Yemen very difficult country to invade: Analyst

Press TV has conducted an interview with Gearoid O Colmain, a political commentator and journalist from Paris, to get his opinion on relentless Saudi airstrikes against the Yemeni people.

The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: The Saudis and their regional allies are burying more and more of their soldiers, a hefty price to pay, don’t you think? And don’t you think that Saudi Arabia actually thought it’s going to be a rather easy feat to accomplish attacking an already impoverished nation?

Colmain: Well, Yemen has always had the reputation of being particularly a very difficult country to invade and attack. It’s a very mountainous country and the people there are very used to fighting these types of conflicts.

I think one of the problems for the Saudi regime is that this is blatantly a war of aggression against a country that hasn’t threatened anyone. It’s clearly going to force a lot of soldiers to reflect on what they’re doing. We’ve seen defections for example already to the Yemeni forces from the Saudis.

And the war is really about getting control of Yemen, wresting control from the Houthi Ansarullah movement and bringing that whole region under US control, because the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait is of enormous strategic importance to the United States and Israel.

The port of Aden, which connects the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea, is of enormous importance for Saudi Arabia as well, because they fear that conflict between Iran and the United States will close the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf. They depend a lot on that. So, there’s also of course a question of oil. There’s quite a lot of oil in Yemen that has been actually undeveloped and the Saudis want to get their hands on that as well. The war has pretty much been ignored by the Western press.

The war has absolutely no international legal mandate, whatsoever; they had no mandate from the Security Council. Yet the United States and Western powers are supporting Saudi aggression, which has killed at least 5,000 and possibly a lot more. They’re destroying the entire civilian infrastructure of course of Yemen, schools, hospitals and even refugee camps have been hit by the bombing campaign.

Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula are benefiting from this as well. That will create further instability. But I think the big problem for the Saudis is the Ansarullah movement has tremendous popular support, and there is very little they can do to defeat them.

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