Yemen Back in the News + Three Million Internally Displaced Iraqis and Rising + French Move to Torpedo P5+1 + Bum Rush on for Renewal of Russian Sanctions

Recent ISIS victories in Ramadi and Palmyra crowded news of the Saudi terror bombing of Yemen not only off the front page of the newspaper but out of the Gray Lady altogether. Today's report from Mohammed Ali Kalfood and Kareem Fahim, "Medical Need Climbs Alongside Death Toll in Yemen," is the first full story to appear in The New York Times in ten days.

And the news is not good. The Saudis and the Houthis are engaged in cross-border clashes in Yemen's north; Saudis continue their aerial bombardment of Sana, regardless of the civilian death toll; and the basic infrastructure of the country is being thoroughly demolished, to the point now that it is estimated that one-third of Yemen's inhabitants are in need of urgent medical care. As Kalfood and Fahim report,

In the absence of negotiations, the military conflict has grown in intensity. Areas in northern Yemen near the Saudi border have become a fiercely contested front in recent weeks, with both the Houthis and the Saudis mounting a series of deadly cross-border attacks. 

The airstrikes in the capital on Wednesday morning followed a familiar pattern, with Saudi-led attacks against military targets in populated areas setting off secondary explosions that sent shrapnel hurtling toward civilian homes nearby. 

Witnesses said the airstrikes hit the headquarters of a counterterrorism unit that had received training and financing from the United States before the conflict. The attack occurred around 10:30 a.m., as Houthi recruits were gathering there to receive weapons. Explosions in the area continued for hours afterward, witnesses said. 

In a statement on Wednesday, the World Health Organization said that nearly 2,000 people had been killed in the fighting since March, including “hundreds of women and children.” Out of a population of 24 million, the organization said, some 8.6 million people “are in urgent need of medical help,” both for war-related injuries and for common medical conditions. 

Hospitals around the country have closed because of shortages of staff members and fuel, and medicines for diabetes, cancer and hypertension are no longer available. The organization added that “outbreaks of polio and measles are also serious risks.”

In Iraq, there are three million internally displaced persons. The UN estimates that number will grow by an additional one million as the Iraqi counteroffensive to retake Anbar builds momentum. Tim Arango, a rare Gray Lady reporter not known to peddle USG infowar talking points, toes the anti-Shiite line this morning with "Sunnis Fleeing ISIS Find Few Doors Open Elsewhere in Iraq." The gist of the story is that the Shiite-controlled Iraqi government is being ruthlessly sectarian by requiring refugees from Anbar to have a sponsor in Baghdad if they want to settle in the city.

Arango does include a modest one paragraph demurrer where he mentions that the Kurds are also loath to wave through refugees from the Sunni heartland:

Even in the northern Kurdish region, long a haven for civilians fleeing Iraq’s turmoil, the authorities are reluctant to accept large numbers of Arabs, worsening the country’s ethnic divisions and adding to the sense that the very cohesion of Iraq is being pulled apart.

The reason the government has some sort of policy in place on the internally displaced is to prevent jihadi suicide bombers from gaining unfettered access to Baghdad. Reasonable. One would expect far worse in the United States if it were facing similar pressures.

In any event, the United Nations has burned through the $500 million the Saudis donated last year to deal with the humanitarian crisis that their jihadis unleashed in Iraq. Now an additional $700 million is needed. I wonder what the total UN humanitarian budget for Yemen, Syria and Iraq is. Who is going to pay it?

The P5+1 negotiations seem to be going off the rails with French foreign minister Laurent Fabius demanding that any final deal must include "anytime, anywhere" inspections, something that Ayatollah Khamenei ruled out in a May 20 statement.

It seemed to me that the Israelis responded with unusual calm when Obama announced at the beginning of April a tentative accord with Iran on its nuclear program. The fact that AIPAC-ally Bob Corker worked so diligently with the administration to pass compromise legislation allowing a congressional role in reviewing the agreement without killing it also seemed odd to me.

All of which makes sense if the Netanyahu government has a fail safe in the form of a French veto. The Hollande government is truly one of the worst; it almost makes Cameron's Tories look bright and shiny.

Then there is the latest outbreak of incitement against Russia. Apparently the Kiev junta is blocking all cargo shipments from Russia to Crimea. This coincides with the latest infowar volley asserting Russian military penetration of Ukraine. Both I'm sure are meant to build support in the EU for a re-authorization of Russian sanctions set to sunset in July.

Wahhabis on the March

Reuters is reporting this morning a massacre of Shiites in the rebel-held Syrian town of Hatla:

A video posted online by rebels on Tuesday, entitled "The storming and cleansing of Hatla" showed dozens of gunmen carrying black Islamist flags celebrating and firing guns in the streets of a small town as smoke curled above several buildings.

Rick Gladstone has a story this morning, "U.S. Blacklists Fund-Raisers for Hezbollah," about the Treasury Department sanctioning four Hezbollah fundraisers who operate out of Africa:

The Treasury said that the four, identified as Ali Ibrahim al-Watfa, Abbas Loutfe Fawaz, Ali Ahmad Chehade and Hicham Nmer Khanafer, had “organized fund-raising efforts, recruited members, and in some cases styled themselves as ambassadors of Hezbollah’s Foreign Relations Department.” 

David S. Cohen, the Treasury under secretary in charge of administering sanctions, rejected Hezbollah’s depiction of itself as a resistance organization, noting that three of Europe’s biggest countries — Britain, Germany and France — now support an effort within the European Union to classify Hezbollah as a terrorist group. Such a change could hurt Hezbollah’s fund-raising in Europe.

The Gulf Cooperation Council, that league of Arab monarchies, also announced yesterday its intention to sanction Hezbollah.

Gladstone provides an economical summary of yesterday's civil war news:

On Tuesday, Lebanon’s National News Agency reported that rocket fire from Syria struck the Shiite border village of Hermel, in what appeared to be a rebel reprisal. In Syria’s capital, Damascus, two suicide bombers killed at least 14 people, which Syria’s state news agency, Sana, called a cowardly retaliation that illustrated “the bankruptcy of the armed terrorist groups and those who stand behind them.”

As Taliban suicide bombers rock Afghanistan, it's worth mentioning yet again that the West is working in concert to destabilize the Middle East with the same regressive Wahhabism that we have been purportedly locked in existential war since 9/11. Assad's characterization of the opposition as foreign-backed terrorists, scoffed at initially, is now impossible to deny.

And this is what Obama is going to wade into with heavy weapons? Madness.

Sunni-Shia Unrest

Yesterday Middle East expert Robert Fisk was interviewed on Democracy Now! It's worth checking out. He's a prickly guy and his take on Syria is sort of a "pox on both your houses." He says the Syrian government is fighting to win and taking no prisoners. Fisk, who maintains high-level contacts within the Syrian military, casts doubt on Israeli-U.S. claims that the government is using poison gas. He thinks the civil war will most likely continue for another couple of years.

The main Syria story in the paper today is about Secretary of State John Kerry's trip to Moscow where an announcement was made about a peace conference to take place as soon as the end of this month.

Anne Barnard has a story about Hezbollah's widening role in the civil war, leaving me with the impression that momentum is definitely going Assad's way. The Wahhabi rebel groups are Keystone Cops compared to the Party of Allah. The last thing Israel wants is a successful proving ground for Hassan Nasrallah's men. And it's why you can expect more Israeli bombing runs.

But I found that the most enlightening story this morning was Tim Arango's, "Iraq’s Worsening Sunni Protests Revolve Around Antiterrorism Tactics." Sunnis are protesting the Maliki government's continued reliance on a U.S.-created policy of indefinite detention based on a network of confidential informants (a.k.a., a police state). The government's harsh crackdown on the protest camp in Hawija that left 50 dead has exacerbated the fissure between Sunnis and Shiites. And at this point, with a Sunni-Shiite civil war raging next door in Syria, there appears to be no going back:

Now, Iraqis on both sides of the divide say the chance to quell Sunni anger by revising these practices seems to have been lost. Sunni protesters have symbolically set fire to their list of demands. Shiite leaders say reconciliation is politically impossible, given the sectarian polarization set off by the recent violence here and the continuing civil war in Syria, which is increasingly aggravating the region’s sectarian fault lines. 

“To be realistic, in the current environment, there is no support for this,” said Sami al-Askari, a Shiite member of Parliament who is close to the prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. “This is the impact of Syria. The whole region is talking about clashes between Sunnis and Shiites.” 

Something greater seems to have been lost here, some Iraqis say, the dream of a sectarian coexistence in which disagreements are contested through politics. The prospect for political blocs comprising Sunnis and Shiites to emerge in advance of next year’s national elections, as they did before the previous vote in 2010, seems far-fetched. 

“The Shiite feeling is that they are under threat,” Mr. Askari said. “The Sunnis feel like they are marginalized. In this environment, it is madness to say, ‘I have a list of Sunnis and Shiites and people will vote for it.’ ”