Yemeni Battle Success Considered a ‘Gamechanger’ Defeat for Saudis, Negotiations on Table
Oct. 1, 2019 (EIRNS)—Yemeni Brig. Gen. Yahya Saree, spokesman for the Houthi forces in Sana’a, asserted on Saturday night, Sept. 28, that the just-concluded 72-hour joint Houthi-Yemeni army offensive along the southern border of Saudi Arabia had “altered the equation of power” in the war in Yemen’s favor. His press briefing showed footage of the rout of three Saudi military brigades, the capture of scores of Saudi military vehicles and the surrender of some 2,000 Saudi troops and Yemeni-mercenary militia assets.
BBC, London’s Guardian, etc., dismissed the video footage as unverified, but retired U.S. Col. Pat Lang, a decades-long intelligence specialist in that region, demanded “someone please show President Trump this film” of the briefing! “It makes the lies of creatures like [Mike] Pompeo obvious,” he wrote. Lang rejects Pompeo’s “BS narrative” that the Yemeni resistance is too militarily incompetent to have carried out the attack on the Saudi oil refinery, concluding that “obviously” Iran did it.
Senior Saudi commanders evidently deserted their men “early and swiftly,” leading to the Saudi forces surrendering “en masse,” Lang noted. The Arabic markings and condition of some of the vehicles abandoned by the routed Saudi forces indicate they belonged to the modernized Saudi National Guard, and among them are very useful U.S.-made armored personnel carriers with radar-trained air defense Gatling guns, he pointed out.
Colonel Lang is not the only senior U.S. military officer who understands the capabilities of the Yemeni resistance. In a Sept. 25 article in the American Conservative, U.S. historian Mark Perry reports that a recently retired senior U.S. military officer told him in recent days that senior U.S. military officers had warned the Saudis when they launched their war against Yemen four years ago: “you can’t win and you’ll bankrupt your country. It’ll be a quagmire.” Key U.S. Special Forces Command officers at that time told Perry that the Houthis were only “nominally surrogates” of Iran, and were “our quiet partners against al-Qaeda,” whom the U.S. should support.
Lang today called attention to a Sept. 30 article by one Federico Pieraccini in Strategic Culture Foundation, which details the months-long planning that went into the stunning battle victory. Pieraccini writes that Yemen’s fight will be studied all over the world, as “the Houthis are showing to the world what a poor but organized and motivated armed force can do using asymmetrical methods to bring one of the best-equipped militaries in the world to its knees.”
More than creative employment of weaponry, as important as that may be, the coming victory of the Yemeni patriots will stand as a monumental lesson in the power which flows from an unbending political will to secure a people’s inviolable rights. In the bleakest moments of the war, Yemeni patriots, working with the Schiller Institute, have been boldly preparing to get right to work on participating in the development of all humanity through collaboration in the New Silk Road, the moment peace is secured.
