Anadolu Agency – January 12, 2024
In 73 strikes by US, UK on Yemen, 5 Houthi fighters killed
The Yemeni Houthi group announced Friday that US and British forces launched 73 strikes on Yemen, killing five of its fighters.
In a statement, the group's military spokesman, Yahya Saree, said "the American-British enemy, in the context of its support for the continuation of the Israeli crimes in Gaza, launched a brutal aggression against Yemen with 73 strikes."
Saree said the raids targeted "the capital Sanaa and the governorates of Hodeidah, Taiz, Hajjah, and Saada."
These attacks led to the death of five Houthi fighters and the injury of six others, the spokesman added.
The US and UK carried out missile strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen Thursday night.
The strikes targeted multiple Houthi sites in Yemeni cities controlled by the Iranian-backed group and followed a string of Houthi attacks in the Red Sea on Israeli-bound vessels.
US President Joe Biden said on Friday he ordered the strikes "in direct response to unprecedented Houthi attacks against international maritime vessels in the Red Sea."
Attacks on Red Sea shipping mount, but confronting Houthis carries risks
A spate of attacks by Yemeni rebels on Red Sea shipping has disrupted the vital trade route, but experts say stopping them appears difficult at best -- and risky at worst.
Dozens of drone and missile attacks have been launched on ships by the Houthis, part of the Iran-backed "axis of resistance" reinvigorated by Israel's war on Hamas.
The rebels, who control large swathes of war-torn Yemen, are targeting supposedly Israel-linked ships passing through the Bab al-Mandeb strait, the Red Sea's southern gateway.
Their attacks, often with home-assembled drones and missiles, has forced some companies to divert around southern Africa to avoid the Red Sea, the key conduit for Asia-Europe shipping which usually carries about 12 percent of maritime trade.
Washington says more than 20 nations have joined the US-led Operation Prosperity Guardian to guard the commercially sensitive Red Sea.
And last week, the United States and Britain were among 12 countries who jointly warned the Tehran-aligned rebel forces of unspecified consequences if the attacks continue.
Undaunted, the Houthis this week fired their biggest salvo yet: 21 missiles and drones that were shot down by US and British forces.
"Enough is enough," UK Defence Minister Grant Shapps said afterwards. "We must be clear with the Houthis that this has to stop."
The bellicose language is at odds with the reality that the Houthis have little to lose and much to gain from a military confrontation, experts say.
"Offensive military operations in Yemen will be counter-productive," said Gerald Feierstein, a former US ambassador to Yemen and the director of the Arabian Peninsula Affairs programme at the Middle East Institute think-tank in Washington.
Bombing the Houthis, who have weathered years of airstrikes by a Saudi-led coalition, would have little impact and would only raise their standing and legitimacy in the Arab world, he said.
- 'New costly conflict' -
"The best option would be to continue the defensive operations to protect international shipping until the conflict in Gaza winds down," Feierstein told AFP.
The situation is also delicate for Arab governments, who risk being seen as traitors to the Palestinian cause if they openly oppose the Huthi attacks which the rebels say are in solidarity with Gaza.
Yemen's powerful neighbour Saudi Arabia -- which is trying to extricate itself from a fruitless, nine-year war against the Houthis -- has stayed silent on the attacks raining down close to its territorial waters.
"The Saudis don't want to jeopardise their talks with the Houthis or trigger a new round of Huthi attacks against Saudi targets," said Feierstein, referring to the Houthis' targeting of Saudi oil facilities between 2019 and 2022.
The Saudi-led military coalition intervened in 2015 in support of the Yemeni government, the year after the rebels took control of the capital Sanaa.
The war has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and plunged the Arabian Peninsula's poorest country into a deep humanitarian crisis, but fighting has largely been on hold for the past two years.
Apart from Iran which holds the most influence over the Yemeni rebels, Oman plays a significant role, too.
But the Omanis "are reluctant to pressure the Houthis at this time because they don't want to be perceived as supporting Israeli operations in Gaza", said Feierstein.
Regional retaliation by the Yemeni rebels to a major military offensive remains a risk, said Thomas Juneau, assistant professor at the University of Ottawa's School of Public and International Affairs.
"Large-scale strikes would... risk entrapping the US into a new costly conflict, especially if the Houthis retaliate regionally," he said.
The Houthis have struck the United Arab Emirates in 2022 and launched missiles towards Israel during its war with Hamas, triggered by the Palestinian group's attacks in early October.
Karim Bitar, a professor of international relations at Beirut's Saint Joseph University, said the military option was a "last resort" for the Western powers.
"I think (US officials) are using their channels of communications through the other regional powers, specifically Oman, to deter the Houthis from striking again."
To Bitar, "the cold hard truth is that threats to freedom of navigation and to international trade in the Red Sea have mobilised the international community more than 20,000 civilian deaths in Gaza."
https://www.yenisafak.com/en/news/attacks-on-red-sea-shipping-mount-but-confronting-Houthis-carries-risks-3675895
World Socialist Web Site – January 12, 2024
US and UK launch war against Yemen
By Oscar Grenfell
The US and UK began bombing Yemen tonight, including strikes in the country’s densely-populated cities. While the scale of the assault is still emerging, the bombardment is an illegal act of war targeting an oppressed and impoverished nation that had already been ravaged by a years-long onslaught by Saudi Arabia, backed by the US and its allies.
The attack highlights the growing danger of a broad Middle Eastern conflict, as the US seeks to transform Israel’s genocide in Gaza into a regionwide offensive, particularly targeting Iran.
In a statement to Reuters, a Houthi official confirmed that strikes had hit the capital city, Sanaa, which has an estimated population of more than three million, as well as Dhamar in the southwest, Sadda in the northwest, and Al Hudaydah, the largest Yemeni port city adjacent to the Red Sea.
Associated Press journalists reported hearing five airstrikes in Sanaa. Footage posted to X/Twitter shows large explosions in Al Hudaydah.
A US military statement proclaimed that the attack hit 60 “targets” and involved “Over 100 precision-guided munitions.” As of this writing, the toll of dead and injured is unknown.
In comments cited by the Al Mayadeen news agency, Hussein al-Ezzi, the Houthi deputy foreign minister, said: “Our country was subjected to a massive aggressive attack by American and British ships, submarines and warplanes, and they will have to prepare to pay a heavy price and bear all the dire consequences of this blatant aggression.”
The US and the UK have effectively launched a new war without even a figleaf of Congressional or parliamentary approval. Amid widespread and ongoing popular anger over the Gaza genocide, US President Joe Biden and UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak did not front the press to announce the operation or to answer questions about the bombing.
Instead, the White House issued a statement in Biden’s name confirming that strikes had begun.
It declared: “Today, at my direction, U.S. military forces—together with the United Kingdom and with support from Australia, Bahrain, Canada, and the Netherlands—successfully conducted strikes against a number of targets in Yemen used by Houthi rebels to endanger freedom of navigation in one of the world’s most vital waterways.”
Biden concluded by threatening a further escalation. “These targeted strikes are a clear message that the United States and our partners will not tolerate attacks on our personnel or allow hostile actors to imperil freedom of navigation in one of the world’s most critical commercial routes. I will not hesitate to direct further measures to protect our people and the free flow of international commerce as necessary.”
The attempt to present the bombardment as a defensive action, upholding international law, is a fraud on the scale of the lies about weapons of mass destruction used to justify the illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq.
The clear aim of the bombardment is to ensure that nothing obstructs the now three-month long US-Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Since mid-November, Houthi forces have carried out a number of operations in the Red Sea, with the stated aim of blocking war materiel and military-related supplies from being delivered to Israel and used against Gaza.
The US-led bombing campaign is thus of a piece with the Biden administration’s funding of the Gaza genocide, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars, and its repeated “urgent” deliveries of munitions to the Zionist regime to ensure that the mass slaughter continues.
The war has been in preparation for weeks. In December, the Biden administration unveiled “Operation Prosperity Guardian,” an international coalition to enforce de facto US and Israeli control over the Red Sea. That included public lobbying of European and allied states to commit warships to the region.
On January 3, a US-orchestrated statement signed by 13 of its “partners” included bellicose threats of conflict with the Houthis. On Wednesday, the US successfully moved a resolution in the United Nations Security Council condemning the Houthis and setting the stage for an attack on Yemen.
The US and the UK are bombing a country that has already been decimated by imperialist-backed war.
In 2014 and 2015, the Houthi movement took over large swathes of Yemen, in a mass struggle against the government of then President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi. Hadi had come to power in the wake of a popular uprising in 2011 against the dictatorial regime of Ali Abdullah Saleh, but had resolved none of the social issues that gave rise to that upheaval.
Saudi Arabia responded to the advance of the Houthis by launching a brutal war in March, 2015 aimed at restoring Hadi. At the start of 2022, the United Nations estimated that the Saudi onslaught had claimed 377,000 lives.
In the course of the war, Saudi Arabia carried out actions of a genocidal character, in some instances paralleling what Israel is now inflicting on Gaza. That included a blockade of all supplies, initiated in 2015 and then intensified in 2017. Saudi Arabia later claimed to have lifted the siege, but continued to hinder and delay supplies to the country.
Saudi Arabia systematically bombed Yemen’s agricultural crops and foodstuffs, in a policy aimed at deliberately orchestrating a famine. Estimates indicate that up to 60 percent of the death toll is the result of starvation. The onslaught contributed to mass disease outbreaks, including a cholera epidemic that infected a million people in a country of 34 million.
In 2019, the United Nations warned that Yemen had the highest number of people requiring urgent humanitarian aid in the world. That cohort included an estimated 75 percent of the entire population. The following year, Yemen was the second-worst placed country in the world on the Global Hunger Index, as well as the highest on the Fragile States Index.
The war crimes were funded by successive US administrations, beginning with that of Obama. Between 2015 and 2021, the Defence Department allocated $54.6 billion of military support to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which also played a central role in the bombardment. The US, together with its allies including Britain, trained Saudi pilots, provided intelligence and politically defended the onslaught.
In bombing Yemen, the US and the UK are not so much returning to the scene of a previous crime, as continuing one that never ended. Notably, Al Hudaydah, one of the cities bombed tonight, was a particular target of Saudi Arabia, because it is a port. Denying Houthi access to the Red Sea was also a key component of the Saudi Arabian blockade.
US backing for the Saudi onslaught was bound up with the fact that the Houthis are a Shia movement with ties to Iran. By taking power, they had threatened the imperialist-dominated status quo as well as the protracted US moves against Iran.
The current attack, occurring as it does amid full-scale US-Israeli genocide in Gaza, Zionist bombing operations targeting Lebanon and Syria, and threats from Washington against Iran, underscores the danger of a massive conflagration throughout the region and more broadly.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/01/12/vgxz-j12.html
Anadolu Agency – January 12, 2024
Russia strongly condemns UK, US strikes on Yemen
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova accuses Washington of misinterpreting UN Security Council resolutions for further escalation of tension in Mideast
04:40 - 12/01/2024 Friday
Russia on Friday strongly condemned the overnight airstrikes by the US and UK on Yemen's Houthis.
Russia's concerns, voiced during discussion earlier this week of a US-sponsored UN Security Council resolution against Houthi attacks on ships, that the document will be "misinterpreted" and used to justify "illegal actions" have materialized, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told a press briefing in Moscow.
"Our fears have been confirmed that the US position in the UN Security Council on the Red Sea is only a pretext for further escalation of tension in the region. We strongly condemn the actions of the US and its allies," she stressed.
According to Zakharova, military escalation in the Red Sea region may negate the positive trends that have emerged recently towards resolution of the Yemen conflict, as well as provoke destabilization throughout the Middle East region.
"As we warned, to justify their aggression, the Anglo-Saxons are trying to use UN Security Council Resolution 2722, adopted the day before under the pretext of ensuring the safety of navigation in the Red Sea," she emphasized.
“Americans have been using such absolutely unscrupulous methods, contrary to international law, for a long time.”
In the same way, the West used "perverted interpretations of UN Security Council decisions" to unleash "criminal actions" in Iraq and Libya, she said.
Earlier today the office of the Russian envoy to the UN Security Council demanded an urgent meeting to discuss the UK and US strikes on Yemen carried out in response to Houthi attacks on vessels in the Red Sea.
https://www.yenisafak.com/en/news/russia-strongly-condemns-uk-us-strikes-on-yemen-3675942
Anadolu Agency – January 12, 2024
Iran criticizes 'arbitrary' US, UK strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen
Strikes came amid heightened tensions in Red Sea following Houthi attacks on ships
Iran reacted strongly to overnight US and UK missile strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen, blasting the "arbitrary" attacks, which it said violated Yemen's sovereignty and territorial integrity.
The bombings constitute a "clear violation" of the Arab country's sovereignty and territorial integrity as well as a "violation of international laws," said Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani in a statement Friday.
The strikes targeted multiple Houthi sites in Yemeni cities controlled by the Iranian-backed group and followed a string of Houthi attacks in the Red Sea on Israeli-bound vessels.
US President Joe Biden said he ordered the strikes "in direct response to unprecedented Houthi attacks against international maritime vessels in the Red Sea."
In a first reaction to the attacks, Kanaani said they were carried out "in line with the continued full support of the US and the UK" for Israel's "war crimes" against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
He said the "arbitrary attacks" will only contribute to "insecurity and instability" in the region.
"While the Zionist regime (Israel) continues its attacks and war crimes in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, the United States and Britain are trying to expand their umbrella of support for the Zionist regime by diverting the attention of the people of the world from the crimes of this fake, criminal and aggressor regime against the Palestinian people," Kanaani said.
He went on to urge the international community to "prevent the expansion of war, instability, and insecurity" in the region.
Iran is a key ally of Yemen's Houthis in the region. Earlier this month, in a meeting with a visiting Houthi delegation, Iran's Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said he "appreciated" the group's support for the people of Palestine amid the war on Gaza.
On Thursday, Iran's naval forces seized an American oil tanker in the Sea of Oman "on a court order," further inflaming tensions between the two sides.
US, UK try to turn Red Sea into 'sea of blood': Erdogan
The US and UK have used disproportionate force in Yemen, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said.
Speaking to reporters after performing Friday prayers in Istanbul, Erdogan criticised the attacks on Yemen by the US and UK.
"All of these actions involve the use of disproportionate force. Israel is also using disproportionate force in Palestine," he said.
"We receive information from various sources that the Houthis have made a very successful defence, provided a successful response, against both the US and the UK," he said.
The US and UK carried out strikes on multiple targets inside Yemen late Thursday in response to ongoing drone and missile strikes by the Houthis on international shipping lanes in the Red Sea. The attacks by the Yemeni group began in November in response to Israel's aggression against Palestinians since October 7.
South Africa's genocide case
On South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, Erdogan said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has nowhere to hide and that there is no defence for his actions.
"I would have seen (Israel's) President (Isaac) Herzog in a much more sincere atmosphere at this point, but lately, he has also imitated Netanyahu, starting to make very different statements," he added.
He noted Israel is presenting its arguments in the top UN court adding: "But the documents we have presented are useful for The Hague."
The first day of the trial concluded on Thursday after the Ambassador of South Africa to Amsterdam, Vusimuzi Madonsela, read the nine interim measures his country requested from the Court against Israel.
On the first day of the trial, the South African side presented their allegations against Israel to the ICJ along with the supporting reasons and evidence.
Legal representatives for South Africa in the trial accused Israel of "deliberate actions against Gazans, proving genocidal intent."
https://www.trtworld.com/turkiye/us-uk-try-to-turn-red-sea-into-sea-of-blood-erdogan-16626355
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