{"id":195466,"date":"2019-09-28T06:10:14","date_gmt":"2019-09-28T06:10:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=195466"},"modified":"2019-10-02T05:50:31","modified_gmt":"2019-10-02T05:50:31","slug":"how-yemens-houthis-are-bringing-down-a-goliath","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=195466","title":{"rendered":"How Yemen\u2019s Houthis are bringing down a Goliath"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pepe Escobar \u2013 The Saker Sept 26, 2019<\/strong><\/h1>\n

\u2018From a military perspective, nobody ever took our forces in Yemen seriously,\u2019 scholar says<\/h3>\n
\"\"<\/a>

An image taken from a video made available on July 7, 2019 by the press office of the Yemeni Shiite Houthi group shows ballistic missiles, labeled \u2018Made in Yemen,\u2019 at a recent exhibition of missiles and drones at an undisclosed location in Yemen. Footage showed models of at least 15 unmanned drones and missiles of different sizes and ranges. Photo: AFP\/ Al-Houthi Group Media Office. Click to enlarge<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cIt is clear to us that Iran bears responsibility for this attack. There is no other plausible explanation. We support ongoing investigations to establish further details.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The statement above was not written by Franz Kafka. In fact, it was written by a Kafka derivative: Brussels-based European bureaucracy. The Merkel-Macron-Johnson trio, representing Germany, France and the UK, seems to know what no \u201congoing investigation\u201d has unearthed: that Tehran was definitively responsible for the twin aerial strikes on Saudi oil installations.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThere is no other plausible explanation\u201d translates as the occultation of Yemen. Yemen only features as the pounding ground of a vicious Saudi war, de facto supported by Washington and London and conducted with US and UK weapons, which has generated a horrendous humanitarian crisis.<\/span><\/p>\n

So Iran is the culprit, no evidence provided, end of story, even if the \u201cinvestigation continues.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Hassan Ali Al-Emad, Yemeni scholar and the son of a prominent tribal leader with ascendance over ten clans, begs to differ. \u201cFrom a military perspective, nobody ever took our forces in Yemen seriously. Perhaps they started understanding it when our missiles hit Aramco.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

A satellite image from the US government shows damage to oil and gas infrastructure from weekend drone attacks at Abqaig on September 15.. Clicki to enlarge<\/p><\/div>\n

Al-Emad said: \u201cYemeni people have been encircled by an embargo. Why are Yemeni airports still closed? Children are dying without treatment. In this current war, the first door [to be closed against enemies] was Damascus. The second door is Yemen.\u201d Al-Emad considers that Hezbollah\u2019s Secretary-General Sayed Nasrallah and the Houthis are involved in the same struggle.<\/span><\/p>\n

Al-Emad was born in Sana\u2019a in a Zaydi family influenced by Wahhabi practices. Yet when he was 20, in 1997, he converted to Ahlulbayat<\/strong><\/span>\u00a0<\/a>after comparative studies between Sunni, Zaydi and the Imamiyyah \u2013 the branch of Shi\u2019ite Islam that believes in 12 imams. He abandoned Zaydi in what could be considered a Voltairean act: because the sect cannot withstand critical analysis.<\/span><\/p>\n

I talked and broke bread \u2013 and hummus \u2013 with Al-Emad, in Beirut, during the New Horizon conference among scholars from Lebanon, Iran, Italy, Canada, Russia and Germany. Although he says he cannot get into detail about military secrets, he confirmed: \u201cPast Yemeni governments had missiles, but after 9\/11 Yemen was banned from buying weapons from Russia. But we still had 400 missiles in warehouses in South Yemen. We used 200 Scuds \u2013 the rest is still there [laughs].\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Al-Emad breaks down Houthi weaponry into three categories: the old missile stock; cannibalized missiles using different spare parts (\u201ctransformation made in Yemen\u201d); and those with new technology that use reverse engineering. He stressed: \u201cWe accept help from everybody,\u201d which suggests that not only Tehran and Hezbollah are pitching in.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Abqaiq processing facility ablaze. Click to enlarge<\/p><\/div>\n

Al-Emad\u2019s key demand is actually humanitarian: \u201cWe request that Sana\u2019a airport be reopened for help to the Yemeni people.\u201d And he has a message for global public opinion that the EU-3 are obviously not aware of: \u201cSaudi is collapsing and America is embracing it in its fall.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The real danger<\/h2>\n

On the energy front, Persian Gulf energy traders that I have relied upon as trustworthy sources for two decades confirm that, contrary to Saudi Oil Minister Abdulazziz bin Salman\u2019s spin, the damage from the Houthi attack on Abqaiq could last not only \u201cmonths\u201d but even years.<\/span><\/p>\n

As a Dubai-based trader put it: \u201cWhen an Iraqi pipeline was damaged in the mid-2000s the pumps were destroyed.\u00a0It takes two years to replace a pump as the backlogs are long.\u00a0The Saudis, to secure their pipelines, acquired spare pumps for this reason.\u00a0But they did not dream that Abqaiq could be damaged.\u00a0If you build a refinery it can take three to five years if not more.\u00a0It could be done in a month if all the components and parts were available at once, as then it would be merely a task of assembling the components and parts.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

On top of this, the Saudis are now only offering heavier crudes to their customers in Asia. \u201cThen,\u201d adds a trader, \u201cWe heard that the Saudis were buying 20,000,000 barrels of heavier crudes from Iraq.\u00a0Now, the Saudis were supposed to have as much as 160 million barrels a day of stored crude.\u00a0 So what does this mean?\u00a0 Either there was no stored crude or that crude had to go through Abqaiq in order to be sold.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Al-Emad explicitly told me that Houthi attacks are not over, and further drone swarms are inevitable.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now compare it with analysis by one trader: \u201cIf in the next wave of drone attacks 18 million barrels a day of Saudi crude are knocked out, it would represent a catastrophe of epic proportions. The US does not want the Houthi to believe that they have such power through such fourth generational warfare as drones that cannot be defended against. But they do. Here is where a tiny country can bring down not only a Goliath such as the US, but also the whole world.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Asked about the consequences of a possible US attack against Iran \u2013 picking up on Robert Gates\u2019 famous 2010 remark that \u201cSaudis want to fight Iran to the last American\u201d \u2013 the consensus among traders is that it would be another disaster.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt would not be possible to bring Iranian crude on line for the world to replace the rest of what was destroyed,\u201d said one.<\/span><\/p>\n

He noted that Senator Lindsey Graham had said he \u201cwanted to destroy the Iranian refineries but not the oil wells\u201d. This is a very important point.\u00a0 The horror of horrors would be an oil war where everyone is destroying each others\u2019 wells until there was nothing left.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

While the \u201chorror of horrors\u201d hangs by a thread, the blind leading the blind stick to the script: Blame Iran and ignore Yemen.<\/span><\/p>\n

Source <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The US does not want the Houthi to believe that they have the means to inflict such devastating blows to the Saudis, writes Pepe Escobar. But they do<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[61,58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-195466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-Commentary","category-Current_Affairs"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=195466"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195466\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":195469,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195466\/revisions\/195469"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=195466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=195466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=195466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}