10/30/15 – Jason Ditz – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And every day on this show, you hear me read articles by Jason Ditz from news.antiwar.com.
He is our managing news editor there, and he is on top of it all day long.
News.antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show, Jason.
How are you, man?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
I really appreciate you joining us, and especially short notice, et cetera, et cetera, like that.
So extra thanks there.
Tell me the bad news, man.
Give us the 101 on the Yemen war.
Well, unfortunately, it's about as bad as it's ever been, and it's mostly more or the same.
Seven months in, the situation's really gotten no better.
They're still fighting over Taiz, huge civilian death tolls pretty much on a daily basis.
And no end in sight.
All right.
So I guess, you know, in the basic scheme of things, the movement that, the Houthi-Zaidi movement that now controls the capital city of Sana'a, based up there, I guess, in the northwest, primarily, of the country.
And they control at least that swath of territory between the capital and the Saudi border, I assume.
How much of the rest of the country do they control?
Or first of all, is that even correct?
And then second of all, how much of the rest of the country is in dispute at this point by Saudi and UAE, et cetera, forces?
Quite a bit of the country is in dispute.
Most of the Taiz province is in dispute.
The Marib province, a little bit further to the east, is also in dispute.
Most of the stuff north of that is basically Houthi-controlled.
Aden is the only thing you can really securely say is the pro-Saudi side controlled.
But even that seems to be somewhat in question because of al-Qaeda, which has set up shop in the same town.
And the Saudis have kind of gone out of their way not to confront al-Qaeda militarily, which has made them kind of a welcome target for al-Qaeda, increasingly.
Yeah, I mean, well, they're using them because who's better at fighting the Houthis than al-Qaeda?
But they're putting themselves in Ambassador Stephen's kind of a situation there, it sounds like.
Right.
And parts of Aden are so controlled by al-Qaeda that they have the al-Qaeda and the Arabian Peninsula faction organizes parades through the city, marches their troops through.
And the pro-Saudi people have been trying to get some tribal leaders to talk al-Qaeda into leaving, but it's not going well so far.
Now, is there any indication of direct communication and cooperation between the, I guess, government, pseudo-exiled government, the Hadi forces, the Saudi-backed forces and the al-Qaeda guys?
Or they're just sort of eyeing each other across the field as they keep their eye on the same goal ahead of them?
More or less that.
I mean, there's been some efforts, again, tribal leaders trying to get the two sides to talk, to do some cooperation, at least to not directly fight.
Well, now, was al-Qaeda in Aden at all before or this is all brand new since the Saudi war?
This is all new.
Al-Qaeda was, before the war began, al-Qaeda was basically on the coast a little further west of Aden.
When the war started, they seized the city of Mukalla, which is along the coast quite a bit to the east of Aden, and they've taken quite a bit of the shoreline.
And when Aden fell, they were pretty quick to establish a presence there.
And they really had been bogged down fighting the Houthis before this, correct?
Oh, definitely.
All right.
So I'm looking at the map embedded in your piece here.
Saudi airstrike destroys bus in Yemen's Taiz, killing 10 civilians.
Medics say slain were workers heading to a factory.
That's at news.antiwar.com.
I'm looking at the map.
And of course, we're talking about the very southwest corner of the Arabian Peninsula here at the Bab al-Mandeb Straits opening to the Red Sea.
And the Gulf of Aden, where Somalia, the Horn of Africa, sticks out there.
And so, and the country, for people not that familiar, it's a lot wider on the map than it is tall, so to speak, a lot further east and west than north and south.
And you mentioned that town al-Mukalla, east of Aden, where al-Qaeda had been based for a while there, had some gains.
But I look at the map, and there's at least four major towns to the east of there, including one apparently right on the Amman border.
And I wonder which, if any, forces controlled those.
And by the way, while you're at it, where are the Chavistas, the socialist movement in Yemen, which I know is still a strong thing?
Those are both good questions, and I don't really know the answer to either of them.
There really hasn't been a lot of reported fighting any further east than Mukalla.
So the locals, I think, are basically in control in a lot of those places, which historically has been the case in Yemen.
Like a lot of the poorer countries in the region, they never really had a national government that was able to enforce its will nationally.
So local tribal leaders and the like were more or less able to do what they want in these sort of great empty expanses in these cities that are kind of off in the middle of nowhere.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, and this is really the most important thing, man, I should have started with, sorry, but the civilian casualties, and we've talked about this before, it's been warned from the beginning of this war, as you said, seven months ago, that here's a society that imports 80 to 90 percent of their food.
And on top of that, it's the poorest country in the Middle East, which is saying something, I think.
Obviously, there are a couple of really rich ones, but most of them are not.
But so, you know, it seemed real clear.
And of course, with the war, you have total disruption of whatever market systems and distribution networks ever existed are all completely jeopardized.
There's no gasoline.
People are dying everywhere, whatever.
Obviously, it's chaos.
So and I heard, I think it was last week, probably you reported this at antiwar.com about the the aid workers.
I forget which NGO warning of severe malnutrition and this kind of thing.
But I wonder if you're seeing many reports about or many in-depth kind of reports about just what is happening to the civilian population of Yemen, especially concerning their food and water resources here.
We're really not receiving as many reports as you'd think.
And I think a lot of that is because there's a war going on over the whole country, which has made getting to a lot of these places all but impossible for reporters.
So we really don't have a lot of accurate reporting on the ground of specifics going on in specific towns.
But yeah, like you say, when aid groups have talked, it's never a pre-picture and it seems like it's always getting a little bit worse.
I mean, in the early months of the war, we were talking about the price of flour going double every few days, eventually hitting a point where the price of flour had doubled five or six times within a matter of a couple of weeks.
And then you couldn't find flour anywhere.
And that was months ago.
So there's been basically no flour since then.
And, you know, all the more desperate sort of famine-type foods that people turn to, stored foods and things like that, are very quickly being run through.
In a country as poor as Yemen, there was never a lot of that to begin with.
Never tremendous food security, but it's only gotten worse and it seems like it's only going to continue to get worse.
All right, man.
Hold it right there, Jason.
We'll be right back after this with Jason Ditz on the war in Yemen.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, Scott Horton Show.
Hey, Jason, tell me, have the Saudis slash Americans who, of course, are running the entire war for them, committed any war crimes lately?
Pretty much every day, yes.
Although pretty much every day, then they, if the war crime gets any particular media coverage, they feel blanket denial of it.
We had a recent incident of them bombing a Doctors Without Borders hospital, which sounds awful familiar because the U.S., of course, did that just a few weeks ago in Afghanistan, but apparently they have one in Yemen as well, and the Saudis bombed that one.
Before that, we had the wedding party bombing in Mocha, which is down on the coast near Taiz, killing 140 or so civilians.
Yesterday, of course, the article you mentioned earlier, the 10 workers being taken to their factory in a bus, and the bus gets bombed.
Man, and now, is there any indication that there's any end in sight here as far as, I don't know, quote unquote, victory for one side or the other, or some peace talks that have any real teeth in them or anything, or this is just going to be like this?
Well, the problem is, if you hear the Saudis talk, they're on the verge of victory, but they've been on the verge of victory for months, and they never seem to take any new territory.
As far as the peace talks go, the Houthis have been on board for the peace talks for pretty much from the beginning.
Their only condition was that the airstrikes stop, but the conditions on the other side are for more or less complete surrender by the Houthis, disarmament, surrendering all the cities to them before they agree to even consider talks, which obviously isn't going to happen and has kept the war going.
Man, and now, so you ran this article about some in the White House got a problem with this or whatever.
Should we put any stock in that?
Is that just they're trying to make themselves look innocent for their horrible bloodsuck crimes that they're 100% guilty of?
Or is there really a split?
Is there any kind of real talk in DC about pressuring the new Saudi king to figure out a way to call this thing short?
I think there is some real split going on there.
I think a lot of people, when the US bought into this war and contributed airplanes and contributed ships to the naval blockade, I don't think they really knew what they were buying into.
The humanitarian toll has been so severe.
I think a lot of them are having some pretty big remorse about having joined in in the first place and want to see at least some effort made to reign the Saudis in to keep this from getting completely out of hand.
Yeah.
I don't know if you've seen this yet.
Somebody sent in to us this morning at antiwar.com.
This piece, Italy sends more RWM bombs to Saudi Arabia.
Apparently, they got all these photographs of a cargo plane taking all these bombs to the Saudis for use on the Yemenis.
So, replenishing their stocks for more slaughter ahead.
This really does seem like not even really a war of attrition, just a war of bombing them but going nowhere anyway kind of thing.
Like, say for example, the war against the Taliban.
There is no end in sight.
This could go on at this same rate for two years or something if America doesn't call an end to it.
Looks like.
Right.
I don't think there's any realistic chance America does call an end to it.
A lot of the US going along so easily with this war, I think, was a function of the Iran nuclear deal.
We saw with Israel trying to placate Israel with billions of dollars in extra military aid.
I think this is just Saudi Arabia's version of that.
Instead of military aid, they're getting unconditional backing for their war in Yemen.
Okay, but so, how are the Houthis hanging on?
I mean, the Saudis don't have to be great pilots to follow American GPS coordinates and draw bombs on people's heads.
And they do have some ground forces there.
And the Houthis, why, they're just the Houthis.
They never had sovereignty over anything but their own little semi-autonomous area up in the north.
And all of a sudden, they rule the capital city and they're able to withstand at least an American-coordinated, sounds like an American-level aerial bombardment, and with UAE tanks and some ground forces on the ground.
But they're just making no headway at all.
Don't tell me the Iranians are arming and funding them, Jason.
I know you're not going to.
Well, to hear the UAE and the Saudis, they would say that that is happening, although they can't prove it.
But the reality is, a lot of this is just the Yemeni military was never particularly loyal to the pro-Saudi government and are still not loyal to them even now that they're nominally back from exile in Aden.
So you see a lot of the military and a lot of the tribal leaders that would have formerly supported the government are on the Houthi side.
Yeah, that's...
Well, I mean, they won't talk about this damn thing at all, really, on TV, but they certainly never really get into all of that.
That, you know, Saleh and his men have now kind of changed sides, that the Houthis have an army that's willing to fight for them.
They kind of took the army over.
They didn't debauchify it and abolish the whole damn thing.
They kind of co-opted it.
And I guess as long as they're paying salaries.
But that sort of implied, to tell that story at all implies some bit of popular sovereignty behind the Houthi movement.
If others besides the Houthis are willing to be ruled by them and work with them to such a great degree, I mean, imagine that war is the health of the state over there.
As the people rally around their country, whoever's running their country, as it's being bombed from the outside.
Well, right.
And I think a lot of this is the old North-South nationalist split, too, because the Houthis are an overwhelmingly Northern movement.
The Shiite population in Yemen is almost exclusively in the far North.
President Hadi, that resigned back in January, was born just outside of Aden in the far South.
And now he's declared his new capital to be Aden.
His troops are mostly flying the flag of South Yemen, not the flag of the Yemen that he was nominally president of last year.
So I think for a lot of people, this is really just a new North-South civil war in Yemen.
And maybe even ultimately a war of secession, and they're just going to break back apart again, it sounds like.
Yeah, I think the reality is that in most of the ways that matter, it's already happened.
And the real question is just where the border is going to be this time.
Right.
Well, man, what a bunch of bad news.
I guess, let me ask you this.
Any European nations trying to do anything to stop the war?
Any European nations trying to do anything to budge the blockade and allow escalation of aid or any kind of thing?
Any sort of silver lining or light at the end of the tunnel for the civilian population there at all?
There really hasn't been.
There have been a lot of European aid groups that have come out very critically of the blockade, as would be expected.
But as far as European governments know, they're really just sort of standing by.
Even when the British government made a sort of token expression of regret when the Doctors Without Borders hospital was hit, Saudi Arabia reacted with outrage to that and demanded a British apology and said it was inappropriate of them to be lecturing them on human rights.
Yeah.
Well, sounds about right, I guess.
And yeah, I guess as long as they have carte blanche from the US, nobody's even really covering it because I guess everybody already knows they can't do a damn thing about it.
It's funny, isn't it, how overshadowed it is in even the international media by the conflict in Syria and Iraq and elsewhere?
It really is.
And the fighting is no less severe and the civilian casualties are no smaller.
But somehow Yemen, with its barely functioning economy to begin with and its almost trivial amount of oil reserves, just doesn't seem to be a priority.
Except for the killers.
All right, man.
Well, thanks very much, Jason, again, for your great journalism, dude.
I really appreciate it.
Sure.
Thank you for having me.
That's the great Jason Ditz, y'all.
News.antiwar.com.
All day, every day.
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