All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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All right, you guys on the line.
I've got Nasser Araby, reporter out of Sana'a, Yemen.
Welcome back to the show, Nasser.
How are you doing?
Fine.
How are you doing?
Very, very fine.
Thank you very much for having me.
Great.
Well, I'm glad to hear it, and I really appreciate you joining us on the show, and I'm sorry I've been out of touch.
It's been a little while since I've had you on here.
Yes, yes, but I understand it.
Yes, go ahead.
Yeah.
Well, so we have a lot to catch up on, but I wanted to start with this big piece in the New York Times about how the Obama government lawyers were afraid that they would all go to prison for war crimes, for aiding and abetting Saudi Arabia and UAE's war in Yemen.
The headline is, War Crime Risk Grows for U.S. Over Saudi Strikes in Yemen.
And apparently, there's some of this talk going on among the lawyers in Mike Pompeo's State Department, too.
And so this is a big deal.
This isn't just like the ICC investigating for Afghanistan.
This is the U.S. government's own lawyers are saying that the principals here, the cabinet members could actually end up going to prison for war crimes, which, after all, are crimes and are illegal under United States law.
I wonder what you make of that.
I think this is the most important thing to start with, yes, because now it's what's happening now here in Yemen is war crimes, new kind of war crimes, yes.
After the U.S. cut the aid to Yemen, I think more than 70 million, they cut it this year.
And not only this, also the U.S. and Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are cooperating in tightening the blockade, the food and the fuel.
And it's even worse than it was at the beginning of this war.
So it's like they feel they failed to bring Yemenis to their knees.
So they tend to use the food and the fuel and the basic supply for human being here in Yemen.
Not only this, after the United States cut their aid this year under very, very weak and useless and meaningless justifications, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia also did not pay what they had pledged they would pay for the United Nations.
And this is something that we understood from the meeting in the UN Security Council, in the meeting of the UN Security Council this week, the undersecretary of the United Nations, Mark Lawcock, said that the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia did not pay anything of the pledge they had said they would do or they would pay for aiding Yemen.
So this means that the United States and Saudi Arabia and the UAE are now shifting to a new kind of starvation, new kind of blockade after they failed in their war.
So this is the big thing.
And if I tell you about what's going on, it's even, I mean, it's a catastrophe now going on here.
And in terms of fuel, food, medicine, hospitals, for example, are under the threat of closing down because they don't have the fuel to operate and they don't have also the basic thing to run and to help the patients.
Also there is also a big crisis in oil.
There are big, big lines up everywhere.
You can see them everywhere here in Sana'a and in the other cities because about 25 ships, just oil, oil ships are now being held by Saudi Arabia in Jizan for about three or four months now, although they already had the licenses and permits from UN to get in Yemen.
But Saudi Arabia did not allow them to get in Yemen because they want to strangle the Yemenis and to commit more war crimes.
And this is why the New York Times and many other outlets outside Yemen talk now about a famine that is very close now in Yemen.
And it's even worse than ever before.
Yes, go ahead, Scott.
Well, you know, not to be too cynical about it, but I mean, this is actually a topic worthy of discussion for a couple of reasons.
But the CNN headline from yesterday is that Saudi announces more than $200 million in UN aid funding to Yemen.
And so never mind that they're the ones prosecuting the war against you.
You're supposed to feel grateful.
And I guess American TV audiences are supposed to feel relieved that the Saudis are waging a very humanitarian war over there.
Yes, they are now focusing on this.
And the revolt in CNN also is in this direction.
As I told you, they are now in Saudi Arabia and with support from the Trump administration.
They are focusing on the humanitarian things.
They are focusing on weaponizing the humanitarian situation, weaponizing the food, the fuel, the medicine, and these things.
Because they are now talking about stopping what they call Houthis from entering Marib, the last stronghold of the Saudi-backed government.
And they, under this justification, they tighten the noose on Yemenis to make the already worst humanitarian crisis even worse and worse.
Yeah.
Now, so I'd also read about increased, you know what, I'm sorry, before we get to that, I wanted to clarify a point for the audience, for anybody new.
We didn't really talk about this at the beginning, but it is important, extremely important to note, as the New York Times does admit in their piece here, that Barack Obama started this war in March of 2015.
And the then deputy crown prince of Saudi Arabia asked for permission, said, okay, if we start this war and you guys will help us.
And Obama gave them the green light.
In other words, it never would have happened at all.
And it wasn't just permission.
It was all the bombs and the, of course, they have all their hangers are full of American F-15s in the first place, but he kept sending them more and more weapons.
But not only that, military and intelligence officers, as well as military contractors to go and take care of all the care and feeding of their military, as well as picking the targets and, you know, helping to plan the entire war.
And that went on for at least the first two and a half years of the war, you know, and it was under Trump, I think they started phasing out the refueling, the midair refueling.
There's another thing the Obama government was doing, but as far as I know, and maybe you have better information about this, but as far as I know, the Americans are still helping the Saudis with their intelligence, with their picking the targets and everything else.
They couldn't wage this war without Americans holding their hands all the way through.
So Obama started this thing and him and Trump are absolutely just as guilty as each other.
I mean, Trump's kept the thing going for three and a half years, where Obama, you know, he's he's over the time Obama had two years at six now.
But yeah, they belong in the same prison cell together.
This is not a partisan issue whatsoever.
Exactly.
It's six.
It's six years now.
It's six years.
It's about six years now, not not only three and a half.
It's six years now.
And they are they are using, I mean, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are using the very dirty things to to to do what they want here in Yemen.
But you know, they they they didn't even they didn't even allow you in to to to do what they want, although you and is is, you know, is, you know, under their influence.
But they didn't even allow them now to do what they want to do, because the United, as I told you, United Nations allowed the ships that are off the sea now.
But they could not they could not get in because Saudi Arabia stopped them and they are still holding them until now for four months now, while people are now starving to death or hospitals and many other farms and many other things are stopped because they they they don't have the petrol, the diesel and the things to to to to run their their their operations and their businesses.
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In terms of the Saudis stopping the shipments there, is that their navy is intercepting the ships and refusing to let them dock?
Or what exactly are they doing?
Well, it's exactly the Saudi Arabia is holding them is holding them in front of the people you and knows very well.
They came to Ethiopia.
They came to Addis Ababa to they start with Ethiopia because there is a U.N. office there and they take the ships, take the licenses and the permits and everything.
And then they they head to Yemen through Saudi Arabia waters.
They stopped them.
Saudis stopped them and they say, we are in war.
It's dangerous for you.
We want to inspect you.
They say something that's that's meaningless.
I mean, you can't stop people for months saying that you want to inspect them.
You want to make sure what they have.
You want to make sure if they if they have weapons from Iran or if they have something like this.
I mean, it's it's it's clear that they are just tightening the noose on on on Yemenis and to make the humanitarian crisis, which is the worst in the world, to make it even worse and worse.
This is what they want.
Yeah.
And now, listen, I think, you know, it may be hard for people to understand here because there's been so much suffering in all of America's wars in this century, in Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya and Syria and Iraq again.
But this one really is separate and different in the sense that the strategy of the war is to inflict punishment on the civilian population.
That's it's not collateral damage.
It's the point.
And yes, this is the point.
Yes, this is the point.
The point is this.
It is not it is not the lateral things.
It is not the side effect.
Yes, it's they want to inflict as much as possible of damage on on on people, on millions of people.
I'm speaking I'm talking about twenty five millions here in the north, the vast majority of Yemenis.
So it's not, as they say, side effect or lateral things.
No, they want to do this.
They want to to do the damage on on the on the people as a war, as a weapon of war.
And now I know that all along here and we've spoken, you and I have spoken about this since 2015 and and cover the whole war really this whole time.
And you have kept your own count of the casualties.
And for years and years, we talked about the ridiculous UN numbers that said 10,000 had been killed for years and years and years.
They just had that that number and you had your own count.
And then finally, right around a year ago, I believe it was the UN admitted that the number was more like two hundred and thirty three thousand people.
So just shy of a quarter of a million dead.
And that was, I believe, you know, violently killed in in bombings and attacks, as well as those who have been deprived to death as well.
Kind of the excess deaths.
But I wonder, I wonder about what's your latest count.
And I don't think that the UN has updated their numbers since then.
So what else can you tell us about the casualties?
Yes, that's right.
Let me just remind your your audience that you kept saying 10,000, 10,000 for four years.
For more than four years, right.
It's only last year when they said they are twenty five thousand as hundreds of thousands of people were killed.
Yes.
Two hundred and fifty.
Yeah.
This is a this is a clear message that there has been misinformation, there has been disinformation and there has been a lot of misleading, deliberate misleading in favor of those who kill Yemenis of the war criminals.
So if you ask me now about the about the about the update, it's we have now more people who also do these things, who are even better than me, organizations, local and others, who try to to to update and to to count as much as possible, because UN is not counting anymore.
They said this and so the the the number is even more than than two hundred and two hundred and fifty.
It's it's about three hundred now, including, of course, the including the the the the children who the children who who died, who died with with this problem related diseases, not not any other diseases like malnutrition, the malnutrition in particular.
If we if we focus on malnutrition, the malnutrition that killed children here in Yemen, it's it will be this number alone.
It will be more than two hundred and fifty thousand children who were killed by malnutrition, malnutrition that was made by this war by Saudi blockade.
So it's it's I mean, it's it's horrible numbers and it's it's really war crimes being committed every day by Saudi Arabia with the support from Trump administration.
And now, you know, as as we talked about before, the UAE reportedly pulled back most of their forces, but they kept their sort of unofficial militias in play there.
And I know that things have been very complicated in terms of the so-called Yemeni government.
That's what they still call it in the American press.
The Hadi group backed by Saudi Arabia versus the Southern Transitional Council down there in Aden, which is sometimes allies with and sometimes enemies with the UAE there.
Can you give us an update on that situation?
Yeah, this is also a good thing to tell your audience.
It's Aden is the same.
I mean, nothing has changed, although Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have been exerting a lot of efforts to bring the two sides together, to bring the separatists and the so-called government, the Saudi-backed government.
But they are still enemies.
Enemies.
I mean, they are still fighting.
The bombings continue to happen.
The assassinations continue to happen.
The chaos, the violence every day, not only this, the economic situation, the livings of the people.
For example, let me just give you one example.
The $1 here in the north is for 600 Yemeni rials, while in Aden it's 1,000.
And it's still going up.
This is one example of the chaos there, although they printed that huge amount of money, that huge amount of banknotes in order to make the problem in the north.
But it backfired.
That's interesting.
Inflation as a weapon and it blew up in their own face, huh?
Exactly.
It blew up in their face.
It backfired because what?
Because they wanted to make the problem here, but now here there is a little bit of organization of law and order here in the north, under the Houthi.
But there, there is no.
So now there are violence, there are demonstrations because of this, because of the economic situation that is getting worse and worse.
So although now the two sides are in Riyadh also for two months now, but they didn't do anything.
They didn't reach anything because everybody knows that they are enemies.
And Mohammed bin Zayed, the Emirates, the Emirati leader Mohammed bin Zayed wants to clean, cleans the south and the north from the brotherhood.
And he knows that the people, the government is a brotherhood.
So this is a problem, their problem.
And they don't care about, about people being killed or being stabbed.
No.
But they want to achieve only their, their goals.
Mohammed bin Zayed wants only to achieve his goals.
And Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince is following him.
It's, it's so funny that where the Saudis traditionally back the Muslim brotherhood in this case, the, and I guess, I don't know the history of the UAE with the Muslim brotherhood, but it sounds like even though the Saudis are back them in Syria and, but they hate them in Egypt.
Yeah.
I can't keep track of what the Saudis position.
I guess they hate him in Qatar too, right?
No, no.
It's, you can say something.
You can say Saudi Arabia is Saudi Arabia is Mohammed bin Salman is, is hating them more than, than, than bin Zayed, but they can't let them go.
Yeah.
They need them.
Cause that's really the only.
He needs them.
He needs them to stay in Riyadh, but it's fake.
It's, it's, it's, it's not true.
You know, it's, it's a problem.
He knows that they are not what they, what he wants, but, but he says, okay, maybe they can do it.
Maybe they will help us.
Maybe they, but nothing is happening.
Nothing is happening at all.
But so, so I like this.
So, so crown Prince Bonesaw Mohammed bin Salman there in Saudi, he may hate and fear them even more than Mohammed bin Zayed from the UAE does, but he's going ahead and accepting the fact that he needs their support to, to support Hadi, even though Hadi could never retake power there anyway.
But the UAE have a hard line, absolutely against the, the brotherhood, the Islam party and therefore are favoring the Southern socialist transitional movement thing down there in Aden instead.
But they're both, but they're all fighting essentially against the Houthis.
But is it, it is, am I right about how, how stark the differences in the policy between the Saudis and the UAE there between which factions are back there?
Yes, you're right.
And let me give you an example, another example.
In Marib now, Marib in the East, in the 200 East of Sana'a, 200 kilometers East of Sana'a, Marib, the last, last, last by far, the last stronghold of Hadi government or Saudi backed government.
Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia, for example, Mohammed bin Salman doesn't want this city to fall in the hand of Houthi, or at least he seems to be.
But he can't do anything.
Mohammed bin Salman can't support his people, his mercenaries, except with a few of airstrikes only.
So now Houthi is surrounding the city from all directions, from the three directions.
Only one direction, which leads to Saudi Arabia, the eastern direction, that is open.
And they are now, they are closing in on the city, for two weeks now.
Maybe tomorrow, after tomorrow, they will be in the city.
And this, of course, there was a lot, a lot of pressure from UN, from US, not Marib, not Marib, not Marib.
But they don't do anything.
Why?
Because Mohammed bin Zayed wants it.
Because Mohammed bin Zayed knows that Marib is the stronghold of brotherhood.
And the people, the leaders that he hates most.
And it's going.
It's going in favor of Mohammed bin Zayed.
You know, Mohammed bin Salman can't stop anything.
He can't help.
And it's not me now who is saying this.
It's some of Houthi's senior people, senior officials who say this.
They are saying we are being stabbed in the back by the coalition, they say, by coalition.
They don't say who.
And some of them say by Emirates, and some of them by Emirates and Saudi Arabia.
They say this on TVs, openly, because they know.
They know that, for example, the people who are fighting are not being paid.
Why?
Because they don't, they want, Mohammed bin Salman and Mohammed bin Zayed want them, they don't want them to fight Houthi.
Because they see that Islah and brotherhood is even worse than Houthi.
Their enemy is the brotherhood, not Houthi.
This is the, this is how the things are going on, on the ground.
It's a big problem.
I mean, a lot of contradictions in there.
Is there any way that the Houthis and the Southern Transitional Council could form an alliance where they respect each other's sovereignty over the North and the South and they team up to isolate the foreigners?
Yes.
Do you know when?
Do you?
Do you?
Do you know when this can happen?
No.
When?
When?
Mohammed bin Zayed wants it to happen?
Yeah.
It could happen.
It could happen overnight.
In other words, the foreigners have too much power to say over the Southern Council thing there.
And they wouldn't be able to make that decision and throw them off and go ahead and join up with the Houthis, despite.
Yes, of course.
Of course.
Sisi, I think it doesn't mean Mohammed bin Zalman now, Mohammed bin Zalman, Mohammed bin Zayed are, they are thinking of reshaping the things, of reshaping everything in their favor because they know that if they, if brotherhood is still there, so they don't like it and it will not, they feel that it will not be, the things will not be in their hands.
So they, they want to waken them as much as possible, to waken the brotherhood as much as possible.
And then when they feel it's okay, they can do okay.
They can say, okay, for, for, for their separatists and their people to, to cooperate or to say to cooperate, not to ally, to cooperate with, with, with, with Houthi and to make the Yemen they want, to reshape the Yemen they, they, they, they need.
But if Houthi is, if Houthi keeps getting stronger and stronger as now, and Houthi will not agree and they will, they will, they will impose their conditions and they will do whatever they want because after Marib, they, they will head to the South because Marib is, is, is also at the border with the South and they know this.
All right.
Listen, I'm so sorry.
I'm way over time and I have got to go.
We both started late here today.
And so I got to cut it short, but I hope we can talk again real soon because I didn't get a chance to ask you about the status of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
You're most welcome anytime.
And thank you very much for your interest in Yemen.
And I'm ready anytime.
Thank you very much, Scott.
Thank you.
Thank you, Nasser.
I really appreciate that.
Okay.
Bye bye.
Bye bye.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
