The United Arab Emirates, as reported in today’s New York Times, has hired foreign mercenaries, from a program launched by Blackwater’s head Erik Prince, and secretly sent them to the fighting in Yemen. This is not a good sign. Blackwater private security alienated Iraqis against the United States. Now the use of foreign mercenaries will signify to the “outs” in the Middle East that the rich will buy guns-for-hire to use against them.
This program gets laid out in a New York Times piece entitled, “Emirates Secretly Sends Colombian Mercenaries to Yemen Fight.” It explains that this is “the first combat deployment for a foreign army that the Emirates has quietly built in the desert over the past five years.” The Emirates had a brigade of 1,800 soldiers from Latin America which provided 450 troops now arriving in Yemen. It seems there are also going to be hundreds of other foreign mercenaries — Sudanese and Eritrean soldiers — brought into Yemen.
These can be viewed as a second generation of foreign mercenaries hired by the countries of the Arabian Peninsula. In the first generation, still powerful, in 1975 Saudi Arabia brought in Vinnell Corporation, an American defense contractor, to train the “Saudi Arabian National Guard.” This is a force outside the official Saudi military and the Ministry of Defense (and larger than the Saudi military). Instead, the 75,000 man National Guard reports to the King. This makes its main duty to suppress internal political unrest that challenges the state’s authoritarian structure. Vinnell receives $819 million for its maintaining 1000 employees in Saudi Arabia doing contract work with the National Guard and Royal Air Force.
The little-known Vinnell is now owned by Northrop Grumman. It has undertaken projects in fifty other countries, including for the United States in the Vietnam War, when it ran secret intelligence programs. Its advantages include giving the Saudis the very top-grade American support without any “official” United States involvement.
In 2011, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia’s neighbor and ally, was shaken during the Arab Spring by unrest. It has a downtrodden Shia majority ruled over by a Sunni minority. The Saudis sent the Vinnell-trained National Guard in, with other forces, to crush the unrest.
M_B_S wrote:Huthi Yemen forces fighting back hard!
Scut Missiles fired on Saudi targets and hitting hard
http://www.almasdarnews.com/article/28098/
The Saudi Royal Army reportedly suffered heavy losses on Tuesday when the Yemeni Army’s missile battalion targeted the Jizan regional airbase in southern Saudi Arabia with a Type-1 Qahir ballistic missile. According to both Al-Masirah and Al-Manar, the Saudi Crown Prince and Defense Minister Mohammed bin Salman paid a quick visit under very tight security measures to the Jizan Public Hospital to check the dead and wounded among his soldiers who were killed in the strike on the Airport earlier this week.
http://www.almasdarnews.com/article/28098/ | Al-Masdar News
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Yeah bring the war to the enemy : Saudi Kingdom
M_B_S
What is a Scud missile hit?
Look
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTCLUVHE7zk
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