Wow! Saudis 'in a panic mode' as Shi'ite rebels move North from Yemen

yep nuthin gonna happen. who on earth would wan't those stupid Saudi Arabia oilfields anyway?

You mean you want to cut of the head of the snake? You realize that that would mean bombing Moscow, Bejing, London, Tel Aviv, Washington?

yep

That worked against the North Koreans

The North Vietnamese

The Cambodians ( God did it there)

The Laotians

Dresden

The Somalis

the Lebanese

The hittites

The Saudi's are said to have given Israel air-space rights, if and when needed, to take out Iranian nuke targets. You can bet that this agreement has some stipulations 'along the way...'

just my 40,000 foot view.

Only she can crush the head of the serpent because she has the moon under her feet.

Lotus

More than one source has talked about this

The Wahabes (Saudis) are the offspring of the Assassins who are the offspring of the Khazar.

Go figure, if you have the mental capacity.

What goes round comes round

Stick a fork in the Saudi's they be well done.

A see a country with oil fields ablaze.

Will make Kuwait look like a birthday cake missing all it's candles.

Collaborators are hated worse than the enemy.

History.

Now it is the worlds fault? Those poor Muslims are never able to carry out a terrorist attack by themselves.

Yemen teeters on brink of failureThe nation is grappling with poverty, a stubborn insurgency and Al Qaeda presence. Some say its strategic location near Saudi Arabia and the Horn of Africa mean it cannot be allowed to fail.
Sana market

Stalls in Sana's Old City sell traditional daggers, or jambiyas. Some analysts fear that authoritarian rule and harsh economic conditions have made the country ripe for Al Qaeda to grow and recruit.

Saudi fighter jets reportedly strike rebel targets in Yemen
*
Yemen rebels, government issue contradictory claims of battlefield success Yemen rebels, government issue contradictory claims of battlefield success


Reporting from Sana, Yemen - The president's new mosque shimmers over this ancient city like an illusion of stability against images of MIG fighter jets screeching overhead toward rebellion in the north or the latest news of pirates seizing ships in the treacherous Gulf of Aden. .

If Yemen were a theater, which sometimes it appears to be, it would be an unnerving place of trapdoors and shifting facades. This is the poorest nation in the Arab world and one of the most strategically located, with 3 million barrels of oil sailing daily past its shores, tucked between Saudi Arabia and Somalia.

And it is a teetering mess that some in Washington fear could draw the U.S. into a conflict with extremists at the intersection of the Middle East and the lawless Horn of Africa.

"We are a failed state," said Abubakr A. Badeeb, a leading member of the opposition Socialist Party. "Yemen can no longer protect the rights of its citizens."

Others regard the country as a "failing" state, and the tricky thing about Yemen is parsing fact from fiction. Every scenario has a counter-narrative; every surface pulses with a beguiling underside. Is Al Qaeda a grave threat, or is its strength exaggerated by a government that needs U.S. attention and billions of dollars in aid from Persian Gulf nations? Is the war in the north a rebellion by a disaffected sect, or is it turning into a perilous proxy battle between Saudi Arabia and Iran, with the Saudis already launching military strikes across the border?

Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh for almost 20 years has balanced conflicting tribal and sectarian voices, but his government's grip is slipping.

Al Qaeda's aim is to exploit the economic crisis and domestic turmoil, overthrow the government and build a base for attacks across the region, Western and Yemeni intelligence officials say. Worried about terrorism and protecting oil supplies, the U.S. is working on a military cooperation pact with Yemen that includes training Yemeni special forces.

"Al Qaeda in the past focused on bombings and suicide attacks, but now it is also able to target security forces," said Saeed Ali O. Jemhi, an expert on terrorist groups in Yemen. "They have sympathizers and agents within the Yemeni security and intelligence forces. Al Qaeda is in a renewing stage, and its aim is to spread an Islamic caliphate across the Arabian Peninsula."

Washington's concern about Yemen has intensified since 2000, when militants slammed a motorboat packed with explosives into the U.S. destroyer Cole in the port of Aden, killing 17 sailors. The U.S. Embassy here in Sana, the capital, was attacked in 2008, leaving 19 dead, including a U.S. citizen.

But non-military U.S. aid to Yemen has remained modest; this year totaling $24 million, up from $9.3 million the previous year. The Obama administration has requested about $65 million in counter-terrorism and military assistance.

It's a discomfiting task to choose Yemen's most pressing problem. Corruption is rampant, unemployment is 35%, child malnutrition is rising, water shortages are severe and oil reserves are shrinking.

It says something about a country's priorities that most of its dwindling water supply goes to irrigating khat, whose bitter-tasting leaves have for generations kept Yemenis in a sedated haze.

"Owing to the central government's historically weak control, the country has often been on the brink of chaos," said Christopher Boucek, an analyst with the Carnegie Center for International Peace. "Yemen has survived individual challenges in the past, but what differentiates the situation today is that multiple interconnected challenges are poised to converge at the same time."

The secessionist movement in the south threatens to split the country, but bombs and a surge of more than 175,000 people fleeing the war in the northwest is the consuming topic these days. There, Houthi rebels, Shiites of the Zaidi sect that had ruled for centuries, are battling Yemeni and Saudi forces along a border that stretches to the shipping lanes of the Red Sea.

The fighting, which began in August when the government launched Operation Scorched Earth, is the latest in a sporadic five-year insurgency. The Houthis say they are persecuted and marginalized, and they condemn Saleh, who is also a Zaidi, for being influenced by Sunni Wahhabi ideology from Saudi Arabia. The conflict, however, is rooted less in religion than in government failures and historical animosities in a mountainous region controlled by clans and tribes.

"The government hasn't offered jobs, education or development," said Mohammed Sabri, a political analyst. "The government thinks the war is a way to keep it in power. But they've chosen the wrong time and wrong place, and given the nation's circumstances, the war is spinning out of their control and they're trying to turn this businessmen's war into a proxy war."

The Shiite and Sunni sectarian overtones have given the hostilities wider regional implications.

The government says the Houthis are supported by Shiite-majority Iran. Tehran has denied the charges and the Yemeni regime has offered no credible evidence to back its assertions. Saudi Arabia joined the war in early November after cross-border raids by Houthis.

Riyadh fears two scenarios: The uprising will inspire unrest among the country's persecuted Shiite minority near its eastern oil fields, and that it will create a porous border for Al Qaeda militants to enter the kingdom to attack oil depots and government institutions.

A Saudi militant based in Yemen slipped into the kingdom in August and blew himself up at a palace reception. Saudia Arabia's top counter-terrorism official, Muhammad bin Nayef, a member of the royal family, was injured. The attack reaffirmed to the kingdom, Yemen's biggest aid donor, that its southern neighbor was too strategically important to let it spiral into anarchy.

Politicians and clerics in Saudi Arabia and Iran have traded scathing rhetoric over Yemen, but so far the countries have avoided increasing military tensions. The kingdom is suspicious of Iran's ambitions, nuclear program and connections to the militant groups Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki recently issued a veiled warning over the Saudi intervention in Yemen, saying that "those who pour oil on the fire must know that they will not be spared from the smoke that billows."

What's perhaps more troubling in the prospect of a failed Yemen is the effect it would have on the unstable Horn of Africa, where pirates roam and Al Qaeda cells hunker beneath U.S. predator drones.

Recent reports suggest that Houthi rebels may be training in camps in Somalia and that African refugees and mercenaries have joined Houthi ranks. This raises questions about the ability of Yemeni security forces to deal with multiple threats from sea and land.

"With the modest navy we have we're trying, but we need international help. Piracy is a serious problem for everyone," said Mohammed Abulahoum, a member of the ruling General People's Congress party. "The U.S. needs a success story in the region. Yemen is important and Washington could have that success with a lower price tag than you would think."

The Saudi navy is patrolling the Red Sea to prevent arms and fighters from reaching the rebels. Iran has warships off the southern coast to protect shipping lanes, it says, from pirates. The confluence of so many competing and dangerous agendas, Yemen is small but too big to ignore.

"Somalia and the Horn of Africa," Jemhi said, "are to Yemen what Afghanistan is to Pakistan."

Now it is the worlds fault? Those poor Muslims are never able to carry out a terrorist attack by themselves.

correct

Yemen: Child Refugees Starving to Death at "Alarming Levels"


less haajis in the world is a bad thing ? starvation retardation and voila a suicide bomber is born

Somalia was never carpetbombeb, neither was Lebanon.

The Hittites?... err you funny?

The Saudi air force was hitting them hard last week...

The Saudis officially denied it, for whatever that's worth.

I knew that the London/N.Y. prime evil controlled a willing Israel and the decadent Saudi Arabia leadership. (they supplying the death patsys in the hellish "war on terror" psyop. Kuwait was a "financed" given (as it had no oil money to be swindled out of in the derivatives con game). Turkey's been owned since Marco Polo..Iraq since the American puppets order our children to die destroying it. I also pretty much knew that Jordan and Egypt was controlled. This certainly proves that in Jordan's case..

Nope, Jordan just refuses to join the CRAZIES!

They could NEVER openly admit that. would lead to, well, what is happening with Yemen and Iran right now!

Well yeah, I'm not really denying that lol. I really can't see Israel putting off an attack much longer.

Israel has to be pretty happy about this.
I'm sure that's just a coincidence, though.

I'm not going to disagree with that.

Good! Be sure to read a copy of Herbert's "DUNE".

Go Fremin!

The U.S. needs to stay out of it. We've got enough forces deployed in pointless wars.

I am a Saudi so I can tell you what the article said about Saudi troops refusing to fight is false.

Saudi Arabia looks at itself #1 enemy of shias so they would never put them in sensitive position let alone make them an important part of the army.

It is very possible Jordan is helping Saudi because the country has an incompetent army. But if thats true then its just because of incompetence not because someone refused orders.

In Sadui Arabia you don't say no to a royal order, especially the army people

I would agree with your point overall..however they are talking about elements of the border guard which are heavily Shia

Iran says Saudis seized atom expert

Iran accused Saudi Arabia on Tuesday of handing over a senior Iranian nuclear scientist to the US.


His disappearance has stoked tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia, two regional rivals who not only see themselves as leading powers in the Middle East but also the respective guardians of Shia and Sunni Muslims.

Mr Amiri, who has won a national award for services to Tehran’s nuclear programme, was a physics graduate and also worked as a researcher at Malek-e Ashtar University of Technology, affiliated to the defence ministry. His wife is thought to be still in Iran.

Why Mr Amiri disappeared in Saudi Arabia is unclear, but some western diplomats in Tehran suspect that he may have defected. A former deputy defence minister, Alireza Asgari, defected in 2006 while in Turkey.

Iranian officials believe, however, that Mr Amiri was kidnapped as part of a US policy to halt Iran’s nuclear programme.

Ramin Mehmanparast, a foreign ministry spokesman, told the semi-official Mehr news agency that Mr Amiri “has been handed over to Washington by Riyadh”. He added that Mr Amiri was “now one of the 11 Iranians in US prisons”.

Saudi Arabia’s foreign ministry said it had no knowledge of the Iranian allegation and declined to comment.

A western observer in Riyadh said: “Iran brings up this subject whenever it wants to divert attention away from the standstill on its nuclear issue. The scientist could be anywhere. The Saudi government does not control movement of pilgrims after they leave the country.”

Analysts in Tehran think that Arab countries – notably Saudi Arabia – are pressing the west to take firm action against Iran’s nuclear programme, which they see as a threat.

Iranian observers suspect that some Arab states have even urged military strikes against Tehran’s nuclear facilities, provided that the US – and not Israel – carries out any such operation.

The alleged handover of Mr Amiri to Washington could fuel Iranian concerns that Saudi Arabia is actively collaborating with the US to gather information about Tehran’s nuclear programme. Iran and Saudi Arabia are regional rivals, supporting opposing factions in Iraq and Lebanon.

A rebellion in Yemen has brought the rivalry between the two countries to the fore.

Saudi Arabia accuses Iran of encouraging Yemen’s insurgents, who come from the Zaydi Shia sect. But Tehran adamantly denies being involved.

“It is not very clear if Iran is involved in Yemen, even though it sounds plausible because it is the natural ideology of this regime,” said a western diplomat in Tehran.

For their part, Iran’s Shia clergy have long suspected Saudi Arabia of supporting Sunni minorities in the south-east.

Meanwhile, the Saudi government’s decision to fingerprint every Iranian pilgrim who visits Mecca has infuriated Iran, with state television showing old men and women waiting for hours to be processed by Saudi officials.

[link to www.ft.com]

that's when the Indonesian oil will start dripping in, slowly but surely, it is all planned

no oil , no money , its like suicide
dammned lady gaga was right :D

By immediately evacuating all allied forces from the entire region and deploying B-2 bomber to carry out strategic, tactical airstrikes using neutron bombs to engage and neutralise large entire populations of areas containing insurgents.