More than anything else in Saudi Arabia, that thing you smell is fear. Everything is coming unglued for the royal family there all at once. If we all weren’t so distracted by the Coronapocalypse these things would all be front page news. In the past week there have been three major stories concerning Saudi Arabia,…
A breakaway faction from the Saudi-backed forces, supported by the UAE, is threatening to push the Saudi Crown prince out of the picture altogether. It wants independence for the South and to end the five-year war with the Saudis. But this might start an entirely new war in Yemen. It was a war which was…
In less than 48 hours, Yemen’s separatist Southern Transitional Council (STC) and Libya’s renegade warlord Khalifa Haftar rebelled against their respective governments, in defiance of previous peace initiatives. These moves could not have occurred were it not for the UAE’s hidden hand, as Abu Dhabi has empowered both factions in a bid to project power….
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman may feel that the global pandemic and its economic fallout are the more immediate of his problems as the kingdom gradually lifts restrictions put in place to stymie the spread of the coronavirus. However, looming large on the horizon is a potential rift with the United States as a…
South Yemen’s Southern Transitional Council declared self-rule over the vast regions of the country that they claim as their own in response to the Saudi-backed Hadi government’s repeated violations of last year’s Riyadh Agreement that was aimed at de-escalating tensions between the nominally allied sides, thus representing the next step towards independence and one which…
An American reader tired of corona journalism sent me a plea this week: “There must be plenty of cruelty being unleashed by the gangsters-in-chief across the ‘Mideast’ that simply isn’t making it into the headlines,” she wrote. “Trump et al are either ignoring it or silently condoning it.” I doubt if Donald Trump is ignoring…
