Saudi Arabia

Iran's semi-official Fars news agency claimed yesterday that Israeli helicopters and/or cargo planes unloaded military equipment "meant for attacking a Muslim state" at an airport in northwestern Saudi Arabia.

According to the report, the IDF built a military base approximately 9 km (5.5 miles) from Tabuk, and while Israeli planes landed there on June 18 and 19, all civilian flights were cancelled at the local airport.

It's an impossible-to-verify report, much like the Times of London's recent claim that Saudi Arabia granted Israel overflight rights to bomb Iran. But we can add a bit of context.

I don't want to speculate too much here about the recidivism rate in Saudi Arabia's terrorist rehabilitation program; I'm working on a longer reported piece on the subject and I don't want to get too far ahead of myself.

But a few early thoughts. The story here is that 20 percent of the "Guantanamo alumni" returned to terrorism after completing the rehab program -- compared to just 9.5 percent of the non-GTMO population.

The Times of London reports this morning that Saudi Arabia will allow Israel to fly over its territory in order to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities, and that Saudi defense officials have already conducted tests to make sure they don't accidentally shoot down Israeli jets.

Is the report accurate? I have no idea. But I will point out, as a cautionary note, that the Times runs a similar story every few months, all of them thinly-sourced. Here's a virtually identical piece from July 2009, for example (which the Saudi government quickly denied).

Even with Saudi overflight rights, bombing Iran would be a logistical nightmare for Israel.

The Israeli tabloid daily Maariv carried a story on Thursday exposing what the newspaper purported to be a "secret" plan hatched by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman to "pester" Saudi Arabia with a global information campaign that could involve lobbying the U.S. Congress and European parliament, and perhaps even filing lawsuits, all with the intent of exposing the kingdom's "involvement in financing terrorism, the state of human rights ... the status of women and numerous other issues." (Original article in Hebrew here.)

The Riyadh conference on Yemen wrapped up this morning with lots of promises and well-meaning speeches -- but very few firm commitments. And the conference was quickly overshadowed, inside Yemen and around the region, by the deteriorating situation in southern Yemen, where the government has declared a state of emergency.

The Yemeni government presented several papers in Riyadh (عربي) outlining how it will use the roughly $44 billion in foreign aid it hopes to receive over the next five years. One of them outlines how Yemen's government will distribute aid; another talks about Yemen's grim long-term socioeconomic picture (rapidly growing population, dwindling oil reserves, a depleted water table).

Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh is in Riyadh today pleading for money meeting with his Saudi counterpart to discuss issues of regional importance.

Saleh's visit is a precursor to the "Riyadh conference" on Saturday, which will involve Yemen, the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, and U.S. and European representatives. Yemen is hoping to raise a lot of money from international donors -- on the order of $40 billion over the next five years, according to one diplomat -- and Saleh hopes much of that will come from the GCC.

The escalating war of words over Iran's nuclear program, and possible sanctions against Iran, is pretty predictable. U.S. officials say Iran has left the world no choice but to impose new sanctions; Gen. James Jones, the U.S. national security adviser, said on Sunday that current proposals are "not mild sanctions. These are very tough sanctions."

Tehran responded with a warning of sorts: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told the West it will regret sanctioning Iran, and threatened a "response" against anyone "seek[ing] to create problems for Iran."

Yemen's Huthi rebels have reportedly released the first of five Saudi Arabian prisoners of war in their custody.

Rebels say they released the first soldier, Yahya Abdullah al-Khazai, as a humanitarian gesture (عربي); Khazai was wounded in the leg during fighting earlier this year. The Huthis say they will free the other four prisoners "in the hours and days to come."

Saudi Arabia gave the rebels a 48-hour deadline to free their captives on Saturday. The rebels won't meet that deadline -- but Saudi Arabia doesn't seem interested in restarting the war just yet, and today's goodwill gesture will buy the Huthis some time.

Today is Valentine's Day, which means it's time for the media to resurrect a favorite theme: Saudi Arabia doesn't like hearts, or flowers, or the color red!

It isn't often that cynical singles and religious police find themselves on the same side, but in Saudi Arabia they are standing united against a common threat: Valentine's Day.

It's the same story every year: A dire lede about how the strange foreign peoples of Saudi Arabia disapprove of Valentine's Day. A sentence about the all-encompassing ban on gifts and chocolates and roses -- about the holiday's incompatibility with Islam and traditional culture.

BAE Systems, a multibillion-dollar defense contractor based in England, announced on Friday that it would settle a long-running corruption investigation brought by the U.S. Department of Justice, which had been looking into allegations of corruption and bribery connected to several arms deals, including the roughly $67 billion "Al-Yamamah" contracts with Saudi Arabia initiated during the mid-1980s.

BAE will pay a $400 million fine to the DOJ and around $46.8 million to the British Serious Fraud Office, which was the first to investigate the deals but controversially dropped the case in 2006, after Saudi Arabia reportedly used its intelligence on Al-Qaida as leverage to force a halt.

Hard to tell, as usual, exactly what's happening up in Saada province, but Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh is signalling -- in word and in deed -- that he's not terribly interested in a cease-fire with the Huthi rebels.

16 rebels were killed in Saada earlier this week, according to state media reports; the dead reportedly included a number of "leaders," but the government hasn't identified any of them. The army says it also destroyed a vehicle carrying ammunition to the rebels (عربي), and seized several farms which were being used as rebel hideouts.

If you believe the latest meme going around Washington, Arab states are fed up with Iran, and willing to set aside their enmity towards Israel and the United States in order to confront the perceived Persian menace. Tom Ricks summed up this thinking quite nicely in what has to be the most muddled blog post he's ever written.

I wonder if something fundamental is going on in the Middle East. That is, Iran is getting more powerful, and that scares the Arab states. So they seem to be turning away from worrying about Israel and focusing more on Iran as it moves toward becoming a nuclear power.

Michael Totten makes a similar argument over in Commentary, though he at least tries to substantiate it with some polling data; Ricks just typed up a dorm room bull session and slapped a vaguely offensive picture on the top.

At least 20 people have been killed in Saada province in fighting between the Huthi rebels and the Yemeni army over the last 24 hours. Saudi Arabia says it is no longer receiving fire from "Huthi snipers" -- a mildly encouraging sign for the Huthi-Saudi cease-fire -- but the Yemeni army is still fighting heavily.

Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh is moving the goalposts.

Saleh rejected the proposed cease-fire from the Huthi rebels, according to Yemen's state-run SABA news service (عربي). Abdul Malik al-Huthi, the rebel leader, agreed to the five cease-fire conditions previously established by Saleh's government -- but now Saleh says there is a sixth: The rebels must return Saudi Arabian hostages and vow not to attack Saudi territory.

The indispensable Angry Arab, who never needs an excuse to jab at the House of Saud, looks at the tenuous Saudi-Huthi cease-fire and takes a shot at Saudi defense minister Prince Khaled bin Sultan:

I often read in his mouthpiece, Al-Hayat, that he is sought after by military colleges around the world to give lectures on military strategy. I mean, sure a band of Hawthi rebels humiliated his US supplied, trained army, and sure he lost more than a 100 of his men, but look how he salutes his soldiers.

That particular critique might be a little unfair: asymmetrical warfare is hard! But he's certainly right that bin Sultan gets fawning coverage in Al-Hayat, and that the Saudi army -- which spent months carpet-bombing rebel positions -- did not exactly distinguish itself with its conduct in this war.

The Saudi government has accepted the truce (عربي) offered on Monday by Yemen's Huthi rebels -- though it's framing the cease-fire as a victory over the Huthis.

Abdul Malik al-Huthi, the leader of the rebels, said his forces were withdrawing from Saudi territory. But Prince Khaled bin Sultan, Saudi Arabia's deputy defense minister, said today that the Huthis were "forced out" because the army has "achieved a clear victory" over the rebels.

"We cleansed the area ... Withdrawal was not an option for them," he said.

Both sides are clearly trying to save face: The Huthis say the withdrawal was a benevolent decision aimed at avoiding more civilian casualties; the Saudis insist it was a military victory.

In any event, bin Sultan said Saudi Arabia would not engage in negotiations with the rebels, but that his army would respect the cease-fire as long as "Huthi infiltrators" stop slipping across the border.

The Saudi government is expected to announce a decision today on the proposed cease-fire with Yemen's Huthi rebels.

The rebels have already withdrawn completely from positions in Saudi Arabia, according to a statement from Abdul Malik al-Huthi, the group's leader. Now we wait to see if Saudi Arabia reciprocates: The rebels were clear that they will resume hostilities unless Saudi Arabia agrees to (and implements) a truce.

Checking in on Yemen's domestic conflicts: Three Yemeni soldiers were shot dead at a checkpoint (عربي) on the outskirts of Ataq, the capital of Shabwa province. Yemeni security officials say the shooters were members of the southern separatist movement.

Separatists also clashed with police in the capital of ad-Dali province, which is west of Shabwa and about halfway between Sana'a and Aden. The separatists laid burning tires on the highway running to the capital, temporarily blocking it. At least two protesters were injured in that fighting.

Update, 10:17 a.m.: Gregory Johnsen, who supports the analysis that today's AQAP is different from its earlier incarnation, offers a rebuttal on Waq al-Waq.

Original post: The thinking on al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, among many of the U.S. analysts I talk with, is that AQAP is a very different organization than it was in, say, 2002-2003. They point to the February 2006 jailbreak in Yemen as a signal event, one which marked the emergence of a more ambitious AQAP, which replaced a group that had been seriously weakened by Yemeni and Saudi government offensives.

Leah Farrell -- who has spent the last decade following the group -- says that's not true. She writes that AQAP wasn't decimated by the Yemeni/Saudi campaign; instead, the group's leadership simply told members to lay low for a while. And the group that re-emerged after 2006 was very similar to the "old" AQAP.

Bottom line: There is very little that is new here. AQAP has always had an external attack capacity and sought to use it. It has always recruited internationally.

Farrell also makes the still-not-internalized point that "lionizing al-Qaeda only further empowers it." As usual -- her whole analysis is worth a read.

Apparently when somebody asked Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz al Saud whether it might be too soon and too risky to finance and build a 1.1 km-tall tower in the desert, Saud shook his keffiyeh'd head and said, "لا."

Saud's business conglomerate, Kingdom Holdings, is planning to build the monstrosity known as Kingdom Tower and make it the centerpiece of the as-yet-nonexistent Kingdom City, "one of the largest and most ambitious projects" in Saudi Arabia, designed to house some 80,000 people, according the National.

The 828-meter tall Burj Dubai finally opened Monday in the Gulf emirate of the same name, only to be promptly renamed the Burj Khalifa in honor of the ruler of neighboring Abu Dhabi, who was kind enough (or self-interested enough) to loan Dubai $10 billion to bail out troubled, government-owned investment authorities and their real estate arms.