Operation Gold Beard: Week 2, Day 1.

Last Thursday (26/3/15) Saudi Arabia launched a war against it's neighbour Yemen which sits on the Gulf of Aden. This was done in order to better allow Saudi Arabia to conduct Islamist insurgencies against African nations, chiefly Somalia and Kenya.

With the exception of that first night of bombings the Saudis have been careful to limit themselves to only Israeli levels of brutality. As such they have focused their attacks on military targets such as airfields, barracks and mainly weapons stores. On Sunday (29/3/15) the Saudis claimed that they had succeeded in destroying all of these targets. However on Monday (30/3/15) night they carried out a strike against a Scud missile store just outside Yemen's capital Sana'a. With several missiles destroying several hundred missiles this resulted in a huge explosion that lit up the night sky and sent a blast wave across the surrounding area.

Also on Monday Egyptian warships who have been press ganged into the war due to the roughly USD40bn in financial support the Saudis provide began bombarding the southern port city of Aden with naval artillery. As I explained during Israel's 2014 war in Gaza artillery is considered an area weapon. That means that rather then aiming for a specific target the gunners simply blast away at a wide area in the hope of hitting something. As such the indiscriminate use of artillery against a civilian area such as a city can be considered a war crime and many people certainly made that accusation against Israel.

Taken together these two developments really serve to underline just how false the Saudis justification for starting this war is. Far from being an operation in support of a national government that is facing an insurgency it is a war between two nation states. As such as the invading army the Saudis main task is to establish a beach-head in Aden in order to land its invasion force. We of course are being told that Aden is the stronghold of the Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi whom the Saudis continue to claim as Yemen's President. However Hadi is currently in Saudi Arabia and it is taking a naval bombardment to allow him to set foot in Aden.

Since the weekend the Saudis have started to run out of military targets to strike in Yemen but they have so far failed to overthrow the Yemeni government. In fact the Yemenis have continued to make advances against Islamist positions in the nations south. This seems to have prompted the Saudis to expand the scope of their air operations from military targets to civilian ones. Yesterday (1/4/15) for example the Saudis struck a dairy in the western city of Hudaydah killing 35 civilians.

On Monday there was a much more serious incident when the Saudis struck the UN run Al-Mazraq refugee camp in the Hajjah province killing between 40 and 45 civilians. As with hospitals refugee camps are granted a special protected status under the laws of war and the during the last Gaza war the UN was an extremely vocal critic of Israel over perceived threats to refugee camps. 

Expecting a similarly robust international response the Saudis first accused the Yemeni government of attacking the camp and when that became impossible they instead claimed they had been targeting a Yemeni military vehicle that had been parked at the gates of the camp. This is direct reference to a incident during the last Gaza war in which the Israeli's carried out a targeted strike against a vehicle outside a UN refugee camp in Rafah. Despite that strike destroying the target vehicle without damaging the camp the UN still accused Israel of a crime against humanity.

Amid a week of aerial and naval bombardment all of the foreign national civilians in Yemen have been screaming to be evacuated. On Monday the Saudis gave permission for Pakistani nationals to be evacuated. On Tuesday Indian nationals were given permission to evacuate. Although the Yemeni government has given permission for all foreign nationals to leave the fate of Egyptian nationals is still being blocked by the Saudis most likely in an effort to provide an excuse for an Egyptian ground force to launch an incursion into Yemeni territory.

On Wednesday the Saudis gave permission for Russian nationals to be evacuated. However as the Russian aircraft was approaching Saudi controlled airspace that permission was revoked and Saudi jets were deployed to chase the Russian passenger jet off. Around twenty minutes later Saudi jets carried out an airstrike against the Russian consulate in Aden which is considered sovereign Russian territory. Although the building did not suffer a direct hit it was extensively damaged in the attack.

Possibly as part of negotiations of allow Pakistani nationals to be allowed to evacuate Yemen on Monday Pakistan formally joined the Saudi war on Yemen. This is by far the most alarming development of the week because Pakistan is a nuclear armed state and through the Abdul Qadeer Kahn network has a reputation for being reckless about who it shares those weapons with. The roughly USD3bn of financial aid the Saudis give to Pakistan is likely to buy them a lot of influence especially with a large proportion of it being spent of Whabbist Madrassas.

US President Barack Obama's response to this rapidly developing crisis has bordered on the insane. Rather then using the US' permenant seat to demand the UN Security Council (UNSC) immediately meets to contain the threat Obama instead responded by finally releasing some USD3bn of weapons to Egypt. 

This weapons deal was suspended in 2013 when the Egyptian people rose up to overthrow the Islamist and incompetent Mohamed Morsi. The US did release a small part of it - Apache helicopters - at the end of 2013 in an effort to get the Egyptians to force through their less then ideal constitution. The US then used the constitution as an excuse to withhold the rest of the deal despite Egypt being forced to fight the Islamic State or Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in the Sinai. However now that Egypt has decided to join a sectarian Islamist war of aggression Obama seems to be falling over himself to provide them with weapons.

That is reckless in the extreme because this situation rapidly needs the UNSC intervene to cool it down. For example Russia has had to put up with a lot of Saudi aggression over the years. If they start viewing the war on Yemen as a direct and active threat to their citizens they will be entitled to use all the force at their disposal to eliminate that threat. 

12:15 on 2/4/15 (UK date).