Yemen crisis

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Volkodlak
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Yemen crisis

Post by Volkodlak »

Uniform it seams we have a new hot spot in middle east and this time is Yemen. Saudis are already attacking with planes they evacuated 86 Arab and Western diplomats and is suposed to have 150000 soldiers and heavy weapons on border with Yemen and Houthi rebels are moving artillery units closer to the border with Saudi Arabia im intrested will be there a ground attack by Saudis and should we be worried?
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Re: Yemen crisis

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Sorry, internet connectivity issues...

Anyway, I don't really have too many worries about this whole thing. Yemen has been teetering on the edge of being a failed state for decades. The government in Sa'naa has always been more notional than national if you catch my drift, so it falling that last notch or two down to "Somalia" is not (in my humble opinion) all that big of a deal. In fact, the biggest concern that I would have is that the place would become a haven for pirates to venture out into the Straits of Bab al Mandeb and prey on all of the Suez Canal traffic. That, however, is not all that much of an issue since the Somali pirates are already doing that garbage and an international naval flotilla based out of Djibouti is busily keeping a lid on that particular garbage can already. There's not much that Yemen getting flushed down the Sixth Circle of Hell can do to make that one any worse.
I don't think that the Saudis, the Egyptians (who are sending troops apparently) nor any of the Gulf-Arab states likewise considering a military intervention, are going to have any real success, however. My suspicion is that if they do send in ground forces, they're going to get some first-hand experience on the nightmare that the U.S. and our allies have self-inflicted over the last decade. The Saudis are sort of goofy on certain things, but I rather suspect that they're a little more cunning than that and I'm betting that threat of a ground invasion is just that: a threat -- intended to get the Iranian-backed rebels to venture out to harass the Saudi border and make it easier for the Royal Saudi Air Force to whomp on them. I could be wrong, but I think a full Saudi invasion is unlikely.
The only real issue, I think, is that Yemen will begin to resemble Syria and there will be another refugee crisis on top of all of the others. UNHCR is sort of slammed at the moment.
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Re: Yemen crisis

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well i think things will get worse, becouse foreign troops of unknown nationality are disembarking at the Yemeni port of Aden, port authorities and witnesses told Reuters. The task force is said to number ‘dozens’.

so are they extraction force or they are first ground troops on yemen soil and bigger attack follows.
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Re: Yemen crisis

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lovec1990 wrote:well i think things will get worse...
"Worse" is a highly relative term -- particularly in that neck of the woods. I wholly agree that things will get worse there, but I don't see it as being something that will critically affect the rest of the world. Yemen is very isolated (both physically and economically) -- so much so that most of its border has never even been demarcated. I find it highly unlikely that any of its internal issues will propagate outside of the country. The only country that's even slightly vulnerable to that effect is Saudi Arabia, and on that front, they've got more issues with I.S. -- which they strongly helped create. Even if Yemen goes down into total civil war, given its relative isolation, the global effects won't be a tithe on Syria -- and even Syria is somewhat ignor-able.

As for the supposed Iranian troops, 'dozens' is really nothing. If they are Iranian, they're probably observers of advisors or something (or even possibly additional security for their embassy). Bottom line is that without heavy equipment, they're not going to be doing much -- and Iran has very little in the way of traditional power-projection capability. Moreover, it looks like the Saudis and other assorted Arabs are content to rely on tactical air and the ground troops appear to be purely defensive for the moment.

Anything really bad that happens down there is probably going to be entirely home-grown in nature -- and would almost certainly have happened without outside intervention anyway.
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Re: Yemen crisis

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Ok, the unknown army was PLA(China) they were only guarding the port.

there are reports that shots are fired from Yemen on Saudis Army and Border guards and two Border guards were killed.
Houthi rebels they are still advancing air attacks are not cousing enough damage to stop their advancments coalition needs a new strategy to defeat them.

well it can influence our oil prices becouse at the moment oil tankers are going through Suez Canal, but if Houthi rebels get hold on yemens coast they could attack oil tankers so companys will use diffrent routes witch would increase oil prices.
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Re: Yemen crisis

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lovec1990 wrote: Houthi rebels they are still advancing air attacks are not cousing enough damage to stop their advancments coalition needs a new strategy to defeat them.
Well, if the Saudis are smart, their "strategy" will generally revolve around not sending in any ground troops. The last time they did that it was sort of a disaster. They have enough internal domestic issues already without getting into a war of attrition with a guerilla force.
lovec1990 wrote: well it can influence our oil prices becouse at the moment oil tankers are going through Suez Canal, but if Houthi rebels get hold on yemens coast they could attack oil tankers so companys will use diffrent routes witch would increase oil prices.
Eh. Not really. The international squadron is based out of Djibouti right across the strait from Yemen. If they can't keep some Yemeni wingnuts from harassing international shipping through the Gulf of Aden, then we have rather larger problems. No, if this affects spot-oil prices, it will be far more due to fears that this will serve to destabilize Saudi Arabia (which I feel I.S. is a greater threat by a wide margin since the Houthis -- while not Shi'ite as some commentators have erroneously claimed -- are a branch of Sunnism that is not really accepted anywhere else outside of Yemen). Additionally, Yemen is a net oil exporter and there may be some fears of disrupted supply from Yemeni oil fields -- and even that is of less consequence than might otherwise be surmised since most of those fields have been under the de-facto control of AQAP for a couple of years now anyway.

The reason why the Saudis are getting so up-tight about this has much more to do with the fear that the Houthis will take down the (Yemeni) government and with their ties to Iran, will give the Iranians a toehold on the peninsula. If it wasn't for the Iranian angle, I think the Saudis really wouldn't care all that much.
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Re: Yemen crisis

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I belive coundown to ground invasion has started, becouse Egypt has decided it will send troops into Yemen
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Re: Yemen crisis

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I haven't heard about that, but I suspect it's just noise. If there's going to be a ground offensive, it's the Saudis that will be in charge. Egypt's amphibious capabilities are very limited. Their only option is to ship it across the Red Sea to Saudi, form up there and go across the land-border. That's going to be a Saudi-run operation.

The more I think about this, there's actually a couple more things that augur against it. If the Saudis go across the border and they do so with an Arab coalition, none of the constituent forces have any real experience working with each other -- which is a big deal without compatible communications, doctrine, or command structures. Moreover, the Saudi forces are geared towards a largely self-defense role, and don't have the theater-level command and control apparatus to do a large scale offensive.

No, I still think that they're just going to sit on the border and let the air components do Whack-A-Mole.
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Re: Yemen crisis

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Apparently thus far the Egyptians are only offering air and naval assets and some other support assets, not ground troops. The latest edition of the Economist says that the Egyptian General Staff are having some high level meetings about this and there are noises coming out of those meetings that they view Yemen as their "Vietnam" and are resisting calls to get any further involved than they already are. They already have enough internal dissent with the Arab Spring / Muslim Brotherhood / Muhammad Morsi issue.

According to that same article, the Saudis are now discussing the topic that their armed forces are centered on heavy armor maneuver units, and Yemen is one of the few places in the Arabian Peninsula that's actually mountainous.

I sort of get the impression that the Saudis don't really know what to do.
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Re: Yemen crisis

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A 'limited' Saudi-led force is on the ground in Yemen's strategic port of Aden and more troops are on their way so this can get intresting
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Re: Yemen crisis

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Best information coming out of the area is that it's just Saudi special forces units and it looks like they're limiting themselves to tying down the airport (if I had to guess, to make resupplying their Yemeni proxies easier). Their main ground force components are still lounging around on the border. The Saudis tried to get the Egyptians and the Pakistanis to commit troops to do their ground fighting for them (this is a pattern with the Saudis, incidentally), and both turned them down. The Saudis aren't really into military operations if they can avoid it so I still hold that they're not going in in any significant way.

The rather more interesting (in the bad way) aspect to all this is the increasing Iranian activity. They've started saber-rattling up in the Persian Gulf. Now, this might have more to do with internal Iranian politics than anything else (since the hard-liners and the clerical wing both really don't like the nuclear deal being hashed out between their foreign ministry and the international community -- particularly the United States). Nonetheless, it will be interesting to see if they continue to harass gulf shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.
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