An unholy alliance: UAE flew Daesh terrorists into Yemen’s killing fields?

Alexander Rubinstein

The de facto alliance between the US with Saudi Arabia, the UAE, al-Qa’eda and now Daesh in Yemen has led to one of the worst humanitarian disasters in modern history,

These were the remarks of US-based journalist Alexander Rubinstein for MintPress in his report, titled: “An Unholy Alliance: UAE Flew Daesh Terrorists into Yemen’s Killing Fields”.

Ali Abdullah al-Bujairi — a Yemeni politician who served as a senior member on the failed UN-brokered transitional government and as Yemen’s ambassador to Iraq under former president Ali Abdullah Saleh — is holding the United Arab Emirates responsible for facilitating a transfer of senior Daesh militants into war-torn Yemen.

He said: “The UAE has recently transferred Daesh commander Abu Bakr az-Zokhri of Sudanese, nom de guerre, Khaibar as-Somali, from Iraq to Aden to recruit and strengthen Daesh militants in Yemen.”

Since the toppling of the so-called caliphate of Daesh — with Raqqa, Syria as its capital — the terrorist outfit has gained a foothold in a number of other countries. In Afghanistan, the US is helping to facilitate the terrorist group’s spread.

According to the 2018 Global Terrorism Index report from the Institute for Economics & Peace, “despite its loss of territory in Iraq and Syria Daesh was still active in ten countries. The collapse of Daesh in Iraq and Syria has moved the group’s activities elsewhere, in particular to the Maghreb and Sahel regions, most notably in Libya, Niger, and Mali, and Southeast Asia, particularly the Philippines.”

The report states: “In 2017, the terror group’s reach was felt in many corners of the world. Daesh committed attacks in 286 cities around the world in four different regions, that is, Asia-Pacific, Europe, West Asia-North Africa, and the Russia-Eurasia region. However, those hit hardest by the group’s terror have mostly been in West Asia and North Africa.”

It further said: “Of all Daesh attacks, 98 percent of incidents and 98 percent of deaths occurred within the West Asia-North Africa region. Ninety percent of all terror attacks and 81 percent of terror-related deaths from Daesh occurred in Iraq alone.”

These figures, however, do not include Daesh’ chapter in Afghanistan, nor does it include Daesh affiliates in Egypt.

The campaign by the US with Saudi Arabia, the UAE, al-Qa’eda, and now Daesh in Yemen has led to one of the worst humanitarian disasters in modern history, with large portions of the population at risk for starvation, millions displaced, and scores of civilians and children killed.

While the Saudi-led coalition’s dealings with the Yemen affiliate of Daesh remain largely unexplored, the main partners have their own ties to al-Qa’eda in the country. This unholy alliance meant to depose the popular Ansarallah Movement, has seen the coalition, of which the supposedly democratic regime of the US became a member without prior authorization from Congress, work hand-in-glove with al-Qa’eda.

According to the UN Security Council, actually little is known about the presence of Daesh in Yemen, with the numbers of fighters believed to be in the low-to mid-hundreds.

The US claims it conducted a total of 36 airstrikes against terrorist groups in Yemen in 2018, but the overwhelming majority targeted al-Qa’eda, and the US has not struck Daesh in Yemen.

While Daesh has attacked Ansarallah and Shi’a Muslim targets in Yemen, it has no territory. Al-Qa’eda on the other hand, controls large swaths of the southeast.

While the extent and nature of U.S. relations with Daesh in Yemen is unclear, its relationship with its regional rival al-Qa’eda, which is best described as that of “frenemies,” is more widely known.

In December, the US Congress voted to end support for Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen, but the US remains authorized to fight on Yemeni soil because of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). The bill allows use of force against groups allegedly associated with the 9/11/2001 incidents of New York.

The US, however, was a member of the Saudi-led coalition for years. This partnership became unpalatable to mainstream media pundits and audiences over the summer when a US-made bomb was used by Saudi Arabia on a bus in an airstrike that left 40 children dead.

While al-Qa’eda is supposed to be an ostensible enemy of the United States, it appears to be a friend of a friend in the very least. In February, it was revealed that Saudi Arabia and the UAE gave US-made weapons to al-Qa’eda fighters in the country.

CNN reports: Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, its main partner in the war, have used US-manufactured weapons as a form of currency to buy the loyalties of militias or tribes, bolster chosen armed actors, and influence the complex political landscape. One of those militias linked to al-Qa’eda, the Abu Abbas brigade, now possesses US-made Oshkosh armored vehicles, paraded in a 2015 show of force through the city.

Abu Abbas, the founder, was declared a terrorist by the US in 2017, but the group still enjoys support from the Saudi coalition and was absorbed into the coalition-supported 35th Brigade of the Yemeni army.

In October 2015, military forces loyal to the government boasted on Saudi-and UAE-backed media that the Saudis had airdropped US-made TOW anti-tank missiles on the same frontline where al-Qa’eda had been known to operate at the time.

Speculation that the Saudi-led coalition was working with terrorists was finally legitimized in the mainstream media over the summer, when the Associated Press revealed that “the coalition cut secret deals with al-Qa’eda fighters, paying some to leave key cities and towns and letting others retreat with weapons, equipment and wads of looted cash, [while] hundreds more were recruited to join the coalition itself.”

Shockingly, the AP revealed that key participants in the pacts said the US was aware of the arrangements and held off on any drone strikes. Coalition-backed militias actively recruit al-Qa’eda militants, or those who were recently members, because they’re considered exceptional fighters.

In one case, a tribal mediator who brokered a deal between the Emiratis and al-Qa’eda even gave the terrorists a farewell dinner.

The US had been fighting on two fronts in Yemen: one against al-Qa’eda, and another alongside the Saudi-led coalition, which includes the UAE, against the legal Ansarallah-led government of Yemen, which is of course, the prime target of this unholy alliance. In contrast to the 36 bombing missions the US claimed to have conducted against al-Qa’eda in Yemen in 2018, the US refueled fighter jets of the Saudi-led coalition more than 9,000 times between March 2015 and July 2017.

This dynamic has fostered an alliance of convenience between the US and al-Qa’eda, materialized by the flow of US-made weapons from the US to Persian Gulf sheikhdoms, which, in violation of US rules, use them as bargaining chips with the terrorists.

In fact, as AP reported, citing a senior American official: “The US was aware of an al-Qa’eda presence among the anti-Ansarallah ranks.” Even the Saudi-backed fugitive president of Yemen, Mansur Hadi, “tapped” Adnan Rouzek to be a “top military commander.” Rouzek was a senior al-Qa’eda official who escaped from prison in 2008 with other members and continues to be photographed with known al-Qa’eda operatives. His militia under Hadi “became notorious for kidnappings and street killings, with one online video showing its masked members shooting a kneeling, blindfolded man.”

In November 2017, Hadi picked Rouzek to coordinate the military campaign and serve as a top commander of a new fighting force, and gave him $12 million for a new offensive.

Another coalition-backed warlord on the US list of designated terrorists due to his ties to al-Qa’eda is Sheikh Abul Abbas.

In 2017, Abul-Abbas’ forces attacked security headquarters and freed a number of al-Qa’eda suspects. According to a security official, though the attack was reported to the coalition, the perpetrators were rewarded with “40 more pickup trucks.”

The security official requesting anonymity, said: “The more we warn, the more they are rewarded. Al-Qa’eda leaders have armored vehicles given to them by the US-backed Saudi-UAE coalition while security commanders don’t have such vehicles.”

He added: “Elements of the US military are clearly aware that much of what the US is doing in Yemen is aiding al-Qa’eda while pretending to be its enemy.”

While Saudi Arabia has been roundly denounced for its attacks on civilians and the infrastructure in Yemen, particularly since the unrelated slaying of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul, Turkey, less attention has been paid to UAE war crimes in the country. NGOs and reporters have charged the Emiratis of running a network of secret prisons in the south that use torture as a feature of detention.

 While the UAE is now being charged with helping to spread Daesh into new theaters of conflict, the US is doing the same in Afghanistan since last year.

According to the Global Terrorism Index report: “The Afghanistan-based Daesh affiliate “was responsible for 14 percent of terrorism deaths, or 658 people, in 2017, a 26 percent increase from the prior year. In neighboring Pakistan, Daesh affiliates were “responsible for 233 deaths.”

Meanwhile, the two deadliest attacks in South Asia” in 2017 were committed by Daesh in Afghanistan and Pakistan, killing 93 and 91 persons respectively. 

On repeated occasions last year, Russia and Iran have charged the US with using unmarked helicopters to transfer Daesh fighters into the Haska Meyna region in Afghanistan.

In March of 2018, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif told a congregation of diplomats, academics and journalists in Pakistan: “We see intelligence, as well as eyewitness accounts, that Daesh fighters, terrorists, were airlifted from battle zones, rescued from battle zones, including recently from the prison of Haska [Meyna].

He said: “This time, it wasn’t unmarked helicopters. They were American helicopters, taking Daesh out of Haska prison.

“Where did they take them? Now, we don’t know where they took them, but we see the outcome. We see more and more violence in Pakistan, more and more violence in Afghanistan, taking a sectarian flavor.”

Tehran Summit: Putting the Last Nail in the Coffin of Terrorists in Syria

TEHRAN (FNA)- The presidents of Iran, Russia and Turkey are meeting for a third summit in Tehran to end the Syrian conflict.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and his Russian and Turkish counterparts Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan are also scheduled to have bilateral talks on the sidelines of the tripartite summit on Friday, September 7. The three presidents previously met in the Russian resort city of Sochi and the Turkish capital Ankara, where they discussed developments in Syria, among other things.

A major item on this summit agenda is the terror-held Northwestern province of Idlib which President Bashar al-Assad wants to recapture. Iran and Russia are the main allies of the Damascus and their military support tipped the balance of the seven-year war in government’s favor. Turkey has backed rebels seeking to oust the government but since late 2016 it has been working closely with Iran and Russia to avoid the fate of Qatar and Saudi Arabia who have been excluded from the equation in Syria, and maintain its presence on the stage.

At any rate, the three leaders have agreed to consider further joint efforts to ensure long-term normalization of the situation in the Arab country. This includes bilateral talks and discussing further measures aimed at finally liquidating the hotbed of international terrorism in Syria, where according to the United Nations the conflict has killed more than 400,000 people since 2011, and made millions more refugees.

The discussions further look at promoting the process of a political settlement with the opposition groups (not Salafi, Takfiri, Wahhabi terrorists), including creating the conditions for the return of refugees and the internally displaced. Unlike the United States and its allies which seek to prolong the war, Rouhani, Putin and Erdogan back Syria peace talks based in the Kazakh capital of Astana (Astana Process), aimed at reinforcing, rather than undermining, a parallel UN peace process in Geneva.

On the other hand, Iran and Russia could speed up normalization of the situation in Syria through Turkey's companionship. The good news is that Turkey is looking for new allies and is in the anti-US camp. Turkey has come so close to Iran that it has informed Washington of its defiance of the US sanctions policy against Tehran. Ties are also warming between Turkey and Russia, even though they supported opposing sides in the war and Turkey shot down a Russian warplane before. Now thanks to the Tehran Summit, Erdogan backs an Iranian-Russian truce plan for four areas in Syria, and has sent troops to assist in its execution. All in all, the Friday summit means collaboration because of common interests among Iran, Russia and Turkey happening at the right time and the right place.

They meet at a sensitive time. Defying Trump, Russian air strikes have resumed against Qaeda-allied rebels in Northwestern Idlib province. The Syrian Army is also preparing a phased offensive to regain the "nest of terrorists". The province and surrounding areas is the last major enclave held by Qaeda-allied insurgents fighting the Syrian government, such as the Nusra Front.

With the foreign-backed terrorist groups still operating there, the government cannot start rebuilding the country. Damascus cannot put in place the legal and regulatory authorities to implement its vision of reconstruction as a process of stabilization when the country is still in the midst of various regional and international tensions and rivalries. With its military victory close at hand in Idlib, the government can use reconstruction to re-impose law and order.

For all intents and purposes, the Tehran Summit means the structure, governance and organization of post-conflict reconstruction in Syria are settled issues. The government has consolidated its dominance over the levers of reconstruction, rendering it virtually impervious to external pressure. The American hope, however modest, that its terror proxies in Idlib might someday set the stage for external actors to engage in partition programming in Syria, or through interventions influence the course of reconstruction and political process, is deeply misguided and out of picture now. 

In brief, much has been accomplished this year in the campaign against terrorism in Syria. This struggle will require further vigilance, perseverance and sacrifice on the part of all parties involved. The Tehran Summit will help end the seven-year conflict and liquidate the hotbed of international terrorism in embattled Syria.

At the same time, it will help normalize the situation, promote the process of a political settlement, create the conditions for the return of refugees and internally displaced, herald international reconstruction support and funds, and take away any remaining pretext for the United States and its allies to occupy the country further and destabilize the entire region for some illicit interests and designs.

Saudi Sectarianism: A Disease Characterized by Hardening of the Categories

By Abu Dharr

Deceptions, dishonesties, defamations, denigrations — these are the words that summarize the attitude of individuals, the media, and institutions that have been and still are contentious toward the trailblazing efforts of a leadership and population who are pioneering a momentous change within the human family. This begins with its Islamic members. Obviously we cannot cover the broad range of cantankerous characters and grumpy governments that have displayed their combination of ignorance and malice toward an Iran that is Islamic and a leadership that is free from foreign exploitation and domestic manipulation. What concerns us is a particular type of Islamic literati who perceive of “Iran” as an existential threat — so much so that Israel has become their political pal and strategic supporter.

These “Islamic pundits” are in high demand by the corporate mass media to convince their particular audience that Iran is pursuing an agenda of control, manipulation, domination, and hegemony! These pundits are located in an assortment of countries — some of them Muslim and others foreign. Briefly, their probe and breakdown of Islamic Iran relies on two canards. The first is that Iran is in reality a sectarian nation-state. The second is that Iran is a “Majusi” (Magian/Zoroastrian) country. They never refer to the Iranian people or the Iranian government with the word Islamic. The people in Iran, according to their descriptions, are either Persian, Safawis, Shi‘is or some other description that sounds like it is incompatible with Islam.

One of the falsehoods, which can only be peddled to the naive, is the conflation, by some of these commentators, of Iran’s Safawi past with its Islamic present. The sectarian bug has circulated so profoundly in the bloodstream of these analysts that they no longer are able to realize that Islamic Iran has broken away from its past Safawi sectarianism as surely as it broke away from its contemporary Pahlavi interventionism. It should be noted here that even though there is a strong Islamic current in today’s Turkey, that current carries within it a deep-seated affinity with its Ottoman past and wants to compel a Pax ‘Uthmania (Ottomanica) wherever it can extend its Islamic influence. There is no doubt that both histories (Persian and Turkic) had elements of a sectarian trend in them, as there is no doubt that both countries still have sectarian trends within them today. The difference is that the Islamic inclination in Turkey with all its secular foils has not been able to make a clean break from the mistakes of the past (without disparaging the accomplishments of that same past) and join hands with Islamic Iran on a post-sectarian strategy that has the very real potential of reviving the Muslim Ummah.

With the prudent guidance of its historically experienced ‘ulama and decision makers, Islamic Iran has been, with Allah’s helping hand, able to tame the sectarian beast within its own ranks, and therefore muzzle the voices of its schismatic Shi‘is. This was most recently demonstrated by the vocal objection of the committed ‘ulama in Islamic Iran to the Shirazi schismatic and divisive Shi‘is whose client relationship with not-so-great Britain was presented to the public without any “Shi‘i”-first bias. Compare the frank and brave drawing of a red line between the conviction of the “Shi‘i” Imams and “Shi‘is” of Isma‘il Safawi’s conviction. And here you may even go a step further and ask yourself: will the time come when members of the “Sunni” Islamic movements have the candor and courage to draw their red line between the conviction of the “Sunni” khulafa’ and the “Sunnis” of Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s conviction? The Safawi dynasty produced generations of “Shi‘i” fanatics. Likewise, the Wahhabi dynasty is responsible for generations of “Sunni” fanatics. The difference is the Safawi dynasty is long gone and dead, even though there are still pockets of their fanaticism — as subtle and substantial as it is in its own enclaves — that linger on here and there, especially in scattered communities from its starting point in Tabriz (hundreds of years ago) to its headquarters (nowadays) in London.

But the Wahhabi dynasty is still alive. And there are more than just pockets of Wahhabis and their vicious fanatics located throughout the world. Their influence, unlike the subtlety of their Safawi sectarian counterparts, is barefaced and brazen. Their notorious call to arms via their takfiri creed should be a wakeup call for the “Sunni” Islamic movements, and especially for Turkey. Their crimes against Muslims resulted in smoldering countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and perhaps more yet to come.

The analysts and authorities who are peddling an anti-Islamic oratory when they do express themselves against Islamic self-governance in Iran never explain to us why the Saudi-Wahhabi strategy of political sectarianism (they claim to represent the Sunnis of the world) and its officials are entering into a political marriage with the Zionist bandits who stole Palestine and dispossessed millions of “Sunni” Palestinians! Can these analysts explain and tell us whether it is a coincidence that Saudi-Wahhabi spokespersons happen to be bad-mouthing Islamic Iran and sweet-talking Zionist Israel at the same time?!

The malicious minds of the debased British diplomats and spies did very well in recruiting the Saudi-Wahhabi dynasty to the colonialist, imperialist, and Zionist causes. The degree of their success can be gauged by the fact that hundreds of thousands of otherwise sincere Muslims were conscripted into imperialist and Zionist wars against the teachings of Islam. The wars in Syria and Yemen would have been impossible to execute without a “religious” justification. The Wahhabi-Salafi underlings of the Saudi ruling family were turned into convenient recruiters for the wars that are raging in and around the Holy Land. And if there are Wahhabi-Salafi ‘ulama who object or may object to this abuse of Islam by the Saudi functionaries of Tel Aviv and Washington, well then, lock them up. And that is where many of them are today: in Saudi prisons. They are left to hang there — high and dry. No one seems to care for them. Barely anyone mentions them. When Muhammad bin Salman (MBS) apprehended and imprisoned hundreds of millionaires and billionaires the mainstream media was a cacophony of news about their most celebrated one: al-Walid ibn Talal… along with a few others. But no one in the mainstream media mentions Hasan Farhan al-Maliki, or Salman al-‘Awdah, or the hundreds of other scholars who are languishing behind bars.

The “intellectual poison” that has injured our understanding of Islam and corrupted the character of certain scholars is in need of an antidote. And that type of cure is not going to come from an article in a magazine or a book in the library — as important as they are. The medicine for this sectarian sickness is the grand jihad beginning with Islamic Iran 39 years ago that has outwitted the Zionist minds, thwarted the imperialist militaries, and stopped the Zionists dead in their tracks.

The “intellectual poison” trying to take effect within the Muslim public mind would have us believe that Iran is anti-Islam and Israel and the US are pro-Islam. No amount of misquoting ayat and misrepresenting hadiths will be able to obscure the slow but sure uncloaking of the Saudi schemers,

And there are people who say, “We affirm and commit to Allah and the Final Day” — but, in fact, they are not committed. They make an effort to deceive Allah and the committed Muslims and in reality they deceive no one but themselves, and they do not sense [what they are doing] (2:8–9).