What's up with Yemen?

[Dill]

(02-19-2019, 06:54 AM)Bengalzona Wrote: Interestingly enough, the Saudi-led attacks made only limited headway, despite some of the best intel and Western weapons money can buy. It seems that, unless they are fighting unarmed peasants, the Saudi military isn’t all that effective.

Well, we have to grant the Saudi's are very effective in fighting unarmed peasants. Remember the 40 children killed when they took out that school bus last August.   What you call "limited headway" is only against armed groups. LOL

(02-19-2019, 06:54 AM)Bengalzona Wrote: Something about these areas of collective governance tends to draw extremist groups like flies to crap. Naturally, we needed to monitor this situation and fling drone attacks at them. Plus, these were our rich buddies, the Saudi’s. There was money to be made here! So, we started providing the Saudis intel and arms support.

But a funny thing happened. Some of the arms that we sent to the Saudis to be used by the Hadis were turning up in Syria being used by ISIL against our own troops. Also, ISIL and al Qaeda started attacking Houthis positions, but not Hadi positions. Strange, eh?

You could argue that the US had a national interest in Yemen over the last decade--to prevent it from becoming a broken state and new haven for Al Qaeda. Also U.S. citizen Anwar Al Awlaki was there fomenting domestic terrorism in the U.S.

But you have flagged something VERY interesting here -- those U.S. weapons shipped to Yemen turning up in Syria.

They didn't walk there.

If US weapons are going to Sunni in Yemen who are sharing them with relatives in AQY and/or they are often recoverable by ISIS or--a new precedent--ISIS is deploying forces in coordination with our "ally" SA, and receiving weapons from them, that's some pretty big news.

I guess there are myriad ways U.S. weapons could be drifting into Syria, so the question I have regards quantity. Are we talking about a few random M-4s picked up on the battlefield, or dozens or hundreds which arrived in unopened crates? That would mean complicity of at least some governments.