Category Archives: Saudi Arabia

Saudi-led coalition accused of collectively punishing civilians in Yemen war

The New York Times reports: The airstrike slammed into Al-Sham water-bottling plant at the end of the night shift, killing 13 workers who were minutes away from heading home.

Standing among the strewn bottles, smoldering boxes and pulverized machines a few days after the airstrike here, the owner, Ibrahim al-Razoom, searched in vain for any possible reason that warplanes from a Saudi-led military coalition would have attacked the place.

Nothing in the ruins suggested the factory was used for making bombs, as a coalition spokesman had claimed. And it was far from any military facility that would explain the strike as a tragic mistake: For miles around, there was nothing but desert scrub.

“It never occurred to me that this would be hit,” Mr. Razoom said.

Of the many perils Yemen’s civilians have faced during the last six months of war, with starvation looming and their cities crumbling under heavy weapons, none have been as deadly as the coalition airstrikes. What began as a Saudi-led aerial campaign against the Houthis, the rebel militia movement that forced Yemen’s government from power, has become so broad and vicious that critics accuse the coalition of collectively punishing people living in areas under Houthi control. [Continue reading…]

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Yemen’s descent into a prolonged and uncontrollable war

The Economist reports: The start of this month may well come to be seen as the moment that Yemen descended into a prolonged and uncontrollable war. The conflict in the desperately poor nation was already going horribly badly. But the Saudi-led coalition fighting the country’s Houthi rebels has now intensified its campaign, after 60 of its soldiers were killed in a single attack in Maarib on September 4th.

More troops have poured in since the attack. Saudi Arabia dispatched more elite forces to join the 3,000-strong coalition force already on the ground, while Qatar, hitherto only participating in air operations, has sent 1,000 soldiers. Egypt, which has long warned of the folly of putting boots on the ground given its disastrous intervention in the 1960s, this week sent in 800 men. Sudanese troops are reportedly waiting to be shipped out of Khartoum. Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa said his two sons will join the battle.

The coalition has since unleashed an unprecedented flurry of air strikes in both the northern governorate of Saada, the stronghold of the Houthi rebels, and the country’s capital, Sana’a. Residents say as many civilian as military targets are being hit, including houses, restaurants and main streets. “The coalition has gone wacko since the attack,” says Hassan Boucenine, who heads the Yemen office of Médicins sans Frontières, a charity. [Continue reading…]

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Senior diplomat for Saudi Arabia accused of raping servants in Delhi

The Guardian reports: Authorities in India have asked the Saudi Arabian ambassador in Delhi to cooperate in an ongoing police investigation into charges that one of the kingdom’s senior diplomats in the city repeatedly raped and abused two domestic servants who were held captive in his luxury apartment.

Earlier this week police raided the diplomat’s residence in the satellite town of Gurgaon where, they have told reporters, they found two Nepali women employed as maids. The police later opened an inquiry into allegations made by the two women that they had been held against their will, denied food and water, beaten, and repeatedly raped by up to seven men at a time over a period of several weeks. Investigators now want to interview the main accused who has reportedly taken refuge in the Saudi embassy.

Vikas Swarup, an Indian government spokesperson, said: “[The Ministry of External Affairs] called in [the] Saudi ambassador and conveyed the request of [the] police for cooperation of the embassy in the case of two Nepali citizens.”

The Saudi Arabian embassy has issued a statement denying all the allegations, describing them as “completely baseless”, and has lodged an official complaint about the raid on the apartment which it says was a breach of diplomatic privilege.

On Thursday, demonstrators gathered outside the Saudi embassy shouting slogans calling for the prosecution of the diplomat.

Leaked details of medical assessments of the two women published in local media in India – which appear to corroborate the allegations of abuse – will increase the pressure on Indian authorities to continue the inquiry, despite the diplomatic damage to relations with Saudi Arabia. [Continue reading…]

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Saudi-led offensive in Yemen faces dangerous new phase

Iona Craig writes: When young garage mechanic Aidaroos Saleh heard the familiar ping of his smartphone, he could never have imagined the journey on which the incoming message would take him. In a matter of weeks, Saleh, 22, went from fixing cars in his adopted country of Saudi Arabia to the battle front of his southern Yemen homeland.

The message was an official communication, a call to arms for Yemenis in Saudi Arabia to join a fighting force that would “defend Aden” — the southern Yemeni city that descended into civil war in mid-March. Four months after he responded to the message in April, the young fighter sat cradling an AK-47 assault rifle between his knees in the scorching heat of Aden.

“They promised us salaries and medical care abroad if we got injured in Yemen,” he said, wearing glasses, sandals and a mawaz, which is like a sarong. He and his cohort received neither.

Those who joined up were sent to the Saudi border town of Sharurah — in the Empty Quarter, the world’s largest sand desert — where they should have received military training to prepare them for deployment in Aden.

This desert camp of some 6,000 Yemeni volunteers was the origin of the kingdom’s Operation Golden Arrow, a ground offensive launched in Yemen in July that now looks set to move in on the capital, Sanaa. This latest phase of operations in Yemen follows consecutive aerial campaigns carried out since March as part of the Saudi-led coalition of nations bid to restore Yemen’s President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi after he fled to Riyadh earlier this year.

But in order to bring Hadi back, the coalition has first set itself the task of removing the Houthis and military units loyal to his predecessor Ali Abdullah Saleh, who seized control of the capital almost a year ago. [Continue reading…]

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Iran ‘ready’ to talk to U.S. and Saudi Arabia about Syria

Al Jazeera reports: Iran’s president has said his country is ready to hold talks with the United States and Saudi Arabia on ways to resolve the Syrian civil war.

Shia powerhouse Iran is a leading patron of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and accuses Sunni rival Saudi Arabia and the US of siding with anti-Assad rebels and fighters.

President Hassan Rouhani’s remarks came during a press conference on Tuesday in Tehran with visiting Austrian counterpart Heinz Fischer. [Continue reading…]

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Qatar deploys 1,000 ground troops to fight in Yemen

Al Jazeera reports: Around 1,000 soldiers from Qatar’s Armed Forces have been deployed to Yemen, as part of the Arab coalition’s fight against Houthi rebels, Al Jazeera has learned.

An Al Jazeera journalist, reporting from the Saudi-Yemen border, said the troops were backed by more than 200 armoured vehicles and 30 Apache combat helicopters.

The troops are now reportedly heading to Yemen’s Maareb province, to join the Saudi-led coalition already fighting in the area.

Al Jazeera has also learned that more Qatari forces are expected, with the aim of securing the Jawf governorate. [Continue reading…]

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Coalition attacks Yemen capital after UAE, Saudi soldiers killed

Reuters reports: Warplanes from the United Arab Emirates struck Houthi targets across Yemen, state news agency WAM said on Saturday, a day after at least 60 soldiers from a Saudi-led coalition, mostly Emiratis, were killed in an attack in central Yemen.

Medical sources at hospitals in the capital Sanaa, which has been under effective control of the Iranian-allied Houthi militia for almost a year, said about 24 civilians were killed in the city as a result of the attacks.

WAM said the UAE air force struck a mine-making plant in the Houthi-dominated Saada province in northern Yemen, as well as military camps and weapon stores in the central Ibb province, causing “heavy damage”.

Apart from 45 Emiratis and five Bahrainis, Saudi state-run Al Ekhbariya TV reported on Saturday that 10 Saudi soldiers were also killed in the attack in Marib province on Friday, quoting Brigadier-General Ahmed al-Asiri, the coalition spokesman.

Asiri told Al Arabiya TV that four Yemeni soldiers were also killed in the attack on the coalition base in Marib.

Friday’s death toll was the highest for the coalition since it began its assault on the Houthis in March, and is one of the worst losses of life in the history of the UAE military. [Continue reading…]

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The Arab world’s wealthiest nations are doing next to nothing for Syria’s refugees

Ishaan Tharoor writes: To varying degrees, elements within Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the U.A.E. and Kuwait have invested in the Syrian conflict, playing a conspicuous role in funding and arming a constellation of rebel and Islamist factions fighting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

None of these countries are signatories of the United Nations’ 1951 Refugee Convention, which defines what a refugee is and lays out their rights, as well as the obligations of states to safeguard them. For a Syrian to enter these countries, they would have to apply for a visa, which, in the current circumstances, is rarely granted. According to the BBC, the only Arab countries where a Syrian can travel without a visa are Algeria, Mauritania, Sudan and Yemen — hardly choice or practical destinations.

Like European countries, Saudi Arabia and its neighbors also have fears over new arrivals taking jobs from citizens, and may also invoke concerns about security and terrorism. But the current gulf aid outlay for Syrian refugees, which amounts to collective donations under $1 billion (the United States has given four times that sum), seems short — and is made all the more galling when you consider the vast sums Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. poured into this year’s war effort in Yemen, an intervention some consider a strategic blunder.

As Bobby Ghosh, managing editor of the news site Quartz, points out, the gulf states in theory have a far greater ability to deal with large numbers of arrivals than Syria’s more immediate and poorer neighbors, Lebanon and Jordan:

The region has the capacity to quickly build housing for the refugees. The giant construction companies that have built the gleaming towers of Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Riyadh should be contracted to create shelters for the influx. Saudi Arabia has plenty of expertise at managing large numbers of arrivals: It receives an annual surge of millions of Hajj pilgrims to Mecca. There’s no reason all this knowhow can’t be put to humanitarian use.

No reason other than either indifference or a total lack of political will. [Continue reading…]

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Yemen’s hidden war: How the Saudi-led coalition is killing civilians

Iona Craig writes: In the Islamic concept of qadar, your divine destiny is inescapable. If you try to cheat death it will find you. For two women on a dusty road in mid-June on the southwest corner of the Arabian Peninsula, their repeated attempts to dodge fate ended in tragic failure.

Leaving the war zone of Yemen’s southern port city of Aden on June 10, the women headed north in a Toyota Cressida driven by a male relative. The pair were escaping the violence that had already turned entire streets in Aden to rubble, left hundreds dead and thousands of civilians under siege, struggling to find food, water and medical care.

Driving ahead of them was a family of four in a Hilux pick-up truck, slowing at the numerous checkpoints along the road and weaving around potholes in the asphalt. Between 4:30 and 5 p.m., seemingly from nowhere, the first missile struck. The Hilux flipped into a cartwheeling fireball, killing the two children and their parents inside.

Before the women in the Toyota had a chance to compose themselves an ominous whistle preceded a second missile, which smashed into the ground beside them and sent their car careering off the road into the dusty scrubland. Twice in the space of just a few minutes the women had stared death in the face.[Continue reading…]

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There may be reasons for hope in the Middle East

Henri J. Barkey and David F. Gordon write: The winds of change are unexpectedly blowing through the Levant.

In the aftermath of the Iran nuclear agreement, there was a broad expectation, both in the region and beyond, that sectarian tensions and conflict would intensify and deepen the proxy battle between Iran and Saudi Arabia. In the United States, even some strong supporters of the nuclear deal emphasized that Washington needed to respond aggressively to the inevitable push by Tehran to expand its regional influence at the expense of traditional U.S. allies.

What we are seeing on the ground, however, looks quite different. There is an increasing possibility for new geopolitical alignments throughout the region. The confluence of the growing fear in both Saudi Arabia and Iran of the threat posed by Islamic State; the weakening of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria; Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s policy shift to cooperate with the United States in Syria, and Moscow’s and Washington’s growing shared interests in steering the Saudi-Iran rivalry onto a less escalatory path, while also creating a broad coalition against Islamic State, is creating real political fluidity. [Continue reading…]

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Hamas caught between Tehran and Riyadh

Ali Hashem writes: A senior Hamas official who spoke to Al-Monitor in Beirut on condition of anonymity said, “We’ve never taken sides, but we have our say on what’s happening. Iran is a friend. It was once a very close friend, and we don’t forget that. But today there are efforts to normalize ties once again. This is facing some hurdles from both sides.”

The official, who visits Iran often, told Al-Monitor, “There were plans for Khaled Meshaal to visit Tehran, [but] on several occasions the visits were canceled because of the uncertainty on our side that it would go as planned.”

Meshaal, head of Hamas’ political bureau, is concerned he won’t be allowed to meet the supreme leader of Iran, Al-Monitor learned, as a trip to Tehran would be useless without a meeting with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. [Continue reading…]

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The Iranian project of regional expansion was from the start based on shaky ground

Basheer Nafi writes: In spite of mounting evidence that the Iranian influence was in decline, many concluded that the nuclear agreement would provide the Iranian expansionist project with what it needs to become an invincible power. So, where is the fault in the reading of the Iranian expansionist project, or in Tehran’s own assessment of its power?

This, first of all, is the Middle East, the post-World War I Middle East, where power equations do not last for long and where the underpinnings of power keep changing just like quick sand. It is true that the Iranian expansion coincided with American failings in the Middle East, followed by a relative American withdrawal, as well as a decline of the regional Egyptian and Saudi influence; but it has also coincided with an active Turkish return to the neighbouring Middle East.

Additionally, it is true that the fall of the Taliban and Saddam regimes was quite swift, but it is also true that the Iraqi resistance to the occupation did not wait long before emerging, and that the Taliban were soon to regroup and lead the resistance against the occupation and its allies in Kabul. The problem with the Iranian expansionist project, right from the start, was that it did not take into consideration the continuously changing nature of the map of power and influence in the region.

Secondly, the Iranians chose in most of their expansionist steps to stand by the minorities, whether political or sectarian, in the face of the majority, not only the majority in every single country but also the majority at the level of the region as a whole.

The peoples of the region were, for several decades, viewing Iran with admiration and sympathy, especially when Iranian policy was characterised with standing by the people and their aspirations. Yet, Iran was changing rapidly, where nationalistic and sectarian ambitions replaced the policies of pan-Islamic solidarity. Iran encouraged the emergence of a sectarian hegemonic regime in Iraq, and put its entire weight behind the continuation of the hegemony of a sectarian and political minority over Syria and its people.

It also supported the foolish Houthi plot to seize control of Yemen. Without a single exception, Iran’s regional policies were to generate civil wars and ethnic and sectarian cleansing, not to mention the tragic destruction of peoples and their resources. [Continue reading…]

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Most of the drivers of regional destruction have little to do with Iranian-Saudi rivalry

Rami G Khouri writes: [Regional] destruction is painfully visible every day in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Bahrain, and Yemen, at the very least. This spectacle of multiple fragmenting states is bad enough; it is made even worse by the latest troubling development — it is too early to call it a trend — which is the spectacle of repeated bomb attacks and killings of government officials and security forces in three of the most important regional powers that should be stabilizing forces in the Middle East: Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. Add to this the ongoing war in Yemen, and the erratic battle against “Islamic State” (ISIS) forces in Syria, Iraq and other tiny pockets of ISIS presence around the region, the massive refugee flows and the stresses they cause, and the dangerous sectarian dimensions of some of the confrontations underway, and we end up with a very complex and violent regional picture that cannot possibly be explained primarily as a consequence of Iranian-Saudi rivalries.

A more complete explanation of the battered Arab region today must include accounting for several other mega-tends: the impact of the last twenty-fix years of non-stop American military attacks, threats and sanctions from Libya to Afghanistan; the radicalizing impact of sixty-seven years of non-stop Zionist colonization and militarism against Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians and other Arabs; the hollowing out of Arab economic and governance systems by three generations of military-led, amateurish and corruption-riddled mismanaged governance that deprived citizens of their civic and political rights and pushed them to assert instead the primacy of their sectarian and tribal identities; and, the catalytic force of the 2003 Anglo-American led war on Iraq that opened the door for all these forces and others yet — like lack of water, jobs, and electricity that make normal daily life increasingly difficult — to combine into the current situation of widespread national polarization and violence.

Most of these drivers of the current regional condition have little to do with Iranian-Saudi sensitivities, and much more to do with decades of frail statehood, sustained and often violent Arab authoritarianism, denied citizenship, distorted development, and continuous regional and global assaults. [Continue reading…]

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Yemen crisis: Famine threatens war-torn country, warns UN

BBC News reports: Yemen’s conflict has left it on the brink of famine, the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) has warned.

Food shortages, lack of fresh water, and low fuel stocks have created a “perfect storm” for the Yemeni people, the WFP’s Ertharin Cousin said.

The organisation estimates nearly 13 million people urgently require help. [Continue reading…]

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The Saudi-Syrian back channel to end the war

Andrew Bowen and J. Matthew McInnis write: In the aftermath of the nuclear agreement struck between Iran and six world powers, a number of the countries with a stake in Syria’s gridlocked civil war have pushed forward initiatives to end the conflict. While the negotiations involving Turkey, Russia, Iran, the United States, and the Gulf Cooperation Council countries have been undertaken in secret for months, Moscow and Tehran’s recent willingness to engage on this issue has made President Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Damascus more attentive to the proposals on the table.

Ali Mamlouk, Assad’s national security advisor, made quiet visits at the end of July to both the Saudi city of Jeddah and to Muscat, Oman, according to both Saudi-based sources and sources close to the Assad regime. Mamlouk’s visit represents the first time Saudi Arabia and Oman have invited a senior Syrian official to the Gulf to discuss a political settlement. Following Mamlouk’s visit, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem made an official visit in early August to Muscat to meet with the Omani foreign minister where they discussed, according to Syrian state media, “efforts to put an end to the crisis in Syria … which preserves the sovereignty, unity, and territorial integrity” of the country.

In conversations with those who were engaged in his visits, Mamlouk arrived in Jeddah and Muscat to continue discussing his proposals for ending the civil war. These previously secret discussions have been taking place for at least the past few months. Despite pressure from Moscow, neither Riyadh nor Tehran have fully bought into these proposals at this stage and are presently biding their time in the hopes that events on the ground will allow them to reach a better settlement.[Continue reading…]

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Talks suggest the endgame is afoot in Syria

Michael Young writes: With the Syrian regime losing ground in the Ghab Plain and Qaryatayn last week, the protagonists in Syria are slowly preparing for the aftermath of the conflict. Few believe president Bashar Al Assad can prevail in the war, and even he conceded his army’s difficulties late last month.

With Mr Al Assad’s foes gaining, all eyes have been on diplomacy in recent weeks. Russian, Saudi and American officials have met in Qatar, the Russian and Saudi foreign ministers met in Moscow on Monday, and Russia mediated a recent meeting in Jeddah between the Saudi deputy crown prince and defence minister, Mohammed bin Salman, and the head of Syria’s National Security Bureau, Ali Mamlouk.

Even Iran has offered a plan for a political solution in Syria. Two things are apparent in these exchanges: Mr Al Assad’s vulnerabilities have prompted his allies to begin a process of finding a negotiated outcome in Syria that could potentially save him and prevent a power vacuum that benefits extremists; and the Syrian president has become increasingly irrelevant, his fate almost entirely in the hands of others. [Continue reading…]

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How Saudi Arabia got its Yemen campaign so wrong

By Sophia Dingli, University of Hull

Among Yemen’s myriad misfortunes, its greatest has been being Saudi Arabia’s neighbour.

Saudi Arabia’s founder, King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, thought Yemen so unpredictable that he warned his sons that they had to tame it in order to remain secure. Saudi Arabia is now embarked on its largest ever effort to “tame” Yemen, but it has already been a disaster: thousands are dead, and the unspeakable destruction wrought by the unprecedented Saudi intervention has undone decades of cautious and under-the-radar meddling.

Ever since Saudi Arabia became a state in 1932, it has been quietly but actively involved in Yemeni politics. Saudi money has been the most important source of revenue for the Yemen Arab Republic for decades, even as Riyadh has tried to stop the emergence of a strong central government by funding other groups, including powerful tribes and the sheikhs of Yemen’s most important tribal confederations.

But in the past couple of decades, Saudi-Yemeni relations have become even more complicated. Multiple points of friction emerged after the 1990 unification of Yemen, after which it drew up a democratic constitution and refused to vote for a UN-backed intervention against Saddam Hussein after he annexed Kuwait.

Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, was pursuing a policy of outright cultural colonialism in an area near the blurred Yemeni-Saudi border, which was historically populated by Shia Zaydi tribes. When the border was finalised at the start of the 21st century, it prevented those tribes from moving freely, restricting their animals’ grazing routes and threatening their livelihoods. This ultimately gave birth to the Houthi nationalist movement.

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In Saudi Arabia, social media is helping reveal the harassment of women

Huffington Post reports: In recent years, an increasing number of women in Saudi Arabia have used social media as a resource to document and confront the ongoing problem of harassment. As Noura bint Afeich wrote in Al-Monitor last year, “Posting photos and videos documenting certain events has shed light on sensitive topics that the kingdom wishes to avoid dealing with.”

Women are harassed at workplaces, in malls and on city streets. Yet in Saudi Arabia’s conservative society, instances of physical harassment are rarely reported to authorities, for fear it will bring shame or embarrassment. In a national survey conducted in 2014 by the Riyadh-based King Abdulaziz Center for National Dialogue, 80 percent of participants attributed sexual harassment in Saudi Arabia to women’s “deliberate flirtatious behavior.”

Amid this climate of shame and underreporting, the data reveal a pressing problem. Six sexual harassment cases are reported every day, as statistics published by the country’s Ministry of Justice have shown. In 2013 and 2014, a total of 3,982 harassment cases made it to Saudi courts, with the largest share of offenses taking place in the Saudi capital of Riyadh.

But the growing outrage throughout the country — prompted in large part by social media — has had an effect, leading the very conservative kingdom to consider legal measures to combat the problem. [Continue reading…]

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