolidating its influence over the mercenary coalition nominally operating under the banner of the Saudi-recognized regime.
By this stage, the Emiratis had been largely pushed to the margins of the ground equation. Washington, having failed to achieve decisive results in either the Strait of Hormuz or Bab al-Mandab through its own military aggression, appeared to be recalibrating around Riyadh as its primary instrument.
For Saudi Arabia, specifically, a single operation on the western coast offered the prospect of three simultaneous gains: accelerating the US push for Red Sea control; transforming what had remained an internationalized war into a fratricidal intra-Yemeni war by stoking internal fronts; and consolidating Riyadh’s dominance over the fractious coalition of Yemeni military factions, many of them previously under UAE command, by bringing them together under a unified operation.
The Saudi Maneuver and Miscalculation
Saudi preparations had begun well in advance, reportedly even before the Yemeni operation to break the siege, which was launched following the funeral ceremony of a martyred leader in Sana’a. The plan envisioned opening three simultaneous fronts in Al-Jawf, Ma’rib, and along the western coast. It immediately ran into structural problems.
Southern factions within the Saudi-backed coalition refused to commit their forces to battles in the north. This single factor created a fracture line through the entire scheme.
Riyadh’s mercenaries, many of whom were fighting for locally defined interests rather than any coherent national project, could not be so easily redirected. The Saudis responded by redeploying forces from eastern Yemen northward and shifting the primary axis toward the western coast, where the geographic and symbolic stakes were highest.
Meanwhile, Riyadh worked the diplomatic track. A host of mediators – Egypt, Turkey, and most prominently Oman – were mobilized. Sana’a, not yet ready to foreclose negotiations entirely, granted a brief reprieve, holding off on launching the second phase of its operations.
None of this changed the military reality. While negotiations proceeded, Saudi Arabia sought to reinforce its mercenary positions and replenish ammunition stockpiles. Sana’a concluded that the window for a negotiated outcome had been deliberately exploited to buy time, not to buy peace.
The intelligence war
What followed was not a conventional military offensive launched from a standing start. It was the terminal phase of a carefully sequenced preemptive campaign that had been underway for approximately four weeks before the main ground advance.
Yemeni military’s intelligence apparatus, operating under the direction of Abu Ali al-Hakim, demonstrated a level of precision that repeatedly left the Saudi-backed coalition wrong-footed.
Newly established mercenary positions were destroyed before they could be consolidated. Ammunition depots were located and struck. Command centers and operations rooms were systematically degraded. The cumulative effect was a coalition whose combat readiness had been substantially hollowed out before the ground offensive even began.
The resulting weapons shortages were severe enough that Riyadh dispatched ships carrying arms to resupply its forces, seeking to close the gap before the main battle.
But the ships, arriving at the port of Mokha, were treated as targets, much like the trucks moving through the Al-Wadiah and Al-Abr crossings. The resupply effort largely failed.
The intelligence picture was so consistently accurate that speculation arose that UAE-aligned elements, still resentful of Saudi dominance over coalition affairs, may have contributed to the flow of intelligence to the Yemeni military. Whatever the source, the Yemeni military’s penetration of the coalition’s operational security was demonstrably deep.
The spark on the Taiz Axis
The specific trigger for the ground offensive came in early September, when the Yemeni military launched a first strike against a Saudi-backed position, anticipating an offensive push northward.
The preemptive strike sparked clashes across four axes simultaneously. The result was not a cascading, domino-like collapse of positions. What the Saudis had intended as the opening move of their western coast offensive instead became the opening phase of their humiliating retreat.
Over the following days, Riyadh attempted to activate additional fronts in Al-Bayda, Al-Dhale’e, and Al-Jawf in an effort to stretch the Yemeni military forces thin across multiple theaters.
Saudi airstrikes intensified across Yemen. Saudi officers reportedly promised direct ground support to coalition factions to incentivize them to hold their positions. The Yemeni military’s own assessment of the dynamic was clear: the Saudis had previously tried activating 52 fronts simultaneously, and each time the result had been further Yemeni military advances, rather than a reversal.
The media war
As the Yemeni military advances accelerated, a parallel battle unfolded in the information space. Saudi-aligned media channels worked to construct a counter-narrative, circulating footage of mercenary vehicle convoys, highlighting minor territorial gains in areas already under Saudi coalition control, and projecting an image of momentum that bore little resemblance to the battlefield reality.
The narrative briefly gained traction by drawing, inaccurately, on the recent Syrian precedent. Some observers speculated that Sana’a might face a “Damascus moment”: a rapid, unexpected collapse of authority under a fast-moving offensive.
The comparison was analytically flawed. The structural, operational, and social conditions that led to the fall of Damascus bear little resemblance to those in Yemen. Sana’a’s military organization, popular base, intelligence infrastructure, and decade-long experience of sustained warfare against a better-resourced coalition have produced a very different kind of fighting force from the one that crumbled in Syria.
The battlefield results made it clear. The “Damascus moment” narrative did not survive contact with the liberation of the islands, the western coast, and the string of ports that followed.
Sana’a’s logic of escalation
Throughout the campaign, Ansarullah-led Yemeni military forces have maintained a consistent list of demands directed at Riyadh: the complete lifting of the air and naval blockade on Yemen; payment of civil servant salaries; an all-for-all prisoner exchange; reopening roads between provinces; Saudi withdrawal from Yemeni territory; and the complete cessation of funding and material support to anti-Sana’a factions.
The strategic logic underlying the current operation can be summarized in three interlocking equations that Sana’a appears to be establishing simultaneously:
The first is Siege for Siege: The imposition of a naval blockade on Saudi Arabia stretching from Bab al-Mandab across the full length of the Red Sea, mirroring the blockade Riyadh maintains on Yemen.
The second is Preemptive Action: Continuous surveillance and interdiction of mercenary logistics and troop movements from eastern to western Yemen, preventing the reconstitution of forces that have already been degraded.
The third is Direct Deterrence: The targeting of Saudi military bases, military airports, and Aramco infrastructure in southern Saudi Arabia in direct response to any Saudi violation of Yemeni airspace or attacks on Yemeni territory.
The endgame
Sana’a has officially announced the conclusion of the operation and directed its forces toward consolidating the liberated territories. The reasoning behind stopping the advance at this stage, rather than pushing farther, reflects three overlapping calculations.
The first is the immediate military imperative of securing and clearing 5,400 square kilometers of newly captured terrain, a task that demands both manpower and time and must be completed before any counteroffensive can be mounted effectively.
The second is the existence of other fronts requiring attention. Ma’rib retains significant economic importance because of the Safer oil-field infrastructure. Taiz carries major political weight for Sana’a’s long-term governance ambitions. Yemeni forces cannot allow gains on the western coast to come at the cost of deterioration on these other critical axes.
The third consideration is strategic restraint, an awareness that actions crossing certain thresholds could trigger a qualitatively different response and draw in actors whose involvement would complicate the current trajectory.
Arab media reports indicate that tensions inside mercenary formations in Taiz have already escalated sharply in the wake of the coastal losses. A critical highway remains in play; delaying withdrawal from the city could leave those forces cut off from a viable exit route, a development that could dramatically accelerate Taiz’s fall without requiring a further ground offensive.
Regional ripples: Tehran, Riyadh, and beyond
The operational dimensions of this campaign extend beyond Yemen’s borders. Saudi Arabia has engaged directly with Tehran in an effort to halt flights to Sana’a since the Yemeni attacks resumed. Pakistan, meanwhile, is reportedly working to include Yemen in a new ceasefire framework, not unlike its role during the previous round, when Islamabad’s diplomatic activity coincided with and helped shape the Saudi naval blockade ceasefire process.
Saudi officials have a documented pattern of denying involvement in Yemen, Iraq, and Lebanon even while conducting active operations across all three theaters. Following its setbacks on the western coast, Riyadh may seek to recover leverage through alternative pressure points, with Lebanon and Iraq among the most likely arenas. That possibility warrants close monitoring.
American support for the Saudi-backed mercenary coalition has continued, but Washington has so far stopped short of direct combat involvement or assuming battlefield command.
Whether that calculus holds in the face of continued Yemeni military advances, or whether disillusionment with Saudi performance drives Washington toward renewed engagement with the UAE, remains one of the most consequential open questions as the war enters its next phase.
What comes next
If Saudi Arabia declines to meet Sana’a’s demands, as its past behavior suggests is the most probable near-term outcome, the Yemeni armed forces retain a substantial menu of escalation options. These include expanded strikes on Saudi supply chains, production and processing facilities, and oil-export infrastructure, with Yanbu and the East-West pipeline specifically on the table.
Operations in the Arabian Sea targeting foreign vessels with Saudi connections represent another avenue. Ground operations in southern Saudi territory constitute a further option that Sana’a has explicitly retained.
Crucially, the balance of internal coalition dynamics has shifted. Over the past two weeks, the Yemeni military has substantially neutralized one of Riyadh’s key remaining leverage mechanisms: its ability to activate internal Yemeni fronts. The collapse of the mercenary coalition and deepening factional rifts have made it increasingly difficult for Saudi officers to reconstitute any credible offensive capability in the near term. That fundamentally alters the timeline calculations for both sides.
The strategic implications of the Yemeni military now holding the coastline overlooking and approaching the Bab al-Mandab Strait are substantial and will require sustained analysis as the situation develops. Control of that coastline does not simply mean territory. It means depth, positioning, and, in the language of maritime chokepoints, leverage.
Yemeni military’s consolidation of Yemen’s western coast represents the acquisition of geographic depth at one of the world’s most consequential maritime chokepoints. Previously, its coastal positions remained vulnerable to suppression. That calculus has now changed.
Al-Mukha, Dhubab, and the surrounding coastline, now under firm control, give Sana’a the ability to position layered anti-ship and air-defense systems across a continuous 200-plus-kilometer stretch. The islands amplify this advantage further, functioning simultaneously as forward sensors and firing platforms, enabling earlier target acquisition, reducing the stand-off advantages of opposing forces, and potentially denying the flanks of the strait to any force attempting to escort commercial shipping.
The relationship with the Strait of Hormuz is noteworthy as well. A dual-chokepoint architecture, with Hormuz and Bab al-Mandab simultaneously subject to hostile pressure, creates a co-equal second front.
A single carrier strike group cannot cover both. Reinforcing one theater necessarily draws resources from the other, complicating the Pentagon’s traditional force-posture hierarchy, which has historically treated Bab al-Mandab as manageable through periodic shows of force.
For Saudi Arabia, the loss is asymmetric in a specific way. Riyadh could previously threaten ground pressure on Ansarullah and the Yemeni military while remaining comparatively insulated from reciprocal pressure on its maritime lifelines. That insulation is now gone.
Red Sea export terminals and the Yanbu complex sit within a substantially more threatening strategic envelope. The Yemeni military can potentially transition from a land-based force with maritime ambitions into a coastal-defense and power-projection actor. That changes the strategic character of any future negotiation and the architecture of any subsequent security ceasefire.
Anthropic bans Israeli account over Iran, Gulf social media citizen profiling
The Cradle | September 11, 2026
An operation run by or on behalf of the Israeli-Singaporean commercial intelligence vendor S2T Unlocking Cyberspace used Claude models to map, classify, and profile social media users across Iran and the Persian Gulf, according to a threat intelligence report published by Anthropic on 11 September.
The platform recorded the locations of users, sorted them as supporters or opponents of their governments, and grouped populations into six demographic categories covering urban, clerical, military, youth, diaspora, and rural.
Its output was written in formal Arabic and styled as official government communications, with sentiment scores broken down by Gulf nationality alongside recommended counternarratives.
The actor fed the model batches of roughly 25 social media posts at a time and directed it to return each poster’s demographic group, location, and political leaning, with confidence ratings attached to every finding.
Anthropic identified a second workstream of more than 255 fabricated social media accounts, which the company said indicated the actor was assembling a stock of fake profiles for later deployment.
In a separate task, the actor directed the model to generate posts for online personas in Persian, Arabic, English, and German, intended to pass as members of both pro- and anti-government Iranian populations.
The company said its findings independently corroborate a February 2023 investigation by the journalism network Forbidden Stories, which documented an S2T surveillance product described in a company brochure recovered from leaked Colombian military files.
Anthropic said the capabilities in that brochure map closely onto the behavior it observed.
Anthropic added that it identified the activity at its pilot stage and found no evidence that later stages of the surveillance chain described by Forbidden Stories were used against real targets before the account was banned.
Israel has invested heavily in cyber capabilities, signals intelligence, artificial intelligence (AI), and advanced surveillance – a technological expansion that shifted the balance of its intelligence collection away from recruited human agents.
Mossad chief Roman Gofman dismissed two of the agency’s most senior officials in August over the failed plot to topple the Iranian government earlier this year.
One had run the intelligence directorate since December while the other headed the Mossad’s Iran division, and both were among the architects of a plan to bring down the Iranian government by igniting nationwide protests and supplying military and communication equipment to opposition groups and insurgents.
Channel 12 said the plan was drawn up in coordination with Washington and was meant to unfold under joint Israeli-US airstrikes.
The New York Times reported on 22 March that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had embraced the Mossad’s promise of a popular revolt when he urged US President Donald Trump into the war, and had grown frustrated when no uprising came.
Before the war on Iran, then-Mossad chief David Barnea had told Netanyahu and Trump that once Iran’s leaders were killed, his agency could galvanize the Iranian opposition into renewed mass unrest, swiftly producing regime change.
Is the Noose Tightening on Iran?
By Bryan Anthony Reo – New Eastern Outlook – September 11, 2026
The Western takeover of Syria, the weakening of Hezbollah, and now the capitulation of Hamas signal that Western/American/Israeli penetration of Iranian outer defenses is essentially complete. The only remaining coherent and unassailed bastion outside of Iran is found among the Houthi. There remains Iran itself, which has weathered six months of American and Israeli aggression.
Western Encroachment on Russia from the South and West
Over the last fifteen or sixteen years, I have followed and analyzed certain developments across the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and Central Asia, and I have noticed a pattern, a theme, a trend — that trend being the dismantling of certain sovereign states aligned with Russia and Iran, or at least committed to their own sovereignty in resistance (or perhaps rather, ‘defiance’ is a better term) to the attempts at policy imposition by Western nations (usually the USA, sometimes France or the UK or Israel).
Iraq went down in 2003.
Then in the recent modern era, Libya was one of the first to be dismantled with the toppling and murdering of Colonel Gaddafi in 2011.
Syria followed in 2024, but fortunately Assad and his family were able to leave safely.
Lebanon was fractured and crippled decades ago and limps along on life support, with only Hezbollah holding the line to protect Lebanese national sovereignty.
Jordan was bought off and is a pathetic satellite of the USA, as is Egypt, with both of those nations having puppet governments that have betrayed their people and their regional partners for American dollars and Western approval.
It is now increasingly obvious and apparent that the Arab Spring was nothing more than a color revolution aimed at the Arab world, the way color revolutions occurred in Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova, and were attempted elsewhere (i.e., Belarus). The Arab Spring was intended to plunge the Arab/Islamic world into chaos and allow the replacement of the post-Cold War era Arab nationalist strongmen with weak, fractured coalition parliaments and fractured states or simply outright chaos (Libya) or Israeli/American puppet regimes.
In some sense, it would be reasonable to label the American advance across the Arab world, from North Africa to the Middle East, as long-term strategic “shaping operations” to remove genuinely sovereign and pro-Moscow governments from the board, so that American and Israeli positions throughout the region become almost unassailable and Russia is denied easy access to the Mediterranean and Iran is denied outer defensive bastions. This advance has been so blatant it is almost impossible not to notice, and attention must be called to it.
Iran Alone Defies America in Central Asia/Middle East
Iran and a few partners (Hezbollah, Houthi, etc.) throughout the region are all that remain in defiance of the Israelis and their American muscle/enforcers.
Syria has become a puppet satellite of the USA/Israel and has effectively ceded a large portion of southwestern Syria to the Israeli “security zone” that has resulted from Israel’s advance from the Golan Heights.
It should be increasingly obvious that Israel will never leave the territory it has occupied in Syria; it will move soldiers in, construct more permanent outposts, and then move settlers in.
Meanwhile, the Damascus branch of Al Qaeda, installed by the CIA and Mossad, is more concerned with trying to provide a legal basis by which they can murder former Syrian President Assad than with maintaining the territorial integrity of Syria against Israeli expansionism.
Across the border in Lebanon, Israel and the USA are working hard to plunge Lebanon into a renewed civil war, as that is the most probable outcome from the policy being foisted on Beirut, specifically the “disarm Hezbollah at all costs” policy. Any significant armed attempt by the anemic, corrupt, Western-aligned government in Beirut to disarm Hezbollah will likely result in a civil war.
While this is happening in the near periphery of Israel, closer to home, in Gaza, it appears that Hamas has capitulated, or at least their senior leaders are prepared to cut and run and toss their fighters under the bus so long as they have personal security guarantees and are able to depart Gaza with their families and wealth.
The disarmament of Hamas will begin the final chapter in the story of the Palestinian people, and this chapter will end with their permanent mass expulsion from the remnants of the Palestinian territories and the formal annexation of those territories into the state of Israel and their population by Zionist settlers.
It will also mean that in regard to the regional chessboard, the only pieces remaining on the board in opposition to Israel and America are essentially Hezbollah, the Houthi, and Iran itself.
Despite American Propaganda, Iran is Actually Winning
CNN claims “80% of all traffic transiting Hormuz is going through the American route,” which, on its face, is plausible and is likely the case.
However, the CNN article does not tell the actual story: that traffic transiting Hormuz is down at least 90-95%.
Thus the notion that “80% of all traffic transiting Hormuz uses the American route via Oman” becomes far less impressive when one analyzes it through the lens of the traffic being 95% reduced from where it had been before the war.
I once had a potential client ask me to take a loser of a case on contingency; he even said, “You can have 100% of the money,” after which I told a colleague, “One hundred percent of zero is still zero.”
80% of 5% is a minuscule 4%, which means 4% of the pre-war traffic is using the American route via Oman. This is hardly something to brag about and it is not evidence that Iran is days from collapse or that the USA has won or is in the process of winning.
By the very nature of the situation, Iran wins by default if the US fails to maintain Hormuz open and freely available for maritime commerce. If the USA is unable to subdue Iran, then Iran prevails. All Iran has to do is avoid losing. It is similar to how in a lawsuit the plaintiff has the burden to prosecute a claim against the defendant in order to succeed and prevail; if the defendant simply avoids losing, then the defendant wins. If Iran is able to avoid botching the defense of their country and come through the war with their regime intact and while maintaining control over the Strait, or at least effectively maintaining area denial of the Strait, then Iran wins.
The Americans can sink some Iranian ships and try a repeat of Operation Praying Mantis, but this isn’t the 1980s, and Iran is a much harder target.
The US can likely even manage commando raids and strikes on Kharg Island, but it won’t be able to take and hold the island. Likewise, the USA is not capable of taking and*holding Qeshm Island (something likely necessary to exercise any significant long-term control over the Strait of Hormuz). An American operation to seize Qeshm Island, unless it has a plan for how to resupply the occupying forces with food and water in the face of drone and missile attacks interdicting the supply craft, is essentially an operation in “how long can these men hold out until they have to surrender to Iran due to hunger and thirst.” In short, an American invasion and occupation of Qeshm Island would be extremely ill-advised, unless President Trump has some secret logistical weapon, or a “trump card” that the American public is simply not aware of.
Negotiations with Iran are the Only Way Forward (But Iran Has NO Reason to Trust Americans Now)
It is painfully obvious that the only way forward for the United States in regard to Iran is to enter into negotiations, negotiations that would have to be fair, reasonable, sincere, and honest. However, given the American tendency to engage in direct strikes and targeted killings (assassinations) of the people they are negotiating with, it is doubtful if the Iranians are going to believe anything the Americans have to say at this stage.
Negotiations with Iran would also require (at least implicitly) the recognition of Iran as having legitimate national and regional interests if not indeed being an actual regional power in Central Asia and the Middle East, something the United States appears unwilling to do, largely because of Israeli/Zionist influence being exerted on American policy.
How can any sincere American diplomat go to Iran and ask, in good faith, that they trust him? How can he suggest, in good faith, that they work with American envoys? We have an established record of murdering diplomats during breaks in diplomatic sessions. How does any nation recover and come back from this reputation?
Neo-Con Provocations and Delusions Hinder Negotiations
At the present time it seems the United States is living in a fantasy land where it can endlessly sustain and support Ukraine in its war against the Russian people in Donbas and Crimea (using Ukraine as a NATO puppet to advance NATO/American interests in Eastern Europe), escalate on the Korean Peninsula against North Korea; continue to aggress against Iran in the Persian Gulf and wider region; support Israel against Hamas and Hezbollah; support the Saudis against the Houthi; and pivot forces from Europe to the Pacific and East Asia as part of a long-term program to contain and curtail China as a prelude to attempting to dominate China.
It is a very ambitious American grand strategy, and while lacking the resources to be successfully pursued, it also lacks any coherent overarching worldview that would string it all together and explain the motive, reasoning, or the telos. At present, it seems America is a mediocre chess-player simply moving pieces back and forth across the board, without any rhyme or reason, although that is the conclusion one reaches at a casual glance. A more thorough analysis would reveal that America’s policy in regard to Iran is primarily aimed at fulfilling long-term Zionist ambitions in the region and providing a puppet government in Tehran amenable to the stationing of American military assets (including nuclear weapons) that would be used to coerce and threaten Russia for the purpose of pursuing the long-term American neo-con goal of causing the collapse of the Russian Federation as a coherent, centralized polity.
America is presently trying to escalate with Iran and Russia, and is always eager and willing to unnecessarily confront, provoke, or escalate with the DPRK and China as well.
What is the American End Goal? Short-Sighted Regime Change?
Let us suppose that American/Zionist goals are accomplished in Iran, and Iran collapses; at that point the USA will have opened a southern front against Russia, with the ability to threaten Russia by projecting power across the Caspian and by escalating provocations throughout the Caucasus region as a way to distract, divide, weaken, and strain Russian resources.
But to what end? For what purpose? Why? While attending recent seminars at the University of Oxford in Aristotle’s Politics and Nuclear/Particle Physics, I had the opportunity to discuss ongoing geopolitical matters with a variety of European classmates. The vast majority (80%) had the standard mainstream EU/UK/Atlanticist line, and some were militantly anti-Russian. One (a man born in the Latvian SSR in 1986) openly said he wanted to see “democracy” rise up in Iran, topple the Islamic Republic, and to see “Putin toppled” in Moscow, and Western liberal democracy take over Russia.
My challenge to all of that was multi-faceted, but one aspect I consistently hammered home was “Why? What comes next? The US has a very bad track record of collapsing regimes and dealing with the aftermath… Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria… Why would we want to collapse stable states such as Iran and Russia? Even if we could, why would we want to collapse those states? What about the aftermath? What about thinking five years or ten years down the road instead of just thinking about the next six months or twelve months? The leaders in Iran and Russia are reasonable and rational, and those powers being intact and stable are crucial to regional stability; why remove them and have them replaced with, well, who really knows, some unknown quantity that might be a lunatic or a zealot or something unreasonable.”
I have very little appetite, and no sympathy, for the view that the USA should lead the way in toppling all non-Western governments so they can be replaced by what would presumably be Western-aligned parliamentarian democracies of the plutocratic variety. Westerners, especially Atlanticists, are great at advocating for the setting of wildfires, and for starting those wildfires, but they seldom give much thought to what happens once they set a conflagration in motion.
Many of the Russophobes cannot see past their own hatred of Russia and of President Putin, and they cannot wrap their minds around the simple truth that the West is fortunate to be able to deal with and interact with a Russia that has historically strong and visionary leadership in the form of true statesmen such as Putin and Lavrov, who are well-educated, experienced, and have coherent and sensible worldviews shaped by a proper and true classical education, whereas most Western leaders are fungible, interchangeable bureaucrats educated in technocratic parliamentary procedure and institutional rules.
Much like we are with Iran, we in the West are squandering golden opportunities for historic cooperation and mutual benefit with Iran and Russia because we are pursuing absurd policies based on, well, frankly, crap beliefs, garbage intelligence, and an incoherent worldview formed in the crumbling and decaying ruins of post-modernity.
Whether or not the US is actually succeeding in tightening a noose against Iran, it is certainly expending significant resources in an effort to do so, although it presently seems to have very little to show for all the effort.
Bryan Anthony Reo is a licensed attorney based in Ohio and an analyst of military history, geopolitics, and international relations
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Persian Gulf states to meet in Oman to discuss regional security, Hormuz navigation: Iran
Press TV – September 11, 2026
Iran and other Persian Gulf littoral states will meet in Oman on Monday to discuss regional issues, including arrangements for safe commercial navigation through the Strait of Hormuz, says Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei.
Speaking on Friday, Baghaei said the meeting would bring together Iran, Iraq and other countries bordering the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman, describing the initiative as an important step toward strengthening regional understanding and cooperation.
He said Iran had consistently sought to build trust and cooperation among regional countries to promote peace and stability without “destructive and divisive interventions” by actors from outside the region.
The meeting in Muscat is also expected to address the outcome of recent Iran-Oman talks on establishing safe routes for commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, Baghaei said.
Iran and Oman have been engaged in negotiations for nearly three months over arrangements for safe navigation through the strategic waterway. On Aug. 25, the two countries announced discussions on a phased framework that would initially establish a temporary joint maritime corridor, alongside a joint mine-clearance project.
The framework is aimed at restoring safe navigation while preserving the sovereignty and sovereign rights of coastal states. Technical talks are expected to continue toward a permanent navigation corridor and an agreement on the future administration of the waterway.
Baghaei recalled the understanding reached between Tehran and Muscat on temporary shipping routes, saying Iran remained committed to efforts to ensure the safety of navigation through the strait.
“However, naturally, as long as the aggressive actions and illegal interventions of the United States, including the naval blockade and economic warfare, continue, the security of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz cannot be guaranteed,” he said.
The Strait of Hormuz is a major global energy chokepoint, with roughly one-fifth of global oil demand passing through the waterway. Iran has maintained heightened restrictions on navigation since the start of the US-Israeli military aggression against the country on Feb. 28, citing security concerns and the need to safeguard its sovereignty.
Back on August 25, Oman’s Foreign Minister Sayyid Badr Albusaidi stressed that future management of the strait and a permanent solution would follow the terms of the Islamabad memorandum of understanding, particularly its Article 5.
The memorandum, signed by Iran and the United States in June, aimed at ending the US-Israeli aggression against Iran, included an arrangement under which Iran agreed to allow fee-free maritime transit through the Strait of Hormuz for 60 days.
Tehran subsequently established a special maritime route for vessels crossing the chokepoint; however, the US established unauthorized routes along Omani shores in violation of the agreement. In response, Tehran reimposed restrictions.
The joint Iran-Oman statement also pointed to the importance of consultations with other countries bordering the Persian Gulf and called for adherence to international law and respect for the sovereign rights of coastal states.
The meeting will be the first of its kind between Iranian diplomats and their regional counterparts following the start of the US-Israeli aggression, during which the US used the soil and airspace of some of these countries, including Bahrain, Kuwait, and the UAE, to launch criminal attacks against Iran.
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From the Archives
A short history of British torture
ICC | December 2005
When the House of Commons was debating how much to increase the time limit for detention without trial the question of torture came up. Officially this was limited to the nice considerations of whether it was all right to send people to places where torture is used and whether Britain can use information collected by the use of torture in other countries. This discussion gave an impression of democratic Britain as the home of civilised behaviour where the very idea of torture is repugnant to our legislators – unlike, say, the US with its secret CIA jails… In reality, the British state has a long history of using and developing a whole range of torture techniques. … continue
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