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We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
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It's a proud day for America.
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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 they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, bitch, say it, 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 on the line.
I've got Nasser Arabi, reporter out of Sana'a, Yemen.
And his site is yemen-now.com.
Yemen Alon at yemen-now.com.
Welcome back to the show, Nasser.
How are you doing?
Fine, fine.
Go ahead.
All right.
So yeah, important news over the weekend.
This massive operation named Victory from God by the Houthis crossed into Saudi Arabia.
And then you tell the details, please, sir.
Yes.
Okay.
Let me first tell you what happened today because it's related.
Houthi authorities here in Sana'a today released 350 war prisoners, including three Saudi nationals.
And they handed them to the ICRC to be handed to their families.
And this is, of course, unilateral step, unilateral initiative from Houthi side.
And, of course, it's in the framework of a prisoner swap, according to the Stockholm Agreement that was signed last December in Denmark.
So the Saudi-backed government or the Saudi side need now to do the same thing in order for the other prisoners to be released, because there are about 15,000 from both sides.
So this is also a sign from Houthi to tell Saudis that he has the upper hand to take initiatives and to move forward.
And it's up to them now.
And the ball is in their court.
And this initiative that happened today, the release of the detainees, came only one day after or two days after the announcement of the major operation that happened in the south of Saudi Arabia.
And, of course, it was called, as you said, the victory or operation victory from God.
This is, of course, a very, very huge operation in which there were three brigades, three Saudi brigades, filled in the hands of Houthis.
There were a lot of losses.
Saudi forces suffered a lot of losses in blood and in treasure.
About 500 soldiers were killed or injured.
This is at least.
And about 2,000, more than 2,000 of them were detained or surrendered.
This is, of course, a big thing.
There were a lot of images, a lot of videos that proved this.
Yesterday, these videos and images were released, and they are now everywhere there.
But let me now tell you what does that mean and who were these people.
These people were not Yemenis who are fighting Houthis.
Yes, there were missionaries from Yemen, from Sudan, from everywhere, but they are under the leadership of the Saudi Ministry of Defense.
So, they are within the army of Saudi Arabia.
They have nothing to do with the Hadi government or the so-called International United Government at all.
They are Saudi forces.
So, this is why it was a big operation.
Of course, this operation came after the announcement of Houthi, the announcement of their initiative that they would stop the attacks with drones and missiles on Saudi Arabia.
But Saudi Arabia ignored, and they actually released or they announced this operation.
But this operation did not happen yesterday or this week, of course.
This is something that everybody should know.
It happened one month ago, almost one month ago, and it was in the making for even more than a month.
But yesterday or this week was only the announcement.
So, the time was good for Houthi to tell the people that they can do a lot of things.
Why Houthi delayed it?
Because Saudi Arabia did not want them to announce it.
Saudi Arabia kept telling Houthis through back channels that if they want a prisoner swap, they should not announce anything about the operation.
Because it was a big blow.
It was a big embarrassment for Saudi Arabia.
If you see an image, a video or something, you would not believe.
Because something like this never happened before at all, to see thousands of people surrendering at the same time, thousands of people.
And they were besieged from all directions.
So, Houthi delayed because of Saudi's pressure.
But when Saudis ignored the announcement or the initiative of the halt of the war altogether, Houthi then published the images and announced the major operation to make more pressure on Saudi Arabia and to embarrass Saudi Arabia and to tell people how weak this army is.
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Alright, so, first of all, just to go back over those numbers.
It's been reported, as you said, approximately 500 killed or wounded and 2,000 captured.
Now, I've been looking at your Twitter feed.
Well, last night, I haven't looked at it, if you've updated in the last 12 hours or so.
Sorry about that.
But I did take a look at it last night, my time.
And I saw, you know, you had a lot of pictures on there.
So, I wanted to ask you if you had taken those pictures or these were furnished to you.
And then, secondly, I wanted to ask about the 2,000.
Because it's not, I don't think, evident in the pictures that there are thousands of prisoners.
Certainly, you know, low hundreds are depicted in a couple of the pictures, I think.
Well, the pictures were taken by the media, by the war media, not by anyone else.
And then they distributed them to us, to everyone, to all media outlets.
And for the numbers, this is what was photographed and filmed.
But if you remember, I already talked in your show about this in particular.
When I talked to you about the attacks on the prison here in Damar, 100 kilometers close to Samar.
I talked about this, but at the time it was not clear to anyone, especially outside Yemen.
Those people, we Yemenis, we know many because they did not come from the sky.
They came from the villages of Yemen.
So, almost everyone knows how many are there and how many are missing now from their families and from their loved ones.
So, I mean, the number is even more as we were told by the sources, by the families who lost their loved ones.
And by also the people who survived and by the people who were able to make it to Saudi Arabia or to Yemen without being captured by Houthis.
They came to Sana'a and they told a lot of stories.
A lot of people came to Sana'a under what is called the General Amnesty or General Badr.
For anyone who would come to his house, he could.
They have a number to which they can call and they say, I am surrendering.
I want to go home and they go home.
So, the numbers that were shown in the photos are not the 2,000, yes, but the numbers who are now in the prisons of Houthis are more than 2,000 from that operation.
And this is something that Houthi is saying, he would be responsible for this because he's saying this in front of ICRC and all organizations.
So, and he also said that there are about 30 Saudis, 30, and he shot only four of them.
Only four of the Saudis who were speaking to camera as Saudi nationals.
And he said 30.
He said three zero, more than three zero Saudi nationals.
So, Houthi also does not want to publish things that will not be in their favor.
So, they just publish or they announce only what is in their favor only.
And this is what they said because they said we have a lot of things, we have a lot of images, we have a lot of videos, and we are going to publish more in the good time.
So, in other words, a big part of what you're saying, I think, is that a lot of these fighters really are local Yemenis who'd been hired by the Saudis.
And so that's how there's a pretty common understanding of the amount of people who are involved in this thing is because they really came from the Yemeni side of the line in the first place.
Yes, it's from the Yemeni side, from Sudan, from Yemen.
Most of them are from Yemen, we know.
And what is more interesting is many of them, almost half, are children under 16.
I know many of them.
I personally know many of them from my village, from my neighboring villages, and all these places.
So they go there for money.
They don't know what to do, they go there.
Some of them went to this operation, they went after two weeks only from their arrival there.
Two weeks, just imagine.
Some of them joined the operation.
I'm not saying joined the camp or the military base, no.
They went to this operation because they wanted to attack.
And the Houthis just lured them.
They were lured.
Until the end, they were besieged from all directions.
So some of them, I know personally, some of them spent only two weeks in the military, in the Saudi base in Najran.
Just imagine.
So without training, without any knowledge.
It's like, you know, you throw people to hell.
You don't care about anything.
And this is what happened.
So, and I think you had told me back a couple of, either the last interview or the one before that, that this even included one or two family members of yours, right?
Cousins or something who had gone?
Yes, yes.
This is why we are talking, me and many others.
We know people of them.
Yes, I have a nephew.
I have a nephew.
That is the son of my brother.
And many others, many people from, you know, from villages, they go for money, unfortunately.
And their parents can't do anything to them.
And Saudis know this.
But the most important thing we should know and your audience should know is that this is the army of Saudi, not Yemenis.
Not under the so-called legitimate government at all.
They are Saudi army.
They are in Saudi bases.
They are under the, in the barrel of Saudi.
Not Yemenis or they will be then allowed to go to Yemen.
No, they are, they, both of them, Saudis, both of them.
Well, it's still important context, though, I guess, that, you know, for all these people being taken captive, that essentially, as you're saying, they are mercenary soldiers and rather than army regulars from the Saudi, it seems like there were a couple of officers with them, but it was not really regular Saudi infantry, correct?
Yes.
So it's a big force, but it wasn't that much of a loss to them.
They just lost some child soldiers that they'd hired, basically.
Exactly.
The Saudis always stay at the back, always.
But this, because, you know, the operation took a lot of time.
So there were some, some Saudis, because there were middle commanders and other commanders, because they were guiding and telling what to do and what they, what they should do and these things.
And because the Lior took a lot of time, Saudis, then they didn't expect that Houthi would do anything after all that distance, because they went in the Yemeni lands kilometers without being hurt, without being confronted, without, okay?
But it was only a Lior at the end.
It turned out to be only a Lior process.
And this is why the loss was big.
Of course, when we talk about the 2000, more than 2000 detainees, we also should mention that about 300 at least were killed by Saudi airstrikes, because Saudi, they didn't want them to surrender this easily, and they didn't want these numbers to be found and these things.
So they tried to kill, but they couldn't kill all.
They killed only about 300 of them in their, in their armored vehicles.
And these, there were many images, of course, showing these things.
Well, there's a couple of things here.
First of all, the American media has been very reluctant to report on this.
I noticed that finally, the Washington Post has a story up this morning, but the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times are essentially refusing to cover this.
If you put it in Google News, you get some Al Jazeera reports, but it's almost comical to see.
They don't know what to do with this.
In the Washington Post report, they say, you know, if true, this means that Iran has escalated, you know?
So that really raised an important question.
Well, let me tell you this, too.
Last weekend, or last Friday, I talked with Mark Perry, the Pentagon reporter, who, you know, he's been really good on this and has talked to American generals who've been good on this the whole time, who didn't want to do it, at least.
Maybe they've done it, so they're not that good, but they've been opposed to it all along.
And he was saying that they just do not want to escalate, that they do not believe the hype that the Houthis really are a front for Iran and this kind of thing, and that they would prefer that the Saudis figure out a way to talk themselves out of this right now.
So we talked about that the day before this massive assault.
So that then raises the obvious question of whether the generals are now going to prevail on the president to prevail upon the Saudis that you guys have to come to the table and deal, or whether Trump's going to go nuts and blame Iran and send in the B-52s.
And I guess if there's a media blackout, that may be for the best, because if the media was covering it, maybe their narrative would be, what's Trump going to do about it?
And they'd be challenging him to do something stupid and horrible, like escalate the war.
And so I wonder, what's your read on that, whether you think this might really backfire on the Houthis by provoking Trump into going crazy, particularly when he's in a lot of political trouble here at home right now?
Yes.
A limited halt of war in Yemen, or a ceasefire in Yemen.
May have been bad timing by the Houthis.
They might have just waited.
Exactly.
And the Houthis immediately responded.
They said, we don't know about these leaks at all.
But we would never accept a limited ceasefire.
We would only accept a complete ceasefire and a complete left of blockade.
They were very clear.
And on the second day, they announced this operation, which means that Houthi now is the one who takes the initiative.
Houthi now tells people that he's the one of the initiatives, and he's the one who's leading things.
Because Saudi Arabia keeps misleading and misinforming, and they just keep talking about Iran and blaming Iran and ignoring what's happening in Yemen.
So it's not, I mean, it doesn't work this way.
Houthi wanted to tell them that we can show you a lot, a lot, what we can do.
And they did this.
Of course, this operation can also be, the announcement of this operation can be the first step of resuming the attacks by the drones and missiles.
And this is what I'm expecting Houthi to do if Saudi Arabia did not take the initiative and positively react with it.
Of course, what happened today or what we heard today from Iran is that they sent a letter, Saudis sent a letter to Iran, Iranian officials, Rouhani and Khamenei, that they want to talk.
They don't want military confrontation.
And this is what Iranian officials said today.
And they said they received the letter from Saudis through the Pakistani prime minister.
And if this is okay, I think it will be good for moving forward in peace process.
Otherwise, Houthis would keep their promise and they would resume their attacks to defend themselves because it's only this way that they can bring Saudis to the table of negotiation.
Yeah, so that's huge.
I had not seen that.
Here it is a brand new out in Reuters from just a couple hours ago.
Saudi Arabia sent messages to Iran's president and Iran's government.
So that really is great news.
This is what I mean.
This is why I mentioned it because it's very related to what we are talking.
Yes.
Right.
I got to send this note to the boss.
So, wow.
Yeah, that's really something else.
Let me just mention something.
Yeah, go ahead.
I talked with you about these things on the time when this happened, but before the announcement.
To Yemenis, to the Yemenis, to the 30 million Yemenis here, it's not new.
The announcement was only for the outside.
This is also something that I should say.
I should be honest and tell you and your audience.
So nothing, nothing was new to all Yemenis.
Not to me, not to all Yemenis inside and outside Yemen.
So it was new only to outside.
So I told you at the time, but it was very difficult for me, very hard to tell because there is no context.
And when I told you about the attacks on the prison here where Saudi airstrikes killed 200 in one prison, in one place, it's on the second day.
And I told you at the time that they were very angry because of what happened there, because there were brigades who surrendered and they came to bomb the prison because they wanted to tell the prisoners or the people who surrendered or who surrender, who keep surrendering them to Houthi.
The Saudis wanted to tell them, we will go after you.
We will kill you wherever you are.
And they did.
They came and bombed 200 people in one place.
All that they knew, and ICRC knows.
When this operation happened about one month ago, the Saudis was very, very angry.
Saudi officials and Saudi military officers, they were very angry.
And they killed about 300 of these people, of these fighters who surrendered themselves while they were surrendering themselves to Houthi or after they surrendered.
So they killed about 300.
And this is very, this is documented with Houthis.
So it was not only, they did not only do this, but they came to the map.
They came to a city here in the south of the capital Sanaa, and they killed 200 people in a prison here.
Although this prison was not secret, it was known to the ICRC, to the International Committee of Red Cross, and to other organizations.
So they came here, Saudis came here to kill those prisoners because they want to deliver a message that we don't want you to surrender to Houthis.
We bear you and you should stay with us and defend the kingdom, not go to Houthi.
So it was kind of banishment.
It was kind of chastening from Saudi Arabia, unfortunately.
Well, now, so I'm sure you saw where a few weeks ago, the Americans had a peace deal with the Taliban on the table ready to be signed.
And the military, of course, was pushing against it.
And there was one last suicide bombing in Kabul that killed an American soldier that Trump then seized on that event and said, okay, deals off, talks are off, occupation continues.
And it sort of seems like, you know, this kind of thing from the Houthis really could backfire.
I saw Crown Prince Bonesaw bin Salman on 60 Minutes.
And this was recorded before the latest assault, you know, and he was talking about, you know, trying to deescalate things.
And say, oh, yeah, no war with Iran.
We definitely don't want that.
We have this report, you know, as we're talking about here where the Saudis are reaching out to the Iranians.
But I'm not sure if that was before or after this attack.
And I'm not saying that the Houthis are a front for Iran, but I am saying that that's what the Saudis and the Americans are saying.
And that's certainly what Trump believes, because he's been told that twice or something.
So he probably can't distinguish Houthi power from Iranian power in any way.
And so it seems like this could be a really dangerous way for the Houthis to increase their negotiating position.
It might backfire, you know, if it's taken that way, but I sure hope not.
What I think is this.
Houthi knows that Saudi Arabia knows that it's Houthi who is doing everything, regardless of what Iran is saying or what the U.S. is saying or what Saudi Arabia is publicly saying.
But Saudi Arabia keeps ignoring Houthis because they know that Houthi is gaining, Houthi is making profit from all these things.
Houthis, I mean, Iran is benefiting from this.
So they don't want to talk with Houthi without Iran, because the problem of Saudi Arabia will keep there.
And for Yemenis and for Houthis, they don't care about Iran.
They care about themselves.
They are under the bombings and destruction for five years.
They want this to stop.
So the only way to make Saudi Arabia stop is to keep escalating, to keep defending yourself by everything you have.
And this is what Houthi is doing, and he knows this, and he doesn't pay any attention to what Saudis or U.S. are saying.
But I think now U.S. and Saudi Arabia also are starting, seemingly at least, starting to understand that the key is Yemen for easing the tension and for diffusing the tension between Washington and Tehran.
The key is in Yemen.
The first step is in Yemen.
So it's okay if you will have the same result.
You will have the result you want.
If you just start from Yemen, then you will ease the tension in Iran and in Yemen.
And that's it.
This is what you want.
But if you want to keep just killing Yemenis, there's something else.
If you want to keep just to keep killing Yemenis.
Yeah, well, I'm afraid there are some who would prefer to just keep it that way.
But you're right that, you know, nobody really wants a war, or I shouldn't say nobody, but very few people really want a war between America and Iran.
Everybody is, you know, and on the Iranian side either.
They don't want a war.
But there are hawks on their side.
I don't know if you saw where one of their IRGC generals was threatening Israel with power that he does not have to inflict on Israel.
But he's just making sure to keep tensions high because that's what's good for the IRGC at the expense of the rest of the people of Iran.
Just like the hawks in America and in Saudi like to ratchet up tensions.
But if we really want to turn this thing down a couple of notches, in terms of the tensions, you're right that, you know, nevermind morally speaking, but practically speaking, seeking a peace in Yemen would be a great first start in, you know, ratcheting down tensions around the rest of the region between the Sunni and Shia factions.
Since the war that George Bush touched off in 2003 and Obama doubled down on and Trump has made so much worse.
But and also it's the right thing to do because it's the worst thing that America is doing right now.
It's worse than Saudi for sure.
And so it, you know, morality calls for an immediate halt to it.
But then, you know, diplomacy and geopolitics and all those things say that this could be a really good method for finding future avenues where we can negotiate and get along in the future too.
Exactly.
And this is what Iran also said today and every day.
This is what they say.
They say, start from Yemen.
If you want us to talk, please start from Yemen.
Start by ending the war in Yemen, then we can talk.
And it's very logic to say this everywhere.
A lot of people in the Congress and everywhere in Washington or London and in the West in general, they say the problem of between Washington and Tehran can be solved by ending the war in Yemen first.
This is something that everybody can say.
But unfortunately, because there are some other agendas here in Yemen between Iran, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates, so they want to make it even longer.
This is why they want to, they don't want to listen to this, to these things.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, I guess let's wait and see what the official reaction from the White House is.
So far, Trump is distracted by everything else and hasn't commented.
So I'm hoping in terms of negative reaction, maybe it'll just blow over.
And maybe in terms of positive reaction, this really will enforce the point of view of the people in the Pentagon and I presume in the State Department who want to find a way to wrap this thing up.
I mean, everybody knows at this point that the war cannot possibly succeed in its stated goal of reinstalling Hadi.
And so it there and the Houthis aren't going anywhere short of a major carpet bombing campaign or something, invasion sending in the Marines or something like that.
Nobody wants that.
So the only option, even no matter, you know, all other things being equal, even if you're an American hawk, the only option is a negotiated peace here.
There's no way to win this thing without an escalation that's absolutely intolerable.
If not now, they will understand more next time when other strike, when other major strike happens.
And this will happen for sure.
And I'm just telling you, and we will talk next time.
If there's no negotiation, we will talk about strikes.
And I'll tell you.
Yeah, well, same thing we saw in Afghanistan, an Obama official recently wrote a piece for the Washington Post, saying, listen, any deal we can get from the Taliban now is the best deal we're ever going to get.
And it's not as good as one we could have got five years ago, or five years before that, or five years before that.
But it's definitely better than any deal we could get from them in another five years from now.
So we should just take it.
And that's the same thing here.
All we are is making matters worse and worse.
You know, just like all these wars, whoever's the designated enemy only gets more and more powerful.
This last operation.
So the tune was a tune of confidence, a tune of confidence, and the one who has the strong position, and they are getting more and more now, which means that the message is very clear from them that we are going to strike more and more because we are under bombings for five years.
So if not the negotiation, more strikes for sure.
All right.
Well, thank you very much again for your time, Nasser.
Appreciate it.
Thank you very much for your for your for having All right, you guys, that's Nasser Arabi.
He is on Twitter, of course, at N-Arabi.
There's two Rs.
And then it's it's A-R-R-A-B-Y-E-E.
N-Arabi on Twitter and Yemen-Now.com for his website, Yemen Alon.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scothorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scothortonshow.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
