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Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the wax museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like say our name, been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing Tom Cooper.
He is an Austrian author and illustrator about modern military aviation.
He's literally authored more than 30 books about air power.
And his most recent is Hot Skies Over Yemen.
And he's written this really important article for War is Boring.
It's called A New State is Emerging in Yemen.
Welcome to the show, Tom.
How are you, sir?
Thank you.
I'm fine.
Nice to be with you.
Thank you.
Good deal.
Very happy to have you here.
And listen, I ran this article, it's the spotlight on antiwar.com the other day, because it's just one of the best things that I've read about Yemen in quite some time.
And of course, the war there is almost three years older.
The current iteration of the war is about three years old now.
That's right, it is.
And yet, I'm very interested in the chronology of all of this, of all the different major steps leading up to the current crisis.
And this is the single best telling of the recent history of the wars in Yemen and American support for the former dictatorship there, and so forth.
So I'm really happy to have you here.
And I guess I just ask you to take us through it.
Can you go back to when President Abdullah Saleh consolidated power over the whole country, back in the first place?
Sure, yes.
Basically, Saleh came to power in 1979, following assassination of several earlier presidents of what was then North Yemen.
And he was supported by the Saudis and by a group of merchants.
And that's basically the clique that ruled the country, former northern Yemen, for most of the 1990s, actually 1980s, then 1990s.
And then the idea was born to unite the two Yemens, Saleh's North Yemen and what used to be Soviet and Cuban-supported South Yemen.
And this process was introduced in 1990, and then theoretically concluded in 1994.
What happened was that in 1994, the Southerners recognized that this is leading nowhere, we are going to lose, and launched a sort of military mutiny.
The problem was that the military, major military units were meanwhile deployed in the north, and those were easy to surround and destroy by northerners.
And following some four months of civil war, Yemen, North Yemen won, and the country was united under Saleh's rule.
And as I wrote in my article afterwards, Saleh was de facto ruling as the entire country, like his family enterprise.
He was appointing his family members to all important positions, primarily military-related positions.
He was appointing his friends from the tribe, but also from other ethnic and groups of society, within society.
Always his favorites, two different positions of power.
And that's how he preceded Yemen until the end of 2000, 2000, 2010, and so on.
Eventually, yes.
Well, yeah, let's stop there before the eventually.
So I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about the Islam party here.
You call them the Muslim Brotherhood of Yemen, or you say that they are referred to as that, and they're an important part of the story.
I think listeners, well, I think we're all pretty much familiar with the Zaydi Houthis in the north.
We've at least heard of them multiple times, and even the somewhat socialist movements in the south, although we're going to get to the different fighting of the different factions in the south here coming up.
But as far as the coalition of different power factions that Saleh had put together here, I at least was unfamiliar with the Islam party here, supported by the Saudis, you say, right?
Well, the Islam party is, yes, I tend to call it privately, I tend to call it Muslim Brotherhood or Yemen, Yemeni issue of Muslim Brotherhood.
Yemen is a very unique country.
Basically, you have Zaydis, you have the Kuwa, who are something like the Shiite, and you have the Sunnis, who are locally called Shafi, and so on.
But people in Yemen were making very little difference between different religious groups.
Basically, they were marrying within different ethnic groups and different religious groups all the time.
They were praying in the same mosques, and so on.
So for everyday people in Yemen, there was no difference, basically.
The Islam party, or the former Islamic front of Yemen, was founded by Saudi Arabia, and primarily with the idea to fight or to confront Marxists in former southern Yemen.
And the Islam party came into being then, following the civil war of 1994, and was always considered a client of Saudi Arabia, or kind of a representative of Saudi Arabia.
And how shall I describe it?
Yes, it certainly became involved in a sort of attempt to convert at least a part of Yemeni population, whether to Sunnism or to Salafism or to Wahhabism, whatever in this direction, was basically fine.
And it depended also on who from Saudi Arabia was more important or powerful in supporting the Islam party over the time, because this was not always the same.
People change all the time.
And so there's support for the Islam party in Yemen.
I'm curious about the role of the jihadis who returned from the Afghan war in the 1980s, when they came home after Operation Cyclone, how much influence they had.
I guess I had read, I think it was Iona Craig was saying that Saleh was very clever in tolerating them and using them against the Reds in the south.
But I wonder if that's the same thing when you say Muslim Brotherhood.
I guess I tend to think of a bunch of conservative old doctors and landowners in Egypt rather than, you know, bin Ladenite type radicals.
But I know that that tends to be different in different places.
Yes, that is the problem.
You know, you can't say there was one power bloc and this was supporting or pro-extremism or pro-Islamism or this or that.
You have different groups, you know, with different interests, but more or less pulling in the same direction.
So you had certainly some who really came back from Afghanistan and and they actually became not even Salafis, but more in the direction of Wahhabists.
I'm making distinction between these two directions or ideologies.
And then you had local Muslim Brotherhood, you had local tribes and also people close to Saleh who were also pro-Saudi or pro-such ideology.
And when you ask who and where were they active or how they became obvious, well, some of them have joined the security system, the very security system that was keeping Saleh in power and became important military, or appointed to important military positions.
That is the point.
And now, is the Islam party particularly associated with a certain tribe or a certain set of tribes?
Well, certainly yes, but you can't say explicitly the same tribe always with Islam and another not.
And it is not really possible, for me at least, to differentiate in this direction.
For example, Saleh is from Sanahan tribe, which is theoretically Zaidi tribe.
And his closest associate for most of the 80s and 90s is Major General Ali Ahmad.
He became something like a representative of the Islam party on Saleh's side.
He's also from Sanahan tribe, which means Zaidi, of Zaidi origin.
So you can't say really it was this or that direction.
Yemen was never separated really along ethnic or religious lines, at least not until relatively recently.
Yeah, well, I guess that's kind of what I was getting at with that question, was I wonder whether for all the talk of Islam as this or that, whether we're really talking about window dressing on the real question, which is the power of this or that group of men, which is usually tied very directly to geography.
This tribe in east of the capital claim this, and these people over there in the north claim that, this sort of thing.
Well, you could say, for example, Shafi Islamists in Yemen, that means Sunni Islamists in Yemen, they used to be a fatherly tribe in southern Yemen.
And they were exposed from southern Yemen by Marxists in the 1980s.
And then started with Saleh during the 1994 war and deployed a big militia to fight south Yemenis.
So sometimes, yes, you have a few tribes that played a crucial role here or there, but generally around Saleh and around his power clique around him, people were from very different tribes, very different, of very different origin actually.
And even nowadays you have a situation where you can't say all the Zaydis are fighting for Houthis, or all the Shafi are fighting against Zaydis or against Houthis.
This is wrong.
You have entire military units or units of former Yemeni military who are staffed entirely by Shafi, by Sunnis, and fighting for Zaydis, for Houthis.
And similarly, you have entire units of Zaydis fighting against the Houthis, entire tribes of Zaydis fighting against the Houthis.
Really?
So it is, yeah.
Now that's interesting, I hadn't heard that part.
Entire brigades.
I knew that, I knew that there were, I knew there were Sunni who were fighting for the current government there, for the Houthi and former Saleh coalition there.
But I didn't realize that there were Zaydis that were even against them.
But now I did, I do remember that when Saleh turned, and I'm skipping ahead here for just a second, but on this point, that when Saleh went and made his deal with the Houthis, his alliance with the Houthis, a lot of people, I was surprised, but I think a lot of people in D.C. were surprised to find out that Saleh was a Zaydi.
And so even though he had attacked the Houthis repeatedly, when it came down to it, he, you know, was able to make an alliance with them and switch sides.
Well, that was one of the points about how Saleh ruled the country.
For example, in 2004, when his differences under apostrophes with Houthis became public, he didn't deploy the core of his military against the Houthis.
No, he sent the units affiliated with the Islam Party to fight the Houthis.
So because he considered people like Ali Ahmad, his competitors, and dangerous for his rule, he deployed the Islam Party to fight the Houthis.
That was the way he was ruling the country.
And for example, that was in September 2014, the Houthis launched their advance on Sana'a and overran, I think it was the 310th brigade of the Yemeni army.
And there was a lot of talk about this, they are going to destroy the entire brigade and similarly execute all the troops and so on.
But nothing of that happened.
What did they do?
They caught the commander of the unit and executed him at the spot.
Why?
Because he was the guy who shot their first leader back in 2004.
So for them, that issue was settled.
Because there was no reason to rile Saleh anymore.
The guy who killed their first leader was dead and that's it.
They got their revenge.
This goes right to the American interventionists information problem here.
You're talking about things that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff could never know, will never know.
That the president and his people, that this is the kind of detail that even if they did know that fact, they wouldn't know what to make of it and what it means for their policy.
They couldn't possibly.
And so all they can do is act in ham-handed and heavy-handed ways.
The problem is actually they should know because the US army, the US military had quite a sizable group of officers, of very good, very clever officers stationed in Yemen before the Saudi-led intervention and before the Houthis took over.
And the people in question, they are very smart.
You can find a few of them have written articles about what is going on in Yemen.
And initially, following the Saudi-led military intervention, they kind of protested through their articles against this intervention.
But nobody's listening to them.
And this is always the same.
You have lots of smart people in the United States, in the military and elsewhere.
And they, for whatever reasons, you can estimate or gauge this on yourself, on your own, nobody's listening to them.
And that's it.
You lose the knowledge and you lose the know-how.
That's a pity, especially in such cases like this one.
Yeah.
And that does make sense that there would be capable people there, but the information just doesn't filter up to the top where it's used in any.
Well, and you know, I mean, one thing is we do know from the New York Times article, the famous New York Times article, because they've run so few, there's really the famous New York Times article about American support for Saudi's here.
And they say the quote, and this was no scoop.
It was, the source was 17 Obama administration officials when they were still in there.
And they said that they knew that when they launched the war three years ago, that it would be long, bloody and indeterminate.
And they did it anyway.
Indeterminate means we can't even imagine how it might end.
And they started it anyway.
So, well, I have actually suspected the situation was such, if you remember at that time, there were talks about the Iranian nuclear treaty and so on.
Negotiations were, you know, going in direction of, OK, we are finally going to find an agreement.
And I guess I cannot, I don't have any kind of evidence in this direction, but I guess it would be useful for somebody to research in this direction.
I guess the solution was found in direction of, OK, you're going to keep the Saudis out of Syria.
Let Iranians take over in Syria, which they are doing ever since, if not longer.
And yes, OK, if Saudis have to fight a war, let's send them to Yemen, you know, and that's it.
And that's, this is what happened.
In essence, you have 160,000 Iranian controlled combatants in Syria right now.
And nobody's reporting about them.
Everybody's happy to ignore them.
But because of perhaps five or if there are 15, OK, Hezbollah instructors in Yemen, all Iranians are taking over.
That's interesting.
Well, I mean, actually, Rex Tillerson has announced that we're staying in Syrian Kurdistan forever in order to check Iranian power.
That's not working out too well, because as soon as he announced that, the Turks invaded.
Exactly.
I mean, anyway, yeah, supporting Kurds, you know, that is fine.
OK.
And so on.
But you cannot stabilize the country by, you know, supporting just one ethnic group or not even that.
Yeah.
Or having one ethnic group.
Yeah.
Or having American marines on the ground anywhere at all.
I mean, the whole thing is crazy.
Anyway, let's not get too far off into Syria.
But I think you're right.
And in fact, that same New York Times article actually says that this is to placate the Saudis over the Iran deal.
So that's about half confirmation of what you said.
You know, that's why they did it in spite of the fact that they knew it would be indeterminate.
But now we're skipping ahead.
So can we go back to right around regime change time here?
And in, you know, the Arab Spring breaks out at the very end of 2010, very beginning of 2011, the dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt are overthrown.
America hijacks and takes over in the Saudis to, I guess, kind of take over the Arab Spring in Libya and in Syria.
But then in Yemen, you have this huge protest movement.
And I wonder if you can tell us which all factions were part of that or maybe more importantly, which all factions weren't, because it seemed like the people, broadly speaking, of the country really wanted him gone and they got their wish, but it took some assassination attempts or something to finally force him out, right?
How did that go again?
Well, you can't really say there are clear factions protesting against Saleh in 2011.
Generally, many people were fed up of his mismanagement of the country and they were protesting on their own.
And then at a certain point of time, Ali Mohsen and with him, of course, most of the Islam party sided with them and said, OK, we are now on the side of the protesters.
But actually, this was a kind of attempted coup against Saleh.
It was actually so that Saleh ordered Ali Mohsen and his units to go out to the streets and shoot the protesters, and they refused to do so.
That's why they could then say, OK, we are now on the side of the protesters and protecting them.
But basically, this protesting in 2011 was very, very, this was really a grassroots movement that emerged on its own and actually surprised not only Saleh, but the Islam party by surprise.
Nobody could really understand, just like in the case of Syria in 2011, nobody could understand where these protesters are coming from, who is leading them, who is organizing them, how do they do that?
And that is in turn, the reason for this is that there is plenty of ignorance and arrogance towards poor people.
You know, poor people that do not use social media or if they do in local languages.
The media in the West is not following what is Arab media reporting or what is going on in the Arab social media and so on.
And so people are taken by surprise and cannot understand.
Look, just normal people, you know, everyday people in Yemen are against Saleh.
How can that happen?
That is the question.
But the answer is very simple.
They got fed up of his mismanagement, of his, you know, arrogance, of all of this, you know, corruption and so on.
They also, just like people in the West or everywhere else, want a better future for themselves, a better future for their children.
And that's why they started protesting.
And now, how did they get rid of him?
Because I remember that Hillary intervened and held a one-man election with only Hadi's name on the ballot.
Sort of like in the Soviet Union, you can vote, but there's only one party on the ballot.
In this case, it's just one guy on the ballot.
Well, of course, Saleh was concerned if he steps down, he's going to get, you know, arrested or prosecuted and so on.
And so it took several months to convince him, oh, don't worry, we are not going to do anything to you.
And the GCC countries issued several guarantees, nothing is going to happen to you, just please don't mess into the politics anymore.
And eventually, they convinced him, OK, he's going to step down.
That was the moment Saleh said, OK, he's stepping down from the position of the president and Hadi can take over.
That is the easiest, the simplest summary of what happened.
Of course, one can talk about negotiations which are going on, as I said, for months without an end.
And indeed, some of his relatives, for example, the commander of the Air Force refused to step down until 2012.
He was even threatening to shut down any aircraft approaching the Al-Ami airbase, which is the same like SANA International and such things.
So it was not a process, you know, that kind of ended at the moment Saleh stepped down.
On the contrary, it continued all the time.
And eventually it turned out that Saleh did step down, but didn't withdraw from the Yemeni politics.
He very much continued messing around, you know, and mixing into various affairs all the time through 2014 and 2015.
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Now, Obama should be famously, I was going to say famously, on video, and the video does exist.
Obama, what I would frame as conceded, admitted that Iran had warned the Houthis, don't take the capital city of Sanaa, because if you do, you're going to completely drive the Saudis nuts and they're going to start a war against you.
And then the Houthis did it anyway.
What's up with that?
Well, actually, I'm skipping ahead there too.
Maybe you can talk also in the same answer, if you could, about, about Salah's role here.
Once he got thrown out, he decided he was taking some army divisions with him.
And as we talked about before, went and joined up with his old enemies, the Houthis.
Well, basically, Salah saw the Houthis as a tool to return to power, or at least some kind of power to become somebody important again.
He was exploiting everybody all the time.
So why not the Houthis too?
As I said, he personally was not at war with them.
He has sent military units affiliated with, and tribes affiliated with Islamabad to fight the Houthis in the year 2004 to 2010.
For him, from his standpoint, and from the standpoint of the Houthis, there was no major issue between them.
Instead, they said, okay, let's build a coalition and let's try to reorganize the country along our ideas.
That's the essence of what he did.
So now, the question was, you know, how is Saudi Arabia going to react to this?
And this is something that I think they have underestimated.
They didn't expect Saudis to launch an outright military intervention.
On the other side, when they recognize that the things are getting wrong, or at least developing in the wrong direction for them, then they launched an all-out advance into southern Yemen, towards Aden foremost.
And this is where their strategy malfunctioned, so to say, or misfired.
The Saudis did launch an intervention, and well, we have the war, which is still going on ever since.
All right, and so now, I'm sorry I'm keeping you so long, now we finally get to the title of your article here.
A new state is emerging in Yemen, and this is, do I have it right, this is the socialist factions backed by the UAE over Saudi's dead body?
Well, socialists, I wouldn't call them really socialists.
They used to be Marxists, no doubt about this.
This is their background, but their current political directions are multiple.
They have this Southern Transitional Council, which consists of 40 or 50 people, and they have very different ideology, and they have different ideas how to develop their country in the future.
The point is this, you have representatives of several different movements in this council.
You have, for example, Hiraq, which is original Marxist movement in southern Yemen.
You have the Hadhramaut Confederation, these are tribalists from eastern Yemen, and various different smaller parties.
The point is this, quite a number of people in question used to enjoy Saudi and Emirati support already since, I would say, 2010, or perhaps even earlier.
Why?
Because they are powerful Saudis, or at least they used to be powerful, interested in constructing some kind of gas or oil pipeline via eastern Yemen, from Saudi Arabia via Yemen to the Indian Ocean and to the south, basically.
And they were always supporting southern separatists.
They always had their designs in regard to southern Yemen.
So now, these three parties, actually there are five or six, they are together in this Southern Transitional Council.
They have oil fields in the Marib area in central Yemen under their control, which means they have an important source of income.
They have the port of Aden too, and they have everything they need to run a state.
And that's what they are doing.
They have also, of course, Emirati support.
One shouldn't forget that there are plenty of southern Yemenis who fled to the United Arab Emirates, and some of them are influential for the Emirati politics.
So is this the best hope for peace then, Tom, that we just have a secession?
And everyone will say, shucks, the Houthis got sauna, but at least the south is allowed to go.
I mean, what is going to happen in such a case?
Let's say there is a secession and southern Yemen splits from the rest of the country.
You're still going to have the issue of all the possible, oh gosh, so many different interests regarding northern Yemen.
Saudi Arabia is not going to accept any kind of a solution which is excluding its position of influence in Sana'a.
Saudi Arabia is never going to stop fighting this war as long as it has no say in Sana'a again.
So you have the situation where the Islamist party wants to be represented in any kind of a government.
You have Saleh's family, his son wants to have his fingers in the future of the country.
And you have the Houthis, and you have various other tribes and political organizations and so on.
So basically, the war is over in the south of Yemen, and this country can't create itself.
It is more or less going to have only one major problem, which is the Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
Right.
So that was what I was going to say for last year.
I talked with a reporter named Nasser Arabi, who lives in Sana'a quite often.
So he talks about Al-Qaeda, ISIS.
He calls them one thing.
He says, yeah, in Syria, maybe they're at each other's throat or something like that.
But around here, it's really just one group.
And yeah, they're as dangerous as he makes them out.
He has said before, he's not trying to get on the war on terror bandwagon or anything.
He's just saying, yeah, no, really, this group has grown to be incredibly powerful now.
And I guess at one point, they'd even seized a military base and even a tax base or two.
They have captured several military bases.
Basically, the problem was this.
The local tribes were without leadership from above.
Nobody cared about them.
And there was a question, the Saudi and allied militaries landed in Aden and steamrolled the Houthis and Salih's troops towards the north.
But there were too few.
And in their background, there were no organized authorities anymore.
No police, no local governance, nothing.
So the ACAP exploited this situation to spread, to bring plenty of quite seizable parts of southern Yemen under its control.
And there was the issue, how are the locals going to react to this?
One shouldn't forget that the locals in southern Yemen were fighting against the ACAP all the time, all the time.
Even when Salih didn't want to fight against them, they were fighting them.
In 2011, they nearly took one of the towns in southern Yemen.
The military wanted to fight.
The local people wanted to fight.
Just Salih didn't want to fight.
And as soon as Salih was stepped down, the military and the locals launched a major offensive and destroyed the ACAP in that area, which is something also, something nobody's talking about.
On the contrary, we have in the media, the impression like, oh, ACAP is supported by the locals.
That's great.
They are working together and so on.
Then you have the UAV strikes flown by the United States and they kill the people, you know, collateral damage and so on, these stories.
And the JSOC raids on the ground, too, there, you know, they've stepped it up really under Trump.
Yeah, tragically.
And that is the problem.
You know, the people get mad about this.
Why do they bomb us?
We are against the ACAP.
Why do they kill our children, our women and so on?
And that's where the new authorities now have also a problem with such people, you know, because they are protesting such bombardment, which is indiscriminate, irresponsible, too.
The United States is de facto bombing or actually using UAVs to hit its own allies on the ground in southern Yemen.
Yeah, we've really been fighting on both sides of this war for three years straight now.
I mean, well, not to say there's only two, but the two major sides.
Yeah, kind of.
One shouldn't forget.
Yes, the ACAP is very dangerous and well organized and well founded and so on.
No discussion about this.
But it is actually no major factor in this war.
I'm sure that if there wouldn't be a civil war between de facto north and south, southerners would turn very quickly and destroy the ACAP in southern and eastern Yemen.
Similarly, Houthis are actually the fierce enemies of the ACAP.
They were fighting them already from 2004 until 2011.
And if you talk with US special forces officers who used to be stationed in Yemen, they are going to confirm you that Houthis were some of the best fighters against them.
To make things even more important, there is a group of Yemeni Salafists from northern Yemen, so-called quietists, and they were exposed by the Houthis from Damar and forced to flee to Taiz and then from Taiz to Aden and so on.
And they have proven to be some of the most effective fighters against the ACAP in Yemen.
And not only the Saudis, but the Emiratis too, are using them as combatants against the ACAP in southern Yemen.
So to repeat, Yemeni Salafists fighting against the ACAP.
So as I said, you have actually no widespread support for the ACAP in the Yemeni population, except there is some kind of emergency and the top authorities are not operating, not functioning.
Well, I mean, I never even mind the last three years of total lawlessness in the country and then the rise in reaction and all this.
But even before that, since 2009, the drone war against them had only grown al-Qaeda.
It was already, Jeremy Scahill had a great piece in The Nation about Yemeni policy backfires.
That was back in 2010, maybe.
He was saying, you know, look, already we have al-Qaeda is growing and growing every time we bomb them.
This is not working.
That's correct.
Yes.
This is absolutely, I don't know how to describe it, except counterproductive politics to pursue it.
It makes no sense.
You can't discriminate between, you know, who are you going to hit and who are you going to kill if you kill one person next to him from 15,000 kilometers away.
It is impossible.
Either you have intimate knowledge of the area or stay out of it.
You know, that's as simple as that.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so you mentioned about hyperventilating about Hezbollah and Iran and this kind of thing.
So let me put it this way.
If America called off intervention in Yemen and told the Saudis and the Emiratis, y'all's war is over there, too.
You know, I guess if they were going to stay and back up the government they've created in the south, that'd be one thing.
But as far as advancing against the capital and the Houthis, the air war and all that, it's canceled.
Obviously, America has the power to do that.
If they did that, then what would happen?
It's not like peace would just break out.
I have strong doubts that the America, I mean, perhaps people of America have such interest or wish to say the Saudis, okay, stop the war, stop the bombardment and so on.
But you have the defense sector, which is absolutely interested actually in exactly the opposite.
You have the defense sector, which is earning handsomely from this war.
So why should they demand the U.S. government to stop the Saudi government?
Similarly, you have inside Yemen, you have an entire, so to say, well, a group of interests, too, for the war to go on.
You have merchants in Sana'a earning handsomely from the war, from smuggling and so on.
You have merchants who are earning money through selling weapons abroad, means from Houthi-controlled parts of Yemen, not to talk about the other parts of Yemen, to Eritrea, to Somalia and so on.
That's so funny.
Wait, wait, wait, wait.
So wait, for all the accusations about the Houthis are being armed by the Iranians, the Houthis are selling weapons.
They have a export industry or under their territory.
Yeah, they're, well, we would say America's selling weapons when it's Lockheed selling them.
So same difference.
I get it.
Well, it is like this.
Houthis never had a problem with weapon supply.
Yemen has more firearms per capita than the United States.
So there was never a problem, you know, with having an AK or AK-47 or AKM or whatever, you know, kind of rifle or assault rifle or whatever else.
And the Houthis actually largely armed themselves through buying weapons from Saleh's officers.
Because the general practice in Saleh's military was that you have a brigade, for example, of nominally 2,000 combatants or soldiers.
But actually, you maintain your brigade at only 1,000 people.
Nevertheless, the state is still paying you and supplying you for 2,000 people.
So you sell, as an officer, as a commander of that unit, you sell all the surplus equipment, arms, supplies, fuel, water, everything on the black market.
This is how Houthis got armed.
Of course, they were not selling such arms and fuel and so on and equipment to Houthis alone, but to everybody else too.
And so, you know, when you check the news about interceptions of supposedly Yemen-bound ships, you know, full of Iranian weapons, and you check what are the backgrounds of the ships in question and their crews and their commanders and the load they were carrying, actually, it turns out most of these weapons were exported, de facto, from Yemen to, for example, Somalia or some other place.
That's interesting.
All right.
I'm sorry, do you have one more minute?
Yeah, sure.
No problem.
Oh, great.
Thank you so much.
Listen, it just occurred to me, you wrote a book, Hot Skies Over Yemen.
So I've got to ask you this.
I've heard this rumor twice, but it's a very good rumor.
It's Andrew Coburn had it from one source and former Ambassador Dan Simpson had it from another source that Americans, I guess contractors or possibly even currently serving Air Force, were sitting in the back of the Saudi F-15s in the backseat, basically holding these Saudi princelings' little hands on the way to their targets in Yemen, at least in some cases.
And I wonder if you can confirm that.
I cannot explicitly confirm that.
I haven't heard anything from this.
I have actually interviewed several Saudi pilots for the volume two of Hot Skies Over Yemen, primarily about their involvement in operations against the Houthis back in 2009 and 2010, but also in regards of more recent operations.
But as far as I can say, the number of US advisors to the Saudis, military advisors, active military personnel, should be down to 50 or 60.
That's what they told me.
So now, whether this is absolutely that way or not, I'm not in a position to estimate and I don't like to do such things, actually.
Basically, I tend to believe that most of operations are actually run by Saudis themselves.
They certainly have enough crews and well-trained crews to operate their F-15s.
They have reorganized their military since that first clash with the Houthis back in 2009, 2010.
So there is lots of false reporting about efficiency of the Saudi military and allied militaries in Yemen at all.
One shouldn't forget that they have deployed on the ground only 40,000 troops against Houthis, who used to have 100,000 combatants already back in 2009, and that the Houthis are supported by up to 60% of the former Yemeni military, of former Salem military.
So the Houthis must have around 200, perhaps more, thousand combatants on the ground in Yemen.
And the Saudis are fighting them.
Saudis and allies are fighting them with 40,000 own troops.
And perhaps, well, now, meanwhile, there should be 50 or 60,000 in this new Yemeni national army they have established.
Yeah, of course, they should certainly help.
I mean, they are making the difference.
The air power is what is decisive over there.
All right, listen, I got to tell you, I really appreciate your time on the show today, Tom.
This has really been very interesting.
You're most welcome.
Thank you very much.
All right, you guys, that's Tom Cooper.
His latest book is Hot Skies over Yemen.
And you got to read this piece.
It's at warisboring.com.
It's called A New State is Emerging in Yemen.
And you guys know me, scotthorton.org and youtube.com slash scotthorton show for the show archives and foolserun.us for my book, Foolserun, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, antiwar.com and libertarianinstitute.org for the things I want you to read.
And follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton show.
Thanks.
