Iranians and Saudis Fight a Proxy War in Yemen
Iran is now waging a proxy war against Saudi Arabia and Yemen by supporting a radical sect of Zaydi Shiites described as the Houthis, after the founder of their movement. The Iranians aren’t merely trying to destabilize Arab countries that are aligned too closely to the U.S.; they are trying to create a Shiite empire extending from Iran through southern Iraq to Syria — where the Alawites, an offshoot of Shiite Muslims, are in power — to Lebanon. Now Iran is trying to create a Shiite enclave in northern Yemen. If Iran gets nuclear weapons, it is easy to predict where they will go next: Bahrain, whose population is majority Shiite, and Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, which conveniently for Iran is 75% Shiite and is the location of 90% of the country’s oil.
The fighting in northern Yemen between the rebels and the Yemeni government has sharply escalated in recent weeks, with violence spilling over the Saudi border. The Saudis have responded by reclaiming their territory, bombing the rebels within a buffer zone six miles south of the border, and beginning a naval blockade in the area to prevent arms from flowing in from outside the peninsula. There is also a report that the Saudis are sending thousands of troops to provide logistical support for the Yemeni military and are financing them with $5 million per day.
Iran has reacted to the Saudi intervention by calling for a “collective approach” (read: negotiate with Iran for a settlement in their favor) in solving the crisis and offering its help in restoring stability, a not-so-subtle way of hinting that they hold the keys for a solution. The unfortunate truth is that the Iranians aren’t bluffing. The Yemenis have captured an Iranian ship delivering weapons to the Houthi rebels and arrested the crewmen: four Iranians and one Indian. The Revolutionary Guards are reportedly training some of the rebels at camps in Eritrea and shipping arms to them via the port of Asab.
A former Houthi official has confirmed that the rebels are receiving Iranian funding and training from the Revolutionary Guards’ elite Quds Force and Hezbollah. He said that members of Hezbollah may have been killed in Yemen. The rebels have fired Katyusha rockets, the same kind of weapon often used by Hezbollah, and even flew the terrorist group’s flag in 2004. The authorities have also closed a hospital in Sana after it was found to be used by the Iranians to fundraise for the rebels and to gather intelligence, and at least six arms depots containing Iranian-manufactured machine guns, rockets, and other weapons have been found.
And, of course, no one cares if the Saudis bomb civilians, after all, Arabs killing Arabs isn’t news. It’s only news if Israel defends itself.
Having said that, wait until Iran has nuclear weapons (thanks to Obama. Then, all you can expect is that the Gulf states, Saudi Arabia included, will do their very best to appease Iran. And, aside from diminished U.S. influence in the Middle-East, Iran will push for BIG increases in the price of oil (if they don’t start an atomic war first).
The world is set to pay a big price for Obama’s appeasement.
It’s a shame both sides can’t lose.
One can only imagine the arms race that will be ignited if Iran gets nuclear weapons. The United States tends to focus on what the effects of a nuclear-armed Iran will be on either Israel or the United States. Unfortunately, the Sunni/Shia struggle has been going on for centuries and shows no signs of disappearing anytime soon. So if Iran gets nuclear weapons, how soon do you think it will be before Saudi Arabia gets its own weapons of mass destruction (either nuclear, chemical, or biological)? Saudi Arabia has the money to buy just about anything, and if they can’t get nuclear weapons they most certainly can afford cheaper, more available, chemical or biological weapons (especially from cash-starved Russia, who used to make a lot of them). Obama does not realize that by not confronting and stopping Iran he’s about to ignite not only a possible confrontation between Israel and Iran, but also a massive arms race in the gulf region as well. Situations like this have an uncanny knack of spinning out of control rapidly, just like a possible nuclear confrontation between India and Pakistan could explode at any minute. All of the Western nations need to really understand that if they don’t stop Iran NOW from getting nuclear weapons, it could ignite a major war in the region that could, quite possibly, have nothing to do with the United States but everything to do with the centuries-old hatred between Sunnis and Shias. The West ignores this problem at its own risk.
What on earth are you talking about?? Al Qaeda is working WITH the Saudis and the Yemeni government fight the Houthi rebels. The basic structure of this war is Houthi rebels and Iran VS. Saudi, al Qaeda and the Yemeni government.
The Yemeni government and al Qaeda have often cooperated with each other. The Yemeni government can’t offer the financial support to al Qaeda that Saudi Arabia does (the majority of funding for al Qaeda comes from our Saudi allies, as do the majority of al Qaeda militants) According to the Council on Foreign Relations:
According to the Long War Journal:
Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh recently struck a deal with Ayman Zawahiri, and Yemen is in the process of emptying its jails of known jihadists. The Yemeni government is recruiting these established jihadists to attack its domestic enemies as it refrains from serious counter-terror measures against the newly formed Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The tripartite relationship between the Yemeni regime and al Qaeda enables all participants to further their goals at the expense of national, regional, and global security.
News reports from Yemen detail a meeting in Sana’a between President Saleh and a number of so-called reformed jihadists late January. The militants demanded freedom for imprisoned associates. A presidential committee identified 170 jihadists eligible for release, and 95 were released Saturday. Other reports indicate that authorities have cleared for release a total of 300 of the 400 total suspected al Qaeda in prison.
In the latest round of negotiations, Saleh reportedly asked the militants to engage in violence against the southern mobility movement. The southern uprising is bent on achieving the independence of South Yemen and is a substantial threat to Saleh’s grip on power.
According to the Council on Foreign Relations:
Yemen was second only to Saudi Arabia in being the source of soldiers for the international Islamist brigade that fought against Soviet forces in Afghanistan and that gave birth to al-Qaeda. Thousands—perhaps tens of thousands—of Yemenis fought in Afghanistan or trained in al-Qaeda’s camps there. Yemeni officials say that not every Yemeni veteran of the war in Afghanistan is an al-Qaeda member; nevertheless, Yemeni prisoners make up one of the largest national contingents of detainees at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba
Yes, Iran is an enemy, but this war illustrates one of the worst problems that arise from our alliance with the terror-supporting Saudi state. If we help the Saudis in this fight, our soldiers will be fighting and dying to defend al Qaeda’s interests. We’ll be helping al Qaeda regain control of a very strategically important area.
Whoever supports our alliance with Saudi/al Qaeda (and who is not a member of the “Carnegie Endowment for International Peace” or the State Department) please raise your hands.
When there are no more Kaffirs and Jews to kill the Mohammedans will turn on each other its been like this for 1400 years so why would it stop now. The Hate and Death CULT of Islam need VIOLENCE to justify its existence.
Our only hope is the impulse for freedom in the Iranian people. The people Obama ignores.
More on the brotherly (close but often feuding) relationship between the Yemeni government and al Qaeda from the Weekly Standard
As if there were not enough reasons to be worried about what is going on inside Yemen, the Yemeni government has decided to release more than 170 al Qaeda suspects. Reportedly, 95 of them have been released already.
This news comes at an inauspicious time. As Steve Hayes and I discussed in a recent piece in THE WEEKLY STANDARD, the Obama administration is considering sending dozens of Yemenis currently detained at Guantanamo back to their homeland. There are a number of obvious problems with this plan. President Saleh’s regime cooperates with al Qaeda and related jihadist groups against their common enemies, including Shiite tribes. Al Qaeda terrorists, including some of the USS Cole plotters, have a habit of “escaping” from prison. Yemen is home to a substantial recruiting network, comprised of veteran jihadists and radical clerics who indoctrinate impressionable minds and send them off for jihad. Their recruits have fought around the world, including Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya, Iraq and elsewhere. And Osama bin Laden has decades-old familial and tribal roots in Yemen that he and al Qaeda rely on…
This conflict is yet another example that the “middle east” problem has nothing to do with Israel’s “intransigence”, and everything to do with Islamic imperial ambitions. The war against Israel is just a symptom of the real problem. Yet, to its great risk, the western world, by focusing on Israel as being the fulcrum to achieving peace and blaming it for not doing enough in that direction, shows wilful disregard to the real and existential danger to the world outside the middle east. Symbolically, it reminds me of Jews being blamed for creating the plague in the Middle Ages as weapon against Christians (although Jews were affected just like everybody else), while the world remained ignorant of the true cause. At least then science was not advanced enough to identify the cause. In this case, though, the cause is known and is amply demonstrated by the different fronts at which Islamic countries and insurgencies fight non-Islamic entities as well as by intra-Islamic wars for hegemony, none of which have anything to do with Israel. To draw an analogy, imagine a physician blaming the gum of a patient for curvy caused boil rather than focusing on the real cause of the patient’s illness, the deficiency of vitamin C. Such a physician would be not just a fool, but a grossly incompetent one. Yet, in the world of politics, at least as practiced today in the Western world, politicians engaging in the same diagnostic folly are considered wise and astute. Go Figure.
The military capabilities of the Iranians are expanding rapidly. Not only that–their ability to manufacture sophisticated weapons is expanding as well. Read this and think hard about the implications.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_equipment_manufactured_in_Iran
7. Mary Madigan: The conflicts in the muslim world make for strange bedfellows and marriages of convenience-Iran, even though fighting through proxies in one part of the world against AQ (afghanistan) may be aiding them in another. The operative goal of Iran is to cause instability in the states (Iraq) where it thinks it can gain advantage, and if aiding AQ will do that, then they will do that.
The military capabilities of the Iranians are expanding rapidly.
Yes, the Iranian government is a serious problem. So are Saudi supporters of terrorism. If we only deal with one of these enemies, the terrorists win. Better to find a way to deal with both problems.
Since we’ve been working with Saudi supporters of terrorism for a long time, they are pretty easy for us to deal with without any large scale military action. We can learn some lessons from how the Russians and Iranians dealt with Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shi’ite leader who was once called the most dangerous man in Iraq. When the Iranians and Russians decided that they were tired of working with him, he disappeared for months, and his armies were decimated. I think he ate some bad sushi…?
When are the Saudis going to get over their bigotry and accept that Israel should be a regional ally? They certainly share many common interests.
A joint Israeli – Saudi strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities is far more likely to succeed than Israel alone. Together they could also deal with Iran’s direct and proxy retaliations far better than either alone.
11. Mary Madigan:
I hate to say it, but as long as we are connected at the hip to the Saudis…we are going to go from compromise to compromise in terms of our own security. Just imagine how many nuclear power plants that could have been built with $787 billion…
The operative goal of Iran is to cause instability in the states (Iraq) where it thinks it can gain advantage, and if aiding AQ will do that, then they will do that.
But in Yemen, it is clear that al Qaeda and the Yemeni government (and the Saudi government) are more closely allied than al Qaeda and Iran ever were.
And yes, the conflicts in the muslim world make for strange bedfellows and marriages of convenience, but there is no reason for the American government to support Saudi al Qaeda or Iran. The state department will tell us that we (and Israel) must ally with Saudi Arabia for economic and political reasons, but that’s just not true. Many members of our government profit greatly from their friendship with the Saudis, but the American people just suffer because of this relationship. We don’t even get most of our oil from the region. Most of our oil comes from the Western Hemisphere.
The people who tell us that we must be allied with the supporters of al Qaeda are lying. They don’t HAVE to be allied with the Sauds, they WANT to be allied with them. And they will do anything they can to maintain this alliance, including placing the blame for Saudi actions on any number of usual suspects.
According to state department spin, first it was Saddam who was allied with al Qaeda, now it’s Iran. Give me a break.
14. Mary Madigan:
Yep. Word. Agreed.
Two Words:NUCLEAR POWER.
NUCLEAR POWER
The Russians are helping the Iranians with their nuclear power. After we deal with the Iranian government, and after we spend tons of money and after we waste thousands of man hours dealing with Iran, the Russians will simply move on and supply some other America-hating regime with nukes. I’d guess Syria will be next, but the possibilities are endless.
The goal of the Russian game is to deplete our economy by making us play unnecessary wargames. The best way to deal with this is to remove the middleman. If we have any threats to make, make them against Russia, not small and relatively worthless regimes like Iran. Yes, we need to decimate the current Iranian regime, but we need to put the nuclear issue where it belongs – with Russia.
We’re playing the same game of nuclear poker that we’ve been playing for years, but for some odd reason, we’re afraid to face the facts about the real players. I don’t know why – I guess it’s because we’ve all gotten so used to terrorist wars of proxy, we can’t face old-fashioned MAD.
Attorney General Holder has just announced that any Yemeni, Saudi or Iranian captured (I been “arrested”) in these military conflicts will be tried in NYC as soon as the courtroom is available. The alternative of a written citation (“ticket”) is also being considered.
I keep waiting for HizbAllah to attack us wondering why – and finally it is revealed. The Wahhabis are duking it out with Houthi Shi’ites, and HizbAllah is part of the Houthi alliance – the new Persian empire.
It’s good to know these things….