Saudi Warship Attacked by Houthis from Yemen
This happened late yesterday. Fighters from Yemen’s Houthi movement crashed three boats loaded with explosives into a Saudi warship, killing two people. (Yes, I do know that’s one of our own, USS Mahan, but it’s the only war ship photo I could find.)
In December, the Houthis’ rebel Prime Minister accused the UK government of war crimes for sending arms to the Saudis.
This is not going to go away.
Category: Foreign Policy
Is John “D Student” Kerry the new Saudi Secretary of State?
This will not be pretty, I fear.
See how angry Trump’s ban on Yemen has made them? Maybe they wouldn’t be so proactively mad if we let more of them into the US….
Red on red.
But, but, but, but. It’s wrong to suspend Yemeni visa and immigration they’re peaceful muslims….
The Houthis are Shia, from what I understand. The whole thing is based on religious differences. Unless I’m mistaken, the Saudis can expect a lot more. The photo in that article of the building that was bombed says ‘more to come’.
All that exporting Wahbism is coming back on the Saudis. I am Shocked! Shocked I say!
I can’t keep those sects straight any more. Wahabi is the Saudis? The Houthis are Shiites. Saddam Hussein was Bathist. How many more of these are there?
I think I see the real difference between US and THEM. Their whole history is warfare-kill-thy-neighbor over nothing.
Oh, crap, I forgot about the British Civil War generated by Ollie Cromwell as revenge for Henry VIII’s execution of his grandfather, or something like that.
I though wahabi was that asian mustard that’s really spicy?
Naah, that’s Wasabi, Japanese Horseradish that will clear out your sinuses if you use more than a dash! Wahhabiism is the muzzie faith they follow in Saudi Arabia. Come to think of it, they have plenty of room and money to house their fellow muzzie “refugees” from Syria and elsewhere but they’re not taking anyone, maybe they know something about them we don’t?
Hey, wasabi will clean out EVERY FREAKING ORIFICE in your Gaijun body!
I got to experience it, up close and personally, during my CPO INITIATION in Yokosuka in the mid-90’s.
IT CLEANS EVERYTHING OUT… BETTER THAN DRAIN-O!
Along with a couple of others.
Nuoc mam…yum.
Vegemite…hmmm, good.
Balut…ohhhh, boy!!!
Unidentified concoction that made me throw up for days after…Da BEST!
Yeah they probably know they’re better off with some Wasabi and less of the Wahhabi….
I don’t know any more.
Soy is a sauce you put on Chinese food. Then you find out it means ‘I am’ in Spanish, and then you find out that soy is a major grain crop for farmers.
I’m not sure about anything any more. Can’t keep up with it.
Soy sauce is people.
Main split is Sunni/Shia, over the successor to Mohammed. Interesting bit of trivia, a key player in that schism was a girl named Aisha. (Wife of M, rather young). Hero to Sunni, villain to Shia. Anyway, majority of Muslims are Sunni. Saudi is Sunni. Iran is Shia. They mostly consider each other apostates, thus slaughter. Wahhabists/Salafists are strict, fundamentalist Sunni. The “twelfth imam” types are their counterparts in Shia. More strictly apostate to each other, bloodbaths abound. There are subsets and sub-sects of islam and the above main teams. (See “pogrom”) Hezbolalla are Shia, Hamas are Sunni. Iran funds and assists Shia mayhem everywhere, and Sunni where the enemy are non-Muslim or fringe Muslim. Saudi funds Sunni everywhere, generally buying peace at home. Occasionally, they fund Shia where they can direct them away from themselves. Enemy of my enemy is always in force. The relationships get decidedly -weird-, as “historical wrongs” of a thousand years come into play, as does the endemic tribalism, which is a major, major guiding force. The ethnicity element (thus tribal) is also a big player. Arabs -founded- Islam, but seldom -rule- it. Non-arabs resent the hell out of Arab bossiness, dismissing them as “goatherds”. Iran is the incarnation of Persia, and their arrogance is exceeded only by China. Shia+persian is an odd mix. Turkey is the follow-on to the Ottoman empire and the last Caliphate, In the past largely secular but Sunni, now increasingly fundamental Sunni leaning Salafist. Islamic State is an attempt to revive the Caliphate, but no one outside that region will seriously obey it unless they become a serious military (and nuclear) power. (“Goatherds”) All of it is heavily invested in dominance/submission games. Weakness is an invitation to contempt, predation, and enslavement. Failure to understand that crude summary would leave someone poorly advised as to how to kick butt effectively. (Sure, there are more scholarly analysis, and I am sure I goobered a detail or two.) But assuming they -want- to be -like us- or think -like us- or use the same “we all have free will” premise is Farking Lunacy. Thus… Read more »
I believe the operative guideline is take out 33% of the fighting population. Decimate them.
The remaining 66% become very peaceful – until their memory fades.
I would not look askance on napalm on some imams operations.
You may consider that a crude analysis, but it’s good enough for me.
The Saudis, esp. the royal family, are the roosters on top of the heap.
The tribes that existed as separate entities in the Bedouin before World War I, such as the Hadith and the Howietat, have almost disappeared. The desert tribes are not and never have been ‘one people’. They would kill each other over drinking out of the wrong well. Now they will kill each other over a phrase in the Koran.
Unless something happens to drive them back to the desert-wandering tribes they used to be, this idiocy that we westerners don’t understand will go on. Maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll kill each other off, but that is very, very doubtful.
East Coast of The Kingdom is mostly Shia.
There was a headline piece claiming that “the countries banned are all the countries in which Trump does not do business” (WaPo) like it was some sort of Trump business plan. The man built luxury resorts… how many of them do you think anyone sites in Somalia, Yemen, or Syria nowadays?
The Aleppo convention center can’t get anyone to hold their event there these days….can’t imagine why.
And, the PGA, being racist, just cancelled the Mogadishu Open golf tournament. Bastards.
From Wiki, the composition of the Royal Saudi Navy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Saudi_Navy
Mostly French-built warships, largest is the Al-Riyadh (3 ships) and Al-Medina (4 ships) class frigates.
Looks like one of the Al-Riyadh class ships. Photo the link is, of all things, the Al-Makkah:
more like the Al Bundy.
The Houthis claim they launched a ballistic missile at it, but they were in motorboats, so I’d like to know what kind of ballistic missile would fit in a small boat.
Ballistic missile my ass… more than likely a suicide boat loaded with explosives. Damn assclowns have a hard enough time using RPG’s… give them a ballistic missile and they would have aimed it at the ship and sent it to “the holy cities” of Mecca and Medina.
The Yemeni goombas shot two older Chinese anti-ship missiles at two DDG’s recently so they gots some Iranian missiles and a little know how. The real question is who lets small boats get that close to them, a warship with lots of weapons, when at sea? COLE was foolishly pier side in yemen when she got blown up. Seems like the Saudi navy is even shittier than I thought at, well, anything a navy should do. With friends like the Saudi’s, who needs the Three Stooges?
The entire Saudi military is AFU… makes the Three Stooges and Laurel & Hardy look like Nuclear Physicist at CAL TECH. Also, throw in a little issue with different tribes (i.e. racism) and you got Major League problems.
I did one of my ME tours in Kuwait and every bit of their military I saw looked like a joke.
The Saudis have starved Yemenis and bombed Yemenis for quite some time now. Once in a while, they hit back. The other day, while Canadia was wringing its hands, gnashing its teeth, and wailing over the mosque attack, two Muslims of one flavor attacked a mosque of another flavor in Saudi. It was during evening prayer. One attacker blew up and the other was wearing his vest when he was captured. His life will neither be long nor happy. BTW, Saudi now taxes certain goods, some quite heavily, and has frozen or reduced the pay of some gov’t types. It’s that oil thingy. The prices dropped by more than half per barrel. Major builds are on hold. They’ll be back trading camels and living in tents in a few years. Come on, Keystone pipeline.
OH, I have some REALLY good gossip about oil!
I was working as a contractor for the Saudi National Guard after I retired from the Navy – the Saudis have been bombing Yemen since at least 2010, if not earlier, over “border incursions”. I remember hearing planes flying over Riyadh almost daily heading south to bomb sites in Yemen – and the Saudi press afraid to say a word about it.
The rebels tried to get back by attacking the Crown Price twice – the last time it happened, the bomber had the explosives in his rectum – set himself off right in front of the Crown Prince.
Rectum, Damn near killed him.
What an asshole.
Well, he wasn’t constipated after that, was he?
Cleaned him right out.
So now he’s remembered as a half-assed suicide bomber?
And the guy who manufactured the asshole bomb was his BROTHER!!!
Ibrahim Al Asiri.
I dunno. I think the kid got a bum rap……
Rimshot!
Yeah, there’s a real good reason why all those jobs and projects with Saudi Aramco are drying up.
Ya think?
‘EXCLUSIVE: Pentagon believes attack on Saudi frigate meant for US warship’
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/01/31/exclusive-pentagon-believes-attack-on-saudi-frigate-meant-for-us-warship.html
‘The Iranian-backed suicide attack targeting a Saudi frigate off the coast of Yemen on Monday may have been meant for an American warship, two defense officials told Fox News.
The incident in question occurred in the southern Red Sea and was carried out by Iranian-backed Houthi rebels. Two Saudi sailors were killed and three were wounded. At first the ship was thought to have been struck by a missile.
But based on new analysis of a video showing the attack, American intelligence officials now believe this was, in fact, a suicide bomber whose small boat rammed the side of the Saudi vessel.
In the audio heard on the video, a voice narrating the attack shouts in Arabic, “Death to America, Death to Israel, Death to the Jews.”
U.S. defense analysts believe those behind the attack either thought the bomber was striking an American warship or that this was a “dress rehearsal” similar to the attack on the USS Cole, according to one official.
The attack, near the Bab al Mandab Strait connecting the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden, occurred in the same area where U.S. Navy warships came under missile attack in October.
An American destroyer shot down those incoming missiles — the first successful engagement in combat using an American SM-2 missile.
USS Nitze, an American destroyer, retaliated soon after, launching Tomahawk missiles on October 13 at multiple Houthi radar sites in Yemen.
This latest incident came a day after President Trump spoke by phone with the Saudi King to discuss setting up safe zones for refugees in Syria and Yemen. Senior U.S. defense officials who spoke with Fox News say they’re concerned by this latest incident, but are confident American warships can defend themselves.
The United States has supported a Saudi-led air campaign against the Houthi rebels in Yemen since 2015.’
The Religion of Peace wanting to kill innocent Americans!?!?
This is my shocked face. /s
Can anyone imagine the consequences of those fleabag hajjis attacking US Warships now that we have a CiC that gives a fuck?
The thing is, they want to die for their beliefs. That they die in the process does not matter to them.
Of course, now we get to accommodate their desires….
Works for me.
I’m guessing that since the rebels aren’t too smart, they don’t have access to Jane’s All the World’s Ships or any other online defense reference.
Or they’re color blind and can’t tell a Saudi flag from a US flag…
And the most educated among their suicidal splodeydopes typically has only about a third grade education.
That is an insult to 3rd graders everywhere.
They are much smarter, and more mature, than that.
API, thank you. I read it twice before I got it. My favorite word of the day, probably the week and may be a contender for the year. Splodeydopes. Don’t ever remember seeing it in writing, and it’s even funnier than when said.
Thankyuverymuch! I can’t remember who I stole it from, but it’s still one of my favorite terms to describe those goat-molesting diaper-headed fleabags.
I watched the video and it appears that the reports of a missile and a suicide canoe may both be correct. One can see a trail that arcs toward one side of the ship, towards its ass, and then, maybe 20 seconds later, an explosion on the other side towards the pointy part, about at water level. Pardon my non-navyness.
There are other things going on, strange things that aren’t being widely reported. For instance, a rare storm battered Abu Dhabi in February 2016, causing severe flooding, with 11.5 inches of rain in 5 days. The rain overloaded the drainage system so badly that people were stranded.
And then, there’s recent snowfall. They don’t usually get snow in the Saudi Peninsula, but in November last year, there was a severe cold snap (-3C) that brought snow.
http://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/frozen-deserts-shock-saudi-arabia-as-3-cold-snap-brings-blankets-of-snow/news-story/07dc0fdd561cdc45292c6154416f104d
Gee, you and I would just grimace, get out the shovel and clear the sidewalk, and then feed the birds (squirrels), but – well, things seem to be changing in that region, don’t they?
I mean, I know it gets cold in the desert, but snow? Oh, that’s right – it’s been happening in the Atacama Desert for the past five or six years now.
GLOBAL WARMING!!!!
Desert dwellers got drainage systems? Who knew?
When in Afghanistan I met a very smart arabic woman in Kandahar , working for the US I recall. Her opinion, I’ll never forget was that Afghanistan is “Where God comes to cry”. Sadly it is a really sorry assed place with some basically nice people subjugated/brainwashed by a 9th century ghastly Pashtun oppressive culture. With burkas-off (I was a surgeon there) the women are strikingly pretty. The men can show a good sense of humor. Physical humor they get and like. One thing I also learned was they, as well as most of the arab world, see Syrians as low class, and stupid “hillbillies”. Go figure
CAPT Bones
I got to see firsthand how the Saudis look at other Arabs… the darker the skin, the lower on the “totem pole” the person/country is. You would see Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Indians, Filipinos and Indonesians doing most of the manual labor in the Kingdom – Saudis usually “managed them”. And they saw both Syrians and Palestinians as “hillbillies”.
As for Saudi women, there were a few that should have been walking the runway in Paris/Milan/NYC – smoking hot! I saw one that had her face uncovered – she ran the Harley Dealership in Riyadh! Dad had the money and was the “face” of the business, her brother did up some bikes on his own (and had some real talent), but she ran the place – and was very beautiful!
So this attack was done by Hootie?
Were any of the Blowfish involved? Inquiring minds want to know.
😀