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 by Staff Writers Aden (AFP) Sept 16, 2018
Fresh clashes and air strikes around the Yemeni city of Hodeida have killed 32 rebels, hospital and medical sources said Sunday, as the UN envoy kept up peace efforts in Sanaa. A military source told AFP the Saudi-led coalition fighting alongside the Yemeni government against Shiite Huthi rebels carried out an air raid on a radio station tower in the port city of Hodeida. Three people died in Sunday's raid, he said, while Huthi-run Al-Masirah television said four people were killed, three security guards and a station employee. According to medical sources in Hodeida province, which is controlled by the Huthis, at least 32 insurgents have been killed and 14 others wounded in clashes and air strikes since Saturday. The coalition accuses the Tehran-aligned Huthis of smuggling arms from Iran through Hodeida and has imposed a partial blockade on the port, which the rebels seized in 2014. In June, pro-government forces launched a major operation to retake both the city and its port, the entry point of most of the impoverished country's imports and aid. The troops, backed by coalition air strikes, have retaken a number of towns across Hodeida province but have not yet breached the city. The coalition in July announced a temporary ceasefire in Hodeida to give a chance to UN-brokered peace talks. The UN's Yemen envoy, Martin Griffiths, arrived Sunday in the rebel-held capital Sanaa, without making any statement to the media. Griffiths is pushing for new peace talks after a failed attempt to bring the two sides together in Geneva earlier this month. The rebels kept away from the talks, accusing the UN of failing to guarantee the return of their delegation from Switzerland to Sanaa and to secure the evacuation of wounded rebels to Oman. The Huthis' foreign minister, Hisham Sharaf Abdallah, said his side supported the UN's peace efforts and urged it to pressure the coalition to stop "targeting civilians", the rebel-run news agency Saba reported. He called for confidence-building measures such as the reopening of Sanaa airport to commercial flights and the payment of civil servants' salaries in all areas of Yemen. Saudi Arabia and its allies intervened in 2015 in the conflict between embattled Yemeni President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi, whose government is recognised by the United Nations, and the Huthis. Nearly 10,000 people have since been killed and the country now stands on the brink of famine.
Spain PM defends sending weapons to Saudis after U-turn His Socialist government announced earlier this month that it would block the delivery of the weapons amid concerns that they could harm civilians in Yemen where Saudi Arabi is engaged in a bloody conflict. But on Thursday Foreign Minister Josep Borrell announced the government had decided to deliver the weapons after all, angering humanitarian groups. Cancellation of the deal would jeopardise a much larger order for five Corvette warships worth 1.8 billion euros, to be built by Spain's Navantia shipyard in the southern region of Andalusia, with thousands of jobs at stake. Workers in the region, a stronghold of the ruling Socialist Party, had staged demonstrations pressing for the deal to go ahead. Asked about the policy reversal during an interview with private television La Sexta, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said his government risked "creating the image that it was revising its entire relationship" with Saudi Arabia if it did not deliver the weapons. "The situation was very complicated. The dilemma the government faced was breaking its commercial, economic and political ties with Saudi Arabia, with the impact this could have in some areas of the country, such as the Bay of Cadiz, or carry out a contract signed by the previous government," he added. Saudi Arabia, a longtime ally, had already paid 9.2 million euros ($10.7 million) for the bombs under a 2015 contract signed by a previous, conservative administration in Spain. Apart from the warship deal, Madrid has obtained juicy engineering contracts to build a high-speed railway linking Mecca and Medina, and a metro in Riyadh. Spain is the fourth largest provider of military equipment and weapons to the Gulf state, according to Amnesty International. Nearly 10,000 people have been killed in Yemen since Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other allies intervened in 2015 after Huthi rebels ousted the government from the capital Sanaa and seized swathes of the country.
Yemeni civilian lives 'hang in balance' in Hodeida: UN "The situation has dramatically deteriorated in the past few days... people are struggling to survive", said the UN's humanitarian coordinator for Yemen, Lise Grande, in a statement. Doctors and medics in two hospitals in Hodeida province said 50 people have been killed in the past 24 hours, seven of them pro-government fighters. The UN's attempts to broker peace talks between Huthi Shiite rebels and Yemen's Saudi-backed government collapsed on Saturday. Fighting has raged in the last two days close to the rebel-held port city of Hodeida, a crucial entry point for humanitarian aid that the Saudi-led coalition alleges also serves as a key conduit for arms to the Iran-backed Huthis. Alongside the threat of combat, civilians also face severe shortages of food, water and medicine in Hodeida province, Grande said. More than a quarter of children are malnourished, 900,000 people are desperate for food and 90,000 pregnant women "are at enormous risk," she said. The situation would be exacerbated if the fighting compromises mills and stores in Hodeida province. "We're particularly worried about the Red Sea mill, which currently has 45,000 metric tonnes of food inside, enough to feed 3.5 million people for a month," Grande said. "If the mills are damaged or disrupted, the human cost will be incalculable." Coalition forces on Wednesday seized rebel supply routes into Hodeida city. Clashes were still ongoing on Thursday, military sources said. The Huthis launched a counter attack to retake Kilo 16 -- the main supply route -- while there was also fighting over the other road, Kilo 10, the same sources said. Government forces backed by the coalition had before this week paused their assault on Hodeida in what they said was a bid to give the UN-led peace efforts a chance. But the rebels refused to send a delegation to Geneva for talks, complaining the UN had been unable to guarantee safe passage back to Sanaa or an evacuation of wounded fighters to nearby Oman. Nearly 10,000 people have been killed in Yemen's conflict since 2015, when the Saudi-led alliance intervened in support of the government.
Syrian War yields new predictive model for attrition dynamics in multilateral war Catonsville MD (SPX) Sep 12, 2018 Three researchers have conducted a study of war, specifically the current conflict in Syria that's been raging since 2011, to arrive at the creation of a new predictive model for multilateral war, which is called the Lanchester multiduel. The research, published in the August edition of the INFORMS journal Operations Research, is titled "The Attrition Dynamics of Multilateral War," and is authored by Moshe Kress and Kyle Lin of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and Niall MacKa ... read more
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