Tag Archives: Yemen

Saudis Drop Air Masks Contaminated with COVID-19 Into Yemen 1

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy • Tags: , , ,

By Randi Nord

Geopolitics Alert

Sana’a (GPA) – The Saudi coalition continues weaponizing disease in Yemen — this time capitalizing on the novel coronavirus — in a disturbing and barbaric fashion. Saudi planes have air dropped suspicious face masks and other supplies potentially contaminated with COVID-19 into some of Yemen’s most vulnerable areas.

Speaking to Geopolitics Alert on Monday, Dr. Yosuf Al-Haidari, official spokesman of Yemen’s Ministry of Public Health, said Saudi planes dropped suspicious packages across Yemen’s impoverished Hodeidah province containing face masks and other supplies. Dr. Al-Haidari called the action “strange” and “unrealistic” due to Riyadh’s history of weaponizing disease and destroying Yemen’s healthcare sector through a five-year blockade.

It’s worth mentioning that Hodeidah province is still an active frontline in the war, facing hundreds of Saudi airstrikes and artillery bombardment every day.

Yemen’s Health Ministry urged residents not to touch the masks due to their potential for containing biological weaponry.

It wouldn’t be out of character for Riyadh to contaminate medical supplies with COVID-19 before distributing them to Yemen’s vulnerable populations. In 2017, Yemen suffered a cholera outbreak globally unprecedented in modern times. Over 2 million were infected as of October 2019 with thousands succumbing to the medieval illness.

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US Democrats not sincere in their concern for Yemen war: Analyst 2

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RASA News Agency

RNA – Democratic Party lawmakers only began criticizing the Saudi war against Yemen after the murder of US-based Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, said Keith Preston, chief editor of AttacktheSystem.com.

“The Democrats have seized on the situation in Yemen and they see this as a weapon that they can use against the Trump administration for political purposes,” Preston told Press TV on Sunday.

US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi says President Donald Trump is “turning a blind eye to Saudi Arabia’s continued violence” against innocent Yemenis. 

Pelosi, the highest ranking Democrat in Congress, made the remarks in a statement she released on Twitter Saturday a day after Trump approved a plan to deploy troops to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

She described Trump’s decision as an “outrageous attempt” to circumvent the will of the Congress.

“Americans are weary of war, and have no interest in entering another Middle East conflict,” Pelosi reiterated, “particularly on behalf of Saudi Arabia.”

Pointing to Saudi Arabia’s “continued assault on countless men, women and children,” Pelosi slammed the president for “turning a blind eye” to the “continued violence against innocent Yemenis.

Preston rejected Pelosi’s comments as insincere, saying her remarks are a “cynical political ploy” to hurt Trump’s re-election campaign.

“The goal of the Democrats is regrettably not to end the Saudi war in Yemen, the goal is simply to score partisan points when it comes to their own conflicts with the Republicans and the Trump presidency,” he added.

The Pentagon announced Friday it would send reinforcements to the region to bolster Riyadh’s air defenses following a recent drone attack on two major oil facilities owned by Saudi state oil giant Aramco.

The decision was made at the request of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, according to the US Defense Department.

The Pentagon said the deployment would involve a moderate number of troops for what it called primarily “defensive in nature.”

The new decision comes after Yemen’s Houthi Ansarullah fighters conducted strikes on the two facilities located in Abqaiq and Khurais on September 14. The attacks led to a halt in about 50 percent of the Arab kingdom’s crude and gas production, causing a surge in oil prices.

Tehran has fiercely rejected any involvement in the retaliatory attack by Yemeni forces against Saudi oil facilities and warned Washington that any military action against it will spell into an “all-out war” with immediate retaliation.

When Drones Come Home to Roost Reply

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By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

It was fucking beautiful. There are no more accurate words in the English dictionary to describe the vision I saw. I awoke Sunday afternoon, turned the TV on to CNN and there it was in all its infernal glory like Christmas Morning in hell. Standing six-hundred stories high above the sea of sand in Saudi Arabia’s Empty Quarter, a leaning wall of towering flames shimmering across the night sky like an aurora borealis made of fire. As all the usual yammering skulls off camera spun fantastic tall tales about an Iranian conspiracy to deny the House of Saud their Allah given right to rape and pillage with abandon, only one thing, one message, burned through my frontal lobes like Abqaiq crude, “They did it. The Houthis really did it!” The resounding feeling of karmic justice was downright euphoric. I wanted to cry. I wanted to dance. Fuck, I wanted to masturbate to the sight of those rabid dogs getting exactly what they deserved.

After spending nearly half a decade watching Saudi Arabia’s savage holocaust in Yemen and the dogged Houthi rebels courageous if at times downright suicidal resistance, after pouring over a veritable ocean of pictures and footage of starving and slaughtered Zaydi children, somehow this conflict on the other side of the planet had become very personal to me. In spite of being a decadent pagan faggot, the chaste Houthi rebels had come to symbolize a greater narrative beyond their own struggle for independence. They had come to symbolize a greater resistance to a dying empire of Atlantic supremacy represented by their twisted Arab cartels in the Persian Gulf, the Salafi Goliath to the Shia Davids. But now, the unthinkable. David struck back hard with his RC slingshot, landing a spectacular blow to the vital organ Goliath held most dear, his wallet.

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Yemen as Arabian Vietnam Reply

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By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

It wasn’t supposed to end this way. The last soldiers and agents of the world’s biggest and deadliest empire, fleeing Saigon with their thorned tails between their legs as a rag-tag army of half-starved guerrillas inched closer by the hour. The last Bell helicopters, stuffed to the brim with bourgeois refugees of the fascist Yankee quisling state of South Vietnam, bumbling about before they scatter like highway vultures interrupted by a semi as they attempt to pick the last bone clean on a withering carcass. This was unthinkable just a decade earlier, when LBJ decided to turn a contentious civil war into a full blown holocaust. We had thrown everything but the White House kitchen sink at those yellow commie savages; bombs, napalm, agent orange, near institutionalized campaigns of rape and slaughter. We had turned the jungles of Indochina into a living hell, just a few Pinkville’s shy of a full tilt genocide. But they just kept coming. Tiny men and women in black pajamas with hearts like lions, throwing their malnourished bodies into the guts and gears of the war machine. At the end of the day, the empire’s efforts were all for nothing. Billions of dollars, millions of lives, and the sterling reputation we had built on the myths of the Good War were gone like dust scattered to the wind. Was there a lesson to be learned here? Was anybody but Charlie interested in learning it?

Flash forward some forty years and tragedy repeats itself as farce. This time it’s one of the now hemorrhaging American empire’s dauphins, a dick-swinging desert upstart called Saudi Arabia, that is rapidly finding itself overwhelmed by the unintended consequences of its own private Vietnam. After another gaggle of impoverished peasants called the Houthis decided to take their once regional conflict from the northern mountains of Yemen to the bustling capital of Sanaa, overthrowing yet another fascist Yankee quisling state, Saudi Arabia’s swarthy young princeling, Mohammed bin Salman, decided to show the world what he’s made of by burying his poorest neighbor in American munitions. Like his fellow psychopath, LBJ, MBS threw everything he could get his filthy hands on at these poor people; bombs, drones, white phosphorous, mercenary death squads of African child soldiers, and a crippling naval blockade, all with more than a little help from their friends back in Washington. Hundreds of thousands murdered in cold blood. Even more starved, diseased, malnourished, most of them children. But just four years into this genocidal campaign and it’s all falling apart. That handsome young Lothario in Riyadh is left drowning in the dunes as his “allies” flee the scene of the crime.
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US support for Saudi war in Yemen has become political liability 1

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Press TV. Listen here.

The administration of US President Donald Trump is likely to reduce support for Saudi Arabia’s deadly military aggression in Yemen due to the political disadvantages for the US, both domestically and globally, says an American political analyst in Virginia.

“It appears that the Trump administration is trying to rein in the Saudi aggression in Yemen somewhat because it has become an international political liability; it has also become a domestic political liability” said Keith Preston, chief editor of AttacktheSystem.com.

The shift in policy is also partly due to Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign, Preston told Press TV on Friday.

“Plus, there’s the fact that the destabilization of Saudi Arabia threatens a lot of American holdings in that particular region, I think that an important motivating factor as well,” he added.

A group of Republican and Democratic lawmakers in the US Congress are making a new effort to end Saudi Arabia’s deadly war against the people of Yemen, amid international outrage over the Saudi regime’s bombing of a Yemeni prison that killed over 100 people.

The lawmakers are seeking to protect an amendment to the annual US defense policy bill, which prohibits the Pentagon from providing the spare parts that Saudi Arabia needs to keep its warplanes, which are mostly US-made, in operational status.

The measure also ends certain forms of intelligence-sharing between Washington and Riyadh.

PressTV-US reaches out to Houthis to end war as Saudi struggles

PressTV-US reaches out to Houthis to end war as Saudi strugglesThe US says it is for the first time in the past years in talks with Yemen’s Houthi Ansarullah movement to end the Saudi-led war against the impoverished country.

Trump has pledged to veto any bills that seek to undermine ties with Saudi Arabia as he did one earlier this year which banned a massive $8 billion arms sale to the kingdom.

Trump and his team have time and again touted Saudi Arabia as an important regional partner, which plays a vital role in keeping Israel secure while being considered a counterweight to Iran.

However, the war on Yemen, which has killed tens of thousands of people and caused near-famine conditions in the impoverished country, is drawing international attention.

A United Nations report released Tuesday said the US, UK and France may be complicit in war crimes in Yemen by arming and providing intelligence and logistics support to the Saudi-led coalition that starves civilians as a war tactic.

The report by a UN panel of experts accused the military coalition led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates of killing Yemeni civilians in air raids and deliberately denying them food in a country facing famine.

Yemen war: Vote in US Senate delivers rebuke to Trump Reply

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This is big news. Apparently, the political class in Congress is siding with the interests of the media class (the left-wing of capitalism) and these have diverged from the priorities of the Trump administration, which is clearly more concerned with the interests of the Israeli and Saudi regimes, and their domestic associates in the United States such as AIPAC, Exxon, and the armaments industry (the right-wing of capitalism).

BBC News

A child suffering from malnutrition in war-ravaged Yemen, 21 November

The US Senate has advanced a measure to withdraw American support for a Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen, in a blow to President Donald Trump.

Many senators are unhappy with Mr Trump’s response to the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defence Secretary Jim Mattis had urged senators not to back the motion, saying it would worsen the situation in Yemen.

However, senators voted 63-37 to take forward the bipartisan motion.

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Hunger, disease have killed 85,000 children under 5 during Yemen war, Save the Children says Reply

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It’s interesting how the MSM never said a word about the Saudi war in Yemen for years, until MBS bumped off a WaPo journalist, and the media realized they could use anti-Saudi sentiment as a weapon against Trump, which is actually quite helpful if it shifts the discourse away from the previous Russiahate line toward a new Saudihate line.

This is a fortunate turn of events. Now, if only Israel would take a bonesaw to a WaPo journalist.

NBC News/Associated Press.

SANAA, Yemen — An estimated 85,000 children under age 5 may have died of hunger and disease since the outbreak of Yemen’s civil war in 2015, an international aid group said Wednesday.

Save the Children said the “conservative” estimate is based on average mortality rates for Severe Acute Malnutrition, which the U.N. says has afflicted more than 1.3 million children since a Saudi-led coalition went to war with Yemen’s Houthi rebels in March 2015.

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Support the Houthis Reply

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By Nick Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Growing up I was obsessed with the counterculture of the 60’s and 70’s, so much so that I now instinctively associate a lot of it with my own childhood even though I grew up in the 90’s and 00’s. Shaved Fish and Let It Bleed play like soundtracks to my teenage years. Some of my first crushes were on righteous babes in arms like Angela Davis and Leila Khaled. And I spent hours pouring over my parents vintage magazines, devouring articles on the Black Panther Party and the Symbionese Liberation Army. What can I say, I was a weird fucking kid. But my fixation with radical chic felt very appropriate during the Orwellian miasma of the Bush years and in some very sad ways, it feels even more appropriate today.

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Keith Preston: US government complicit in Saudi crimes in Yemen Reply

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Press TV. Listen here.

The administration of US President Donald Trump’s unconditional support for Saudi Arabia despite the kingdom’s many crimes in Yemen makes Washington a complicit in the onslaught, says an American analyst.

Keith Preston, director of the Attackthesystem.org, made the remarks during an interview with Press TV about the White House’s continued backing of the Saudi-led military aggression against Yemen despite international outrage.

Earlier this week, as the months-long offensive by the Saudis and their regional allies to capture Yemen’s important port city of al-Hudaydah continued, Saudi commanders announced Wednesday that they had been able to block two key supply routes into the city, The Washington Post reported.

That was bad news for millions of people in Yemen who are struggling with hunger and deadly cholera outbreaks, as the city acts as a gateway for 70 percent of food and medicine supplies sent to the conflict-ridden country.

This is while the Saudi-led coalition has had the port city under aerial and maritime blockade since the beginning of the war in March 2015.

Despite all this, however, the Trump administration certified to Congress on Tuesday that the Saudis and their allies were “making every effort to reduce the risk of civilian casualties.”

The official notice was required for the Pentagon to be allowed to continue delivering weapons and intelligence to Riyadh despite the international view that civilians have now become the main target of the war.

“The American government is completely complicit in this in the sense that the American government, who is not only the world’s primary backer of the Saudi regime in terms of money, weapons and diplomatic support, but the United States has actually given the green light to Saudi Arabia and the UAE for the war in Yemen,” Preston told Press TV.

Referring to reports that US military forces are working closely with their American peers on the battlefront, the analyst said the cooperation was part of an Israeli-American plan to “undermine the influence of Iran in the region and by extension nations that are aligned with Iran.”

“This is a humanitarian catastrophe and the United States has escalated the humanitarian issue by attempting to restrict aid to Yemen as well,” he said, calling the situation in Yemen as one of the “most serious human rights problems in the world today.”

Who Cares About Dirty Brown Genocide? Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Uncategorized • Tags: ,

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

The scene was apocalyptic, like something out of a George Romero movie gone horribly wrong. Tiny bodies littered the shattered concrete, stained pitch black with soot and blood. Some of them were as still and stiff as calcified ventriloquist dummies, breathing nothing but smoke. Some of them rived in agony, mangled limbs throbbing and kicking, eyes rolled back in their battered little skulls as they screamed in agony to an indifferent god. The landscape that surrounds them is a bleak, smoldering, landfill overpopulated by a seemingly random collection of twisted metal and charred body parts; Arms, legs, heads, jagged fragments of bones and bubbling molten globs of shredded viscera, and every here and there a haunting sign of the casualties battered innocence; A doll with a heat warped plastic face, the busted half of a pink plastic lunchbox, and at the center of it all, a boy no older than 7, sitting upright, covered in his playmates blood, with an oversized UN-blue backpack still strapped to his bony shoulders, staring a thousand yards into an abyss that no one that young should ever see. They were children. They were all just children. And they were obliterated by an American bomb.

This was the latest chapter in the endless horror story called the Yemen Civil War. But it’s not a civil war. A civil war requires two sides on the same playing field. Whats going on in Yemen ceased to be a war at all long ago. This is a slaughter, a genocide, a holocaust. It’s latest victims were children on a school bus, coming home from a picnic, miles away from anything resembling a military installation. Over 40 dead, scores injured, many if not most of them under 10. This was a deliberate act of terrorism perpetrated by our “allie” Saudi Arabia with the full aid and support of these fine United States. We supplied the weapons. We fueled the planes. We provided the precise logistics that told our proxies exactly who they were murdering. We did everything but pull the goddamn trigger. And as usual nobody in this timezone or the next could be bothered to really give a shit.

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Counting the Dead in Yemen Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Uncategorized • Tags:

By Daniel Larison

The American Conservative

Kareem Fahim investigates the war on Yemen’s weirdly static official death toll of 10,000 casualties and finds that it is certainly much higher:

The overall death toll may have reached alarming levels, according to one independent tally. Data collected by ACLED, a group that studies conflicts, puts the death toll at nearly 50,000 people in the period between January 2016 and late July 2018.

That number includes combatants but excludes people not directly killed during the fighting — thousands of civilians who have died of malnutrition or cholera, for instance. Last year, Save the Children estimated that 130 children were dying every day because of “extreme hunger and disease.”

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The US-backed Coalition in Yemen is Trying to Trigger Another Massive Cholera Epidemic Reply

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By Randi Nord

Geopolitics Alert

cholera epidemic

Sana’a (GPA) – The U.S.-supported Saudi-led coalition in Yemen carried out multiple airstrike attacks across Yemen on Friday, Islam’s holy day. Although the raids were not absent of casualties, today’s airstrikes appeared to target vital civilian infrastructure rather than human life. The continual attacks on water wells and treatment facilities make it seem as though the U.S.-backed coalition is attempting to trigger another massive cholera epidemic.

Last year, over one million people contracted cholera in Yemen and over two thousand died.

U.S.-backed warplanes belonging to the Saudi coalition launched at least five airstrikes on the Sana’a International Airport. The attacks took place immediately following the departure of UN envoy, Martin Griffith. Griffith had just met with the leader of the Yemeni Ansarullah revolution, Abdulmalik Al-Houthi to discuss the conflict and humanitarian disaster.

The coalition against Yemen has hit Sana’a’s airport over 160 times since the war began despite the fact that the Saudi-imposed blockade forced the airport to shut down. Additional airstrikes on Friday targeted a farm, communication tower, and plastic factory.

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Keith Preston: Wahhabi Ideology behind Shiite Genocide in Saudi Town Reply

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Tasnim News Agency

کیث پرستون

TEHRAN (Tasnim) – An American political analyst described the extremist Wahhabi ideology dominant in Saudi Arabia as a driving force behind the killings of Shiites in the kingdom’s besieged town of Awamiyah in the Qatif region.

“The Wahhabi ideology is very convenient for the Saudis because while the Saudi regime is primarily motivated by geopolitical concerns, and expanding its own political influence in the region, the Wahhabi ideology creates a pretext for these massacres of the Shiite people in Yemen and Qatif,” Keith Preston, the chief editor and director of attackthesystem.com, told the Tasnim news agency.

 

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