Following Russia’s troop build-up along Ukraine’s borders portending imminent invasion, Houthi rebels in Yemen backed by Iran, which is Russia’s most dependable regional ally in the decade-long Syrian conflict, have significantly escalated missile strikes on the oil-rich Gulf States with a nod of approval from the Kremlin in order to take pressure off Russia in the Ukraine stand-off by opening a second front in the veritable Achilles’ heel of the energy-dependent industrialized world.
To buttress the defenses in the Gulf, US F-22 fighter jets
arrived in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on Saturday, Feb. 12, as part of an
American defense response to recent missile attacks by Yemen’s Houthi rebels
targeting the country. The Raptors landed at Al-Dhafra Air Base in Abu Dhabi,
which hosts 2,000 US troops. American soldiers there launched Patriot
interceptor missiles and briefly had to take shelter after the missiles
exploded in the airspace above the military base last month.
The deployment came after the Houthi rebels launched three
attacks targeting Abu Dhabi last month, including one targeting a fuel depot
that killed three people and wounded six. The attacks coincided with visits by
presidents from South Korea and Israel to the UAE. Though overshadowed by the Ukraine
crisis, the missile strikes targeting the Emirates has sparked a major US
response. The American military has sent the USS Cole on a mission to Abu
Dhabi.
To return the favor of opening a second front in the Gulf
and acknowledging Russia’s steadfast strategic alliance with Iran in the
region, the Kremlin issued rare
condemnation [1] of recent Israeli airstrikes in Syria as “crude violation”
of Syria's sovereignty on Thursday, Feb. 10, that up until now were tacitly
tolerated by the Russian forces based in Syria’s Tartus naval base and Khmeimim
airbase southeast of Latakia, and also pledged last month that the Russian Air
Force would conduct joint air patrols alongside the Syrian Air Force that would
pre-empt the likelihood of further Israeli airstrikes in the future.
“Israel’s continuing strikes against targets inside Syria
cause deep concern,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.
“They are a crude violation of
Syria’s sovereignty and may trigger a sharp escalation of tensions.
Also, such actions pose serious risks to international passenger flights.”
Although Israel claims its air campaign in Syria is meant to
target Iran-backed militias, the airstrikes often kill Syrian soldiers. Syrian
state media said one soldier was killed and five more were wounded in the
latest Israeli attack at Damascus, which occurred Wednesday, Feb. 9.
Russia has held talks with Israel on Syria, and said last
month it would begin joint air patrols with Syria. The patrols will include
areas near the Golan Heights in southern Syria bordering Israel, a frequent
site of the Israeli airstrikes, and Israel is said to be considering
discontinuing the strikes altogether or slowing them down significantly.
The Times of Israel noted that this marked a momentous
change in policy for Russia: “Following the patrol, Ynet reported that Israeli
military officials were holding talks with Russian army officers to calm
tensions.”
The report added, “Israeli officials were struggling to
understand why Russia, which announced that such joint patrols were expected to
be a regular occurrence moving forward, had apparently changed its policy
toward Israel.” The report claimed that Israel might limit its air campaign in
Syria as a result of Russia’s “mystifying” change in the Syria policy.
Over the years, Israel has not only provided material
support to militant groups battling Damascus – particularly to various factions
of the Free Syria Army (FSA) and al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate al-Nusra Front in
Daraa and Quneitra bordering the Israel-occupied Golan Heights – but Israel’s
air force has virtually played the role of the air force of the terrorists and
mounted hundreds of airstrikes in Syria during the decade-long conflict.
In an interview
to New York Times [2] in January 2019, Israel’s former Chief of Staff Lt.
General Gadi Eisenkot confessed that the Netanyahu government approved his
recommendations in January 2017 to step up airstrikes in Syria. Consequently,
more than 200 Israeli airstrikes were launched on the Syrian targets in 2017
and 2018, as revealed
[3] by the Israeli Intelligence Minister Israel Katz in September 2018.
In 2018 alone, Israel's air force dropped 2,000 bombs in
Syria. The purported rationale of the Israeli airstrikes in Syria has been to
degrade Iran’s guided missile technology provided to Damascus and its Lebanon-based
proxy, Hezbollah, which poses an existential threat to Israel’s regional
security.
Nevertheless, Israeli military strategists’ “concerns”
aside, it’s worth recalling that a joint
American-Israeli program [4], involving a series of short-of-war
clandestine strikes, aimed at taking out the most prominent generals of the
Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and targeting Iran’s power stations,
industrial infrastructure, and missile and nuclear facilities has been going on
since early 2020 after the commander of IRGC’s Quds Force General Qassem Soleimani
was assassinated in an American airstrike at the Baghdad airport on January 3,
2020.
As the US presidential race heated up in the election year,
the pace and sophistication of the subversive attacks in Iran picked up
simultaneously. In the summer of 2020, “mysterious explosions” were reported at
a missile and explosives storage facility at Parchin military base on June 26,
at power stations in the cities of Shiraz and Ahvaz, a “mysterious fire” at
Bushehr port on July 15 destroying seven ships, and a massive explosion at the
Natanz nuclear site on July 2, 2020 that reportedly set back Iran’s nuclear
program by at least two years.
Besides wooing the Zionist lobbies in the run-up to the US
presidential election, another purpose of the subversive attacks appeared to be
to avenge a string of audacious attacks mounted by the Iran-backed forces
against the US strategic interests in the Persian Gulf that brought the US and
Iran to the brink of a full-scale war in September 2019.
In addition to planting limpet mines on oil tankers off the
coast of UAE in May 2019 and the subsequent downing of the American Global Hawk
surveillance drone in the Persian Gulf by Iran, the brazen attack on the Abqaiq
petroleum facility and the Khurais oil field in the Eastern Province of Saudi
Arabia on September 14, 2019, was the third major attack in the Persian Gulf
against the assets of Washington and its regional allies.
That the UAE had the forewarning of the imminent attacks was
proved by the fact that weeks before the attacks, it recalled forces from Yemen
battling the Houthi rebels and redeployed them to defend the UAE’s territorial
borders.
The September 14, 2019, attack on the Abqaiq petroleum
facility in eastern Saudi Arabia was an apocalypse for the global oil industry
because it processed five million barrels crude oil per day, almost half of
Saudi Arabia’s total oil production.
The subversive attack sent jitters across the global markets
and the oil price surged 15%, the largest spike witnessed in three decades
since the First Gulf War after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, though
the oil price was eased within weeks after industrialized nations released
their strategic oil reserves.
It bears mentioning that alongside deploying several
thousand American troops, additional aircraft squadrons and Patriot missile
batteries in Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of the Abqaiq attack, several
interventionist hawks in Washington invoked the Carter Doctrine of 1980 as a
ground for mounting retaliatory strikes against Iran, which states:
“Let our position be absolutely clear: an attempt by any
outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an
assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an
assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”
Although the Houthi rebels based in Yemen claimed the responsibility
for the September 2019 complex attack involving drones and cruise missiles on
the Abqaiq petroleum facility and the Khurais oil field in the Eastern Province
of Saudi Arabia, Washington dismissed the possibility. Instead, it accused
Tehran of mounting the complex attack from Iran’s territory.
Nevertheless, puerile pranks like planting limpet mines on
oil tankers and downing a $200-million surveillance aircraft can be overlooked
but the major provocation of mounting a drone and missile attack on the Abqaiq
petroleum facility that crippled its oil-processing functions for weeks was
nothing short of showing red rag to the bull.
Unless Iran got the green light to go ahead with the attacks
from a major military power that equals Washington’s firepower, such
confrontation would have amounted to a suicidal approach.
Considering such a co-ordinated escalation in the Gulf by
Iran and Russia, it seems a forgone conclusion that if Kremlin decided to
invade Ukraine, Iran, too, would mobilize its forces in the critically
important volatile region to disrupt the global oil supply and put pressure on
the energy-dependent industrialized powers to carefully consider their
retaliatory measures against the Russia-Iran military alliance.
In fact, this was the precise message conveyed to
Washington’s military strategists by the last month’s audacious Houthi attacks
on targets in UAE, specifically the one targeting al-Dhafra airbase hosting US
forces.
Regardless, the acts of subversion in the Persian Gulf in
2019 culminating in the “sacrilegious assault” on the veritable mecca of the
oil production industry in Sept. 2019 should be viewed in the broader backdrop
of the New Cold War that has begun following the Ukraine crisis in 2014 after
Russia occupied the Crimean peninsula and Washington imposed sanctions on the
Kremlin.
In addition, Russia’s membership in the G8 forum was
suspended by the Western powers in March 2014 and Russian President Vladimir
Putin was snubbed at international summits by the Western leaders, by
then-President Obama in particular, an insult that the Russian strongman took
rather personally.
The Kremlin’s immediate response to the escalation by
Washington was that it jumped into the fray in Syria in September 2015, after a
clandestine visit to Moscow by General Qassem Soleimani, the slain commander of
the IRGC’s Quds Force.
When Russia deployed its forces and military hardware to
Syria in September 2015, the militant proxies of Washington and its regional
clients were on the verge of drawing a wedge between Damascus and the Alawite
heartland of coastal Latakia, which could have led to the imminent downfall of
the Bashar al-Assad government.
With the help of the Russian air power, the Syrian
government has since reclaimed most of Syria’s territory from the insurgents,
excluding Idlib in the northwest occupied by the Turkish-backed militants and
Deir al-Zor and the Kurdish-held areas in the east, thus inflicting a
humiliating defeat on Washington and its regional allies.
Finally, a word about the venerated commander of IRGC’s Quds
Force General Qassem Soleimani who was assassinated in an American airstrike on
a tip-off from the Israeli intelligence at the Baghdad airport on January 3,
2020. Soleimani was the most trusted aide of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah
Khamenei and his main liaison for holding consultations with Russia.
Not only did he convince Kremlin with his diplomatic skills
to strike at Washington’s vulnerability in the Syrian conflict but he was also
the chief architect of the audacious September 2019 attacks at the Abqaiq
petroleum facility and the Khurais oil field in the oil-rich Eastern Province
of Saudi Arabia.
Reportedly, Trump
initially rejected [5] the Pentagon’s option to assassinate General
Soleimani on December 28, 2019, due to apprehensions over full-scale
confrontation with Iran, and authorized airstrikes on Iran-backed militia groups
in Iraq instead.
But after one of frequent rocket attacks at the US embassy
in Baghdad claimed by Iran-backed forces, Trump succumbed to pressure from the
American deep state, led by the powerful top brass of the Pentagon, which had a
score to settle with General Soleimani for giving the global power a bloody
nose in Syria’s war.
Citations:
[1] Russia cites ‘deep concern’ over ongoing Israeli strikes
in Syria:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/russia-cites-deep-concern-over-ongoing-israeli-strikes-in-syria/
[2] An interview with Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, Israel’s chief
of staff:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/opinion/gadi-eisenkot-israel-iran-syria.html
[3] Israel Katz: Israel conducted 200 airstrikes in Syria in
2017 and 2018:
[4] Long-Planned and Bigger Than Thought: Strike on Iran’s
Nuclear Program:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/10/world/middleeast/iran-nuclear-trump.html
[5] Trump initially rejected the Pentagon’s option to
assassinate General Soleimani:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/04/us/politics/trump-suleimani.html
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