Video from the huge rally in Meanjin/Brisbane for justice for Afghanistan. The rally called for at least 20,000 refugee visas and immediate granting of permanent protection for thousands of Afghan refugees already in Australia on temporary visas. Includes comment by Saajeda Samaa from the Hazara community.
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Green Left’s Pip Hinman spoke to Shayaan, a member of the Solidarity Party of Afghanistan (SPA) about the situation on the ground in the country.
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Marcel Cartier remembers the 1988 Halabja massacre, and the ongoing genocidal war against the Kurds.
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The situation in Afghanistan is critical, writes Malalai Joya. For ordinary people, especially for women, this means more suffering. Progressives are in more danger than ever.
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The Taliban’s victory is not a sign of peace but a message of perpetual civil war, writes Farooq Tariq.
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If any proof was needed that the Afghani government was a puppet of Washington, it was shown by its quick collapse, writes Malik Miah.
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The US‘s withdrawal of its troops from Afghanistan has gone alongside a stunning recapture of much of the country by the Taliban. This has naturally raised predictable whines from neoconservative elements who believe that withdrawal has “led to a Taliban triumph”.
However, not only is continuing the occupation of Afghanistan an abject exercise in futility, the US also has partly itself to blame for the rise of the radical Islamist group. A closer examination of history shows that this ascendency traces its roots to US interference in earlier decades.
On 14 August, the Guardian reported that the Taliban had taken control of Mazar-i-Sharif. This is Afghanistan’s fourth-largest city and “the government’s last major stronghold in the north”. On the same day, the New York Times reported:
President Biden’s top advisers concede they were stunned by the rapid collapse of the Afghan army in the face of an aggressive, well-planned offensive by the Taliban that now threatens Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital.
President Biden repeated that he wouldn’t reverse his decision. He pointed out that four presidents have presided over the US occupation of Afghanistan. He affirmed that he “would not, and will not, pass this war on to a fifth”. Biden first announced a US withdrawal on 14 April. He had set a deadline of 11 September, 2021 – the 20 year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in 2001.
Meanwhile, Afghan president Ashraf Ghani said in an address to the nation that he would reorganise the military and begin a process of consultation with Afghan society and international allies. Rumours have been swirling that Ghani might step down as part of some kind of peace deal. In 2018, the Trump administration sent a ‘special envoy’ to begin a peace dialogue with the Taliban. The US then agreed to release 5,000 Taliban prisoners in exchange for a ceasefire in 2020.
The Taliban eventually agreed to peace talks with the Afghan government in that same year, but the talks didn’t go anywhere. The former didn’t have much incentive to negotiate even then given their military strength throughout the country. The Afghan government, meanwhile, has never had much credibility. It’s largely considered a US puppet that owes its position to the 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan, which toppled the then-Taliban-led government.
There is a stunning irony to this. The US labelled the Taliban an enemy in the wake of the 11 September terrorist attacks (based on arguably dubious allegations that the Taliban had ‘harboured terrorists’ and had links to Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaida). The reality, however, is that the Taliban owe their rise in part to US interference in Afghanistan.
During the Cold War, Afghanistan became a major focal point of proxy conflict between the world’s then dominant powers, the US and the Soviet Union (USSR). The USSR was allied to Afghanistan’s socialist government of Mohammed Najibullah. So the US intervened on the side of its opponents by launching ‘Operation Cyclone’.
The operation was hatched by the US’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Its aim was to covertly arm and finance a group of rebel guerrilla fighters called the ‘mujahideen’. It ultimately channeled $2bn to the Islamist group in what became the most expensive covert action in history.
Hostilities culminated in the Afghan Civil War, which pitted US-backed mujahideen against the Soviet-backed government. The problem was that, having now given this latter group support, the US couldn’t put the genie back in the bottle. When hostilities ended in the early 1990s, the Taliban emerged as a mujahideen splinter group. By 1996, it had taken control of most of the country and was essentially the government of Afghanistan.
So when the US invaded Afghanistan to remove the Taliban, it was toppling a ruling faction that it had helped create in the first place. And this shines a light onto the vicious cycle that can emerge when Western powers interfere. Initial interference creates unintended consequences that then provide a ruse for further interference.
Another example is that of Vietnam. The country’s move toward communism was sparked in large part by French colonialism. (The communists were, after all, the most militant and committed of the anti-colonial movement’s factions.) This ‘problem’ was then ‘solved’ by the US first backing a puppet government in South Vietnam. It then invaded when this weak and unpopular government struggled to resist both an invasion from the communist-controlled north and an internal guerrilla insurgency.
To be clear, given its poor record on issues like women’s rights, the Taliban’s return to power is nothing to celebrate. But those who actually have credibility when it comes to opposing the Taliban are local Afghan democratic socialist factions like the Progressive Democratic Party of Afghanistan and the Solidarity Party of Afghanistan (SPA). Though these parties unequivocally stand against the Taliban, they stand against the US occupation in the same way. In fact, the SPA boycotted the last election since it claims no one can get elected without US support.
The US, on the other hand, obviously doesn’t have a shred of credibility when it comes to opposing the Taliban. Because just like the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the US created a problem that it ultimately couldn’t contain. Worst still, Washington then ended up using that problem to provide bogus justification for its self-serving foreign policies. It’s time to break this vicious cycle of interference begetting further interference.
Featured image via Wikimedia Commons – isafmedia
By Peter Bolton
This post was originally published on The Canary.
Jonah Goldberg and Michael Ledeen have much in common. They are both writers and also cheerleaders for military interventions and, often, for frivolous wars. Writing in the conservative rag, The National Review, months before the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Goldberg paraphrased a statement which he attributed to Ledeen with reference to the interventionist US foreign policy.
“Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business,” Goldberg wrote, quoting Ledeen.
Those like Ledeen, the neoconservative intellectual henchman type, often get away with this kind of provocative rhetoric for various reasons. American intelligentsias, especially those who are close to the center of power in Washington DC, perceive war and military intervention as the foundation and baseline of their foreign policy analysis. The utterances of such statements are usually conveyed within friendly media and intellectual platforms, where equally hawkish, belligerent audiences cheer and laugh at the war-mongering muses. In the case of Ledeen, the receptive audience was the hardline, neoconservative, pro-Israel American Enterprise Institute (AEI).
Predictably, AEI was one of the loudest voices urging for a war and invasion of Iraq prior to that calamitous decision by the George W. Bush Administration, which was enacted in March 2003.
Neoconservatism, unlike what the etymology of the name may suggest, was not necessarily confined to conservative political circles. Think tanks, newspapers and media networks that purport – or are perceived – to express liberal and even progressive thought today, like The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN, have dedicated much time and space to promoting an American invasion of Iraq as the first step of a complete US geostrategic military hegemony in the Middle East.
Like the National Review, these media networks also provided unhindered space to so-called neoconservative intellectuals who molded American foreign policy based on some strange mix between their twisted take on ethics and morality and the need for the US to ensure its global dominance throughout the 21st century. Of course, the neocons’ love affair with Israel has served as the common denominator among all individuals affiliated with this intellectual cult.
The main – and inconsequential – difference between Ledeen, for example, and those like Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, is that the former is brazen and blunt, while the latter is delusional and manipulative. For his part, Friedman also supported the Iraq war, but only to bring ‘democracy’ to the Middle East and to fight ‘terrorism’. The pretense ‘war on terror’, though misleading if not outright fabricated, was the overriding American motto in its invasion of Iraq and, earlier, Afghanistan. This mantra was readily utilized whenever Washington needed to ‘pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall’.
Even those who genuinely supported the war based on concocted intelligence – that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, possessed weapons of mass destruction, or the equally fallacious notion that Saddam and Al-Qaeda cooperated in any way – must, by now, realize that the entire American discourse prior to the war had no basis in reality. Unfortunately, war enthusiasts are not a rational bunch. Therefore, neither they, nor their ‘intellectuals’, should be expected to possess the moral integrity in shouldering the responsibility for the Iraq invasion and its horrific consequences.
If, indeed, the US wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan were meant to fight and uproot terror, how is it possible that, in June 2014, an erstwhile unknown group calling itself the ‘Islamic State’ (IS), managed to flourish, occupy and usurp massive swathes of Iraqi and Syrian territories and resource under the watchful eye of the US military? If the other war objective was bringing stability and democracy to the Middle East, why did many years of US ‘state-building’ efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, leave behind nothing but weak, shattered armies and festering corruption?
Two important events have summoned up these thoughts: US President Joe Biden’s ‘historic’ trip to Cornwall, UK, in June, to attend the 47th G7 summit and, two weeks later, the death of Donald Rumsfeld, who is widely depicted as “the architect of the Iraq war”. The tone struck by Biden throughout his G7 meetings is that ‘America is back’, another American coinage similar to the earlier phrase, the ‘great reset’ – meaning that Washington is ready to reclaim its global role that had been betrayed by the chaotic policies of former President Donald Trump.
The newest phrase – ‘America is back’ – appears to suggest that the decision to restore the US’ uncontested global leadership is, more or less, an exclusively American decision. Moreover, the term is not entirely new. In his first speech to a global audience at the Munich Security Conference on February 19, Biden repeated the phrase several times with obvious emphasis.
“America is back. I speak today as President of the United States, at the very start of my administration and I am sending a clear message to the world: America is back,” Biden said, adding that “the transatlantic alliance is back and we are not looking backward, we are looking forward together.”
Platitudes and wishful thinking aside, the US cannot possibly return to a previous geopolitical standing, simply because Biden has made an executive decision to ‘reset’ his country’s traditional relationships with Europe – or anywhere else, either. Biden’s actual mission is to merely whitewash and restore his country’s tarnished reputation, marred not only by Trump, but also by years of fruitless wars, a crisis of democracy at home and abroad and an impending financial crisis resulting from the US’ mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic. Unfortunately for Washington, while it hopes to ‘look forward’ to the future, other countries have already staked claims to parts of the world where the US has been forced to retreat, following two decades of a rudderless strategy that is fueled by the belief that firepower alone is sufficient to keep America aloft forever.
Though Biden was received warmly by his European hosts, Europe is likely to proceed cautiously. The continent’s geostrategic interests do not fall entirely in the American camp, as was once the case. Other new factors and power players have emerged in recent years. China is now the European bloc’s largest trade partner and Biden’s scare tactics warning of Chinese global dominance have not, seemingly, impressed the Europeans as the Americans had hoped. Following Britain’s unceremonious exit from the EU bloc, the latter urgently needs to keep its share of the global economy as large as possible. The limping US economy will hardly make the substantial deficit felt in Europe. Namely, the China-EU relationship is here to stay – and grow.
There is something else that makes the Europeans wary of whatever murky political doctrine Biden is promoting: dangerous American military adventurism.
The US and Europe are the foundation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) which, since its inception in 1949, was almost exclusively used by the US to assert its global dominance, first in the Korean Peninsula in 1950, then everywhere else.
Following the September 11 attacks, Washington used its hegemony over NATO to invoke Article 5 of its Charter, that of collective defense. The consequences were dire, as NATO members, along with the US, were embroiled in their longest wars ever, military conflicts that had no consistent strategy, let alone measurable goals. Now, as the US licks its wounds as it leaves Afghanistan, NATO members, too, are leaving the devastated country without a single achievement worth celebrating. Similar scenarios are transpiring in Iraq and Syria, too.
Rumsfeld’s death on June 29, at the age of 88, should serve as a wake-up call to American allies if they truly wish to avoid the pitfalls and recklessness of the past. While much of the US corporate media commemorated the death of a brutish war criminal with amiable non-committal language, some blamed him almost entirely for the Iraq fiasco. It is as if a single man had bent the will of the West-dominated international community to invade, pillage, torture and destroy entire countries. If so, then Rumsfeld’s death should usher in an exciting new dawn of collective peace, prosperity and security. This is not the case.
Rationalizing his decision to leave Afghanistan in a speech to the nation in April 2021, Biden did not accept, on behalf of his country, responsibility over that horrific war. Instead, he spoke of the need to fight the ‘terror threat’ in ‘many places’, instead of keeping ‘thousands of troops grounded and concentrated in just one country’.
Indeed, a close reading of Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan – a process which began under Trump – suggests that the difference between US foreign policy under Biden is only tactically different from the policies of George W. Bush when he launched his ‘preemptive wars’ under the command of Rumsfeld. Namely, though the geopolitical map may have shifted, the US appetite for war remains insatiable.
Shackled with a legacy of unnecessary, fruitless and immoral wars, yet with no actual ‘forward’ strategy, the US, arguably for the first time since the inception of NATO in the aftermath of World War II, has no decipherable foreign policy doctrine. Even if such a doctrine exists, it can only be materialized through alliances whose relationships are constructed on trust and confidence. Despite the EU’s courteous reception of Biden in Cornwall, trust in Washington is at an all-time low.
Even if it is accepted, without any argument, that America is, indeed, back, considering the vastly changing geopolitical spheres in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, Biden’s assertion should, ultimately, make no difference.
The post US Foreign Policy Adrift: Why Washington is No Longer Calling the Shots first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Alex Salmon reviews Ilan Pappé’s book, Ten Myths about Israel, which debunks Zionist propaganda and proposes a just solution for the Palestinians.
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Western nations and arms companies are complicit in aiding regimes in the Middle East to spy on their citizens, speakers at an international conference shedding light on the human rights implications of the arms trade, said on Saturday.
Attendees at Selling Death: why the international arms trade must be controlled, which was backed by former Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn, decried what they said was a “corrupt” arms trade that reaped huge profits for the “global military-industrial complex.”
The Egyptian human rights activist, Sherif Mansour spoke of “the quiet war” which he says takes place every day across the Middle East whereby “governments use violence against their own population to build the fear barrier to stop them from ever dreaming to be free like they did 10 years ago in the Arab Spring.”
The post Western Governments Chided At Arms Conference For ‘Enabling’ Arab Regimes appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
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Ali Fahim, recently said in an interview with The Tehran Times: “The arrival of [newly elected Iranian President] Ebrahim Raisi at the helm of power gives a great moral impetus to the resistance axis.” Further, with new administrations in the United States, Israel, and Iran, another opportunity presents itself to reinstate fully the 2015 multilateral nuclear agreement, as well as completely lift the US economic sanctions from Iran.
The post Afghanistan War Outcome appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
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Mira Ibrahim, Shelan Khodedah and Zeynep Korkmaz share their personal stories illustrating the struggle for liberation of the Kurdish and Yezidi people.
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After nearly two decades of war, occupation and political meddling, the occupying United States and NATO forces have withdrawn from Afghanistan, leaving Afghans to pick up the pieces, reports Pip Hinman.
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This post was originally published on The Asian Age | Home.
Criticism is growing of recent U.S. airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, which the Biden administration says targeted Iran-backed militias. Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi condemned the attack as a “blatant and unacceptable violation of Iraqi sovereignty and Iraqi national security.” The U.S. airstrikes come as the Biden administration is holding indirect talks with Iran about reviving the Iranian nuclear deal. Jamal Abdi, president of the National Iranian American Council, says the U.S. needs to end its “constant tit for tat” with Iran across the Middle East. “By failing to pivot away from that and instead bombing targets inside of Iraq, we are giving more fuel to this conflict,” he says.
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan Gonzalez.
A U.S. military base near a major oil field in eastern Syria came under attack Monday, one day after the Biden administration launched airstrikes in Syria and Iraq targeting an Iranian-backed militia. Shortly before 8 p.m. local time, multiple rockets hit the U.S. base near the U.S.-controlled Al-Omar oil field. The U.S. responded directing artillery fire at nearby rocket launching positions.
This comes as criticism of the U.S. airstrikes grow. Iraq’s prime minister condemned the U.S. attack as a, quote, “blatant and unacceptable violation of Iraqi sovereignty and Iraqi national security,” unquote. A symbolic funeral was held today in Baghdad for four members of the Iraq Popular Mobilization Forces killed in the U.S. strikes. Syrian media is [reporting] Iran’s Foreign Ministry accused the United States of, quote, “disrupting security in the region.”
On Monday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken defended the U.S. military strikes, claiming they were done in self-defense.
SECRETARY OF STATE ANTONY BLINKEN: We took necessary, appropriate, deliberate action that is designed to limit the risk of escalation, but also to send a clear and unambiguous deterrent message. This action, in self-defense, to do what’s necessary to prevent further attacks, I think, sends a very important and strong message. And I hope very much that it is received by those who were intended to receive it.
AMY GOODMAN: The U.S. military airstrikes come at a time when the Biden administration is holding indirect talks with Iran about reviving the Iranian nuclear deal.
We’re joining right now by Jamal Abdi, the president of the National Iranian American Council.
Welcome to Democracy Now! Can you respond to these attacks?
JAMAL ABDI: Well, you know, it’s hard to find something novel to say about the United States bombing Iraq at this point in time. We’ve been doing this for 30 years. But this comes at a time when the Biden administration has potentially the opportunity to pivot off of this track that was laid for them by the Trump administration, where they are engaged in this constant tit for tat and attempting to roll back Iranian influence and striking Iranian forces. And as we see, by failing to pivot away from that and instead bombing targets inside of Iraq, we are giving more fuel to this conflict. And instead of disincentivizing further attacks by Iran-linked groups, we see immediately retaliation. And this is how these things continue to bog the United States down in the region. And unless Biden is able to break out of this cycle, this is the norm that we’re going to be continuing.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Jamal, what is the Iraq Popular Mobilization Forces, and what is their connection, if any, to Iran? And also, what’s the status of U.S. troops in Iraq these days? How many are there?
JAMAL ABDI: Yeah. So, the groups that Biden struck are part of the Popular Mobilization Units, which were formed to combat ISIS and have been integrated in the Iraqi Security Forces. And so, this is very much, from the Iraqi perspective, a violation of their sovereignty. This is an attack on, you know, groups that are part of the Security Forces.
The United States is still in Iraq. The Iraqis actually — the parliament voted to kick the United States out back when Donald Trump was doing these strikes and when Donald Trump actually killed the Iranian general, Soleimani, and the leader of one of the groups that Biden then struck yesterday. After those strikes in 2020, the Iraqis voted to kick the United States out. The U.S. is still there. I think there are about 3,000 troops in an advise-and-assist role to support the Iraqi government. But, as we see, you know, this is not having a stabilizing effect, and actually the United States is a target for these groups that, prior to the Donald Trump administration, were actually working, if not in coordination with the United States, then in close proximity with the United States, and we weren’t having these conflicts.
And I don’t think it’s any coincidence that that was when the United States and Iran had a deal. We were at the diplomatic table, we had a nuclear agreement, and we actually started to see this trend reverse. Now we’re back in a state where we don’t have a nuclear agreement. We’re trying to get back to there. The U.S. is in Iraq but in a different role. And Biden supposedly wants to withdraw from the region or draw down from the region. And the failure of diplomacy, combined with the willingness to engage in these strikes to supposedly create a deterrent, but actually put a big target on our backs, is a very bad place to be. And it’s hard to see a way out of it, unless there is a diplomatic breakthrough.
AMY GOODMAN: Jamal, this is like a rite of passage, and Biden already did this once, so this is the second time since he’s come to office. But he is the sixth U.S. president in a row to bomb Iraq. I mean, you have George H.W. Bush, you have President Clinton, President George W. Bush, you have President Obama, you have President Trump, and then you have Biden. Now, let me play how the White House spokesperson Jen Psaki defended the airstrikes.
PRESS SECRETARY JEN PSAKI: The targeted strikes were directed at facilities used by Iran-backed militias involved in these ongoing attacks for purposes including weapons storage, command logistics and unmanned aerial vehicle operations. So, Article II, the self-defense, the defense of the United States and our interests, is our domestic justification for the strikes announced yesterday. … The president’s view is that it was necessary, appropriate and deliberate action, these strikes, designed to limit the risk of escalation.
AMY GOODMAN: So, they’re saying — the U.S. is saying it was self-defense. But it’s also interesting that the airstrikes come two weeks after the House of Representatives voted to repeal the AUMF, the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force, which grants sweeping war powers to the president. What will this mean for the nuclear deal that supposedly is — President Biden is attempting to revive?
JAMAL ABDI: As you know, the talks to revive the nuclear deal are ongoing. We’re now in this awkward position where we have a lame-duck administration in Iran, who — the Rouhani government, who placed all of its political hopes and capital in the prospect of détente with the West and with the United States and getting this nuclear deal, to then have the rug pulled out from under it by Donald Trump, and now we are where we are today, where Iran is expanding its nuclear program and Iranians are suffering under sanctions, COVID, government mismanagement, and it’s a terrible situation.
The talks are ongoing, and I think that the talks may still yield a return to the deal. I don’t think that’s necessarily off the table. But I think these actions make it a lot more difficult and have a risk of poisoning the atmosphere there. That being said, you know, I do think that the Iranian supreme leader has signaled that he does want to get this deal, and the incoming president, the hard-line Ebrahim Raisi, has also, if not signaled his support for the deal, signaled that he will accept it.
And I think what really is going to determine whether that happens, it may be these negotiations with this outgoing sort of, quote-unquote, “friendly” administration in Iran, but it also may come under this new government. And the question then is: What does that then build towards? Is there further diplomacy that can happen? It does not look like that’s going to be the case.
I think, for Congress, you know, you hear a lot of voices from Congress criticizing these talks and saying, you know, either we need to not be talking to Iran or we need to seek this bigger and better deal that Donald Trump was trying to get. So, there’s no bigger, better deal on the table unless we return to these obligations. And I just think the fact that the Biden administration is using this legally dubious grounds for these strikes and keeping Congress out of that conversation — Congress is supposed to be authorizing the wars. They’re not involved, so they’re totally detached from the consequences of the failure of diplomacy. And so it’s very easy to cheerlead these strikes and to criticize diplomacy, for members of Congress who don’t actually have any skin in the game when it comes to having to authorize these strikes that are very unpopular among the American public.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you also — this whole issue of self-defense. Given that the United — isn’t this the essence of how an imperial power operates? If you station enough troops around the world — and, of course, the United States has troops in scores of countries around the world — you could always claim self-defense of the United States, because you’re so extended in so many different parts that have really no direct relation to our own country.
JAMAL ABDI: Yeah, absolutely. And the U.S. presence in Iraq — I mean, going back to 1991, the U.S. presence in Iraq and the region have only put targets on the United States’s back and given rationalization to groups that want to see, you know, legitimately or illegitimately — you know, I let you decide — but want to see the United States out of the region. And that’s exactly what we’re doing. You know, counter to popular belief, Iran is not going to leave the region. They’re stuck there. They’re geographically stuck there. The United States isn’t. And the notion that we’re going to perpetually be, whether it’s having a large-scale troop presence there or even this more limited presence but continuing to engage in these deterrent strikes and this tit for tat, is going to lead to any new results just belies the past 30 years of history with the United States in the region.
AMY GOODMAN: Jamal Abdi, we want to thank you for being with us, and, of course, we’re going to continue to cover this, president of the National Iranian American Council.
This is Democracy Now! Next up, Vice President Harris did go to the border Friday, went to El Paso, Texas, but didn’t go to this massive emergency shelter for migrant children at Fort Bliss military base. The Border Network for Human Rights held a protest there with other groups yesterday demanding that the site for the children be shut down. Stay with us.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
An exclusive report from Iraqi Kurdistan’s Zirgwezala by Marcel Cartier.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
About 13,000 Kurdish refugees from south-eastern Turkey live inside the UNHCR-recognised Makhmur refugee camp, which is being attacked by Turkish forces, reports Peter Boyle.
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Australian ties to Israeli weapons corporations make it complicit in Palestine atrocities, Sue Bolton reports.
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Haidar Eid, Jeff Halper, Noura Mansour and Arie Huybregts discuss why Israel is an apartheid state.
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Zaka Mohsin, Riyadh,
A joint air exercise participating several Arab countries was launched on Sunday in Al-Kharj in central Saudi Arabia, the Saudi ministry of defense said.
Maj. Gen. Mohsin bin Saeed Al-Zahrani, commander of the Prince Sultan Air Base, and heads of participating delegations were present, countries including Oman, the UAE, Jordan and Egypt taking part, and Kuwait and Bahrain are the observers.
The two-week exercise “aims to ensure the highest levels of readiness, and achieve operational compatibility and integration,” the ministry said.
Lt. Col. Mohammed Ibrahim bin Sufyan, commander of the exercise, said that the air exercise will be carried out in different stages, including planning and implementing flights.
“The exercise aims to raise the operational and training readiness for tactical airdrops and raise the spirit of competition among the participants,” he added.
Air force contingents taking part in the exercise arrived at the Prince Sultan Air Base on Friday along with their air, technical and administrative crews.
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More than 44 Palestinian cultural institutions were partially or completely destroyed by Israel’s latest bombing attacks. One small way we can express solidarity with Palestinian artists, writers and musicians is by learning about their work and sharing it with others, writes Markela Panegyres.
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