A ship unloads a cargo of wheat at the Red Sea port of Hodeida, Yemen, April 1. The port, controlled by Shiite Houthi rebels, is key to feeding the capital, Sanaa, and Houthi regions. Some 17.8 million Yemenis are considered 'food insecure.'

—By the third anniversary of Saudi Arabia’s intervention in Yemen last week, the coalition it leads – backed by the United States and Britain – had carried out 16,749 airstrikes against one of the poorest nations on earth. The United Nations blames coalition bombs for causing two-thirds of the more than 10,000 deaths in the conflict.

Shiite Houthi rebels marked the three-year anniversary of a war the UN blames for creating the "worst man-made humanitarian crisis in the world” by launching seven missiles deep into Saudi territory. Three fell on the capital Riyadh, killing one civilian, in the most extensive counter-strike of its kind.

But two days later, while Yemenis braced for a military response, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman gave a strong indication that the kingdom has also begun to focus on humanitarian needs in the war, which has created widespread hunger and a raging cholera epidemic.

The crown prince presented $930 million from Saudi Arabia and its chief coalition partner, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), to UN Secretary-General António Guterres in New York – a sum that meets nearly one-third of a $2.96 billion UN appeal for 2018.

That philanthropic largess will be welcomed tomorrow in Geneva, where the UN is convening a high-level pledging conference for Yemen. The cash is part of a $1.5 billion package announced by Saudi Arabia in late January, which is meant to include the expansion of Yemen’s port capacity and opening of 17 “safe passage corridors” for aid supplies, mostly in non-Houthi areas.

But Yemenis affected by the war and analysts alike say the Saudi donation aims more at repairing the kingdom’s own damaged reputation than at ending a war where it plays the decisive role. Indeed, the Saudis have also hired American and British firms to wage a concerted public relations campaign.

“The money the Saudis are giving is like make-up on its face,” says Abdulrashid Al-Faqih, executive director of the Mwatana Organization for Human Rights in the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, which has been under Houthi control since 2015.

“All the warring parties are responsible for this suffering, but first is the Saudi- and UAE-led coalition,” says Mr. Al-Faqih. “What would be better than this [money] would be if Saudi Arabia stopped the war in Yemen. It’s not enough for Yemen to receive humanitarian aid as long as the war continues.”

April Longley Alley, project director for the Arabian Peninsula for the International Crisis Group (ICG), articulates only a slightly more positive view of the Saudi initiative, though she reaches a similar conclusion.

“Over the last several months, it’s very clear the Saudis are taking the reputational damage seriously, and they are mobilizing resources to address it,” she says. “This is especially true around their humanitarian plan for Yemen that they just announced.

“In some respects, it’s very good, right? They are now focusing on the humanitarian crisis…. The UN has a humanitarian plan. It needs to be funded. That’s a very positive development,” says Ms. Alley, speaking from Dubai after visiting Yemen’s southern, coalition-controlled port city of Aden.

“But the larger picture has to be that humanitarian aid is a Band-Aid, and the reason we need that humanitarian aid is because of the conflict,” she says. “So as long as the conflict continues, it’s just going to create more of a need.”

The Saudi-led military intervention was initially meant to last just three months, to reverse a Houthi takeover of Yemen and restore the internationally recognized government of President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi.

But as “Operation Decisive Storm” dragged on it was renamed “Operation Restoring Hope.” Mr. Hadi is still the nominal president, but rules from exile in Riyadh, and steady coalition bombing has devastated civilian infrastructure, from hospitals and factories to bridges – and led to war crimes charges.

A strict air, land and sea blockade – which Saudi Arabia promised to ease last November, with little follow-through so far – has meant that critical food and goods are too expensive for most. The UN says a “record” 22.2 million Yemenis, some 75 percent of the population, are in need of humanitarian assistance in 2018, 3.4 million more people than last year.

Marie-Christine Heinze, a Yemen expert and president of the Center for Applied Research in Partnership with the Orient (CARPO), a think tank in Bonn, Germany, argues that despite the Saudi humanitarian plan, the kingdom is not likely to scale down its military campaign.

“They continue the blockade, they continue to bombard civilian infrastructure, all of which continues to impact the humanitarian situation on the ground.... I don’t see this as a change,” says Ms. Heinze.

More broadly, the scale of bombing has “traumatized a whole population,” especially a generation of children, she says.

“Even if the war came to an end tomorrow, we would have to deal with the consequences of this for decades,” says Heinze. “You also have the conflict on the local level, the sectarian undertones, the hatred, the propaganda that is now not only dividing regions, north and south, but dividing governorates, villages, whole communities, dividing families – that’s going through the social texture in a way that [can’t] be easily mended.”

More than 79 percent of children experienced “severe symptoms” of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), such as being “unable to cry or unable to feel happy,” according to a CARPO survey of more than 900 Yemeni children after the first year of the Saudi intervention, during which the coalition bombed Sanaa several times a day.

By comparison only children in northern Iraq, in the aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s genocidal Anfal campaign against Iraqi Kurds in 1988, registered similar levels of PTSD, according to this study. Today that impact would be greater, since Yemen’s children have been subject to two more years of conflict.

Yet the coalition air war – supported by American and British intelligence and advisers, and critically by US aircraft mid-air refueling capacity – is just one factor in Yemen’s suffering.

“Yemen is one of the most food insecure countries in the world,” where vulnerable populations in one out of three districts “are facing heightened risk of famine and require integrated response efforts to avert a looming catastrophe,” the UN states in its current appeal.

The conflict “exacerbated the poverty and vulnerabilities that were entrenched in Yemen before 2015,” says the UN. The result today is that 17.8 million Yemeni are “food insecure,” with 8.4 million of those “severely food insecure and at the risk of starvation.”

Such figures, and the widespread perception that Saudi Arabia is responsible for the bulk of Yemen’s civilian agony with little military result, has stung in Riyadh. Crown Prince Mohammed, 32, is the Saudi defense minister and architect of the war. He is nearing the end of a three-week visit to the US, where he met President Trump, lobbied for support for his shock-therapy reform program at home, and defended the Yemen war.

He told CBS’s “60 Minutes” that the Houthis are “using the humanitarian situation to their advantage in order to draw sympathy,” and charged that the Houthis “block humanitarian aid in order to create famine and a humanitarian crisis.”

Early in the prince’s visit, the Senate narrowly defeated a bipartisan bill to end US refueling of coalition jets and intelligence support. Defense Secretary James Mattis argued that both the refueling and US advice on how to target were aimed a “reducing the risk of civilian casualties” by preventing “rash or hasty” decision by pilots running low on fuel during bombing runs.

It’s not clear how the announced Saudi plan will mesh with the multibillion dollar UN aid strategy.

Those Saudi steps are “very problematic” because they are not yet defined, says the ICG’s Alley. In the case of the ports they appear to be a bid to shift away from reliance on the crucial, Houthi-controlled port of Hodeidah, which feeds the capital and Houthi regions.

“Three years in, there is no longer a Yemeni state, per se. There is no longer one country, [it] has fragmented along historical divides, and you have various power centers,” she says. “This is a largely stalemated, grinding war of attrition on many of these fronts…. It’s a multi-layered conflict, even inside Yemen.”

Saudi Arabia has addressed criticism of the war in other ways. A reporter for The Wall Street Journal was allowed rare access last month to the command center in Riyadh, for example, from which Yemen military operations are conducted.

Saudi officers spoke of trying to minimize civilian casualties in its mostly combat missions over Yemen.

“We’ll watch for hours, days sometimes, and not strike to protect civilians,” Maj. Gen. Abdullah al-Ghamdi was quoted as saying, while watching a live feed from a drone over Yemen that he said showed a group of fighters hiding in a compound.

The Houthi missile strike was a “message” to Saudi Arabia on the war anniversary, Alley says.

“The perception from their side is that, until Saudi Arabia feels pain from its side domestically, they are not going to be serious about negotiations,” she says. “That’s the Houthi perspective.”

For human rights activist Al-Faqih, in Sanaa, the deaths of civilians on any side is condemned. But the Houthi’s seven-missile strike a week ago pales in comparison to the coalition’s near-17,000 airstrikes – a figure from the Yemen Data Project.

“The airstrikes were almost all focused on destroying the interests of people, like attacking factories, the markets,” says Al-Faqih. “The military campaign conducted by the coalition is against the people, it’s not really against Houthis – it’s against Yemenis.”

“We do see the suffering every day on the streets and even on the faces of the Yemeni people,” he says.

“What could be worse than the current situation?” he asks. “All forms of normal life have been fading. It’s started to disappear.”</s>GENEVA, April 3 (Reuters) - United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged the warring sides in Yemen on Tuesday to reach a political settlement to end a four-year-old conflict that has left 22 million people in urgent need of aid.

Yemeni Foreign Minister Abdel-Malek al-Mekhlafi echoed the call for a return to the negotiating table and said that his internationally-recognised government was working to open ports and airports to humanitarian aid.

The U.N. conference, which is seeking pledges towards a $3 billion funding appeal to address the world's worst humanitarian crisis, takes place a day after an air strike by the Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen killed 12 civilians in the coastal city of Hodeidah and the Houthi rebels later targeted Saudi Arabia's southern border area with a missile.

"A negotiated political settlement through inclusive intra-Yemeni dialogue is the only solution. I urge all parties to engage with my new Special Envoy, Martin Griffiths, without delay," Guterres told the one-day conference.

"All ports must remain open to humanitarian and commercial cargo, the medicines, food and the fuel needed to deliver them. Sanaa airport is also a lifeline that must be kept open," he said.

The war has killed more than 10,000 people, displaced more than 2 million and driven the country - already the poorest on the Arabian Peninsula - to the verge of famine. Hodeidah is Yemen's biggest port where most of the humanitarian aid enters for millions of hungry civilians but the government accuses Houthis who control the port of smuggling weapons through it.

Mekhlafi said: "We need to find the ideal solution which is a return to the talks table, to put an end the war, to return to a sustainable system supported by the people of Yemen, including the putschist parties and those supported by the international community."

The country's unity and territorial integrity must be preserved, he added.

When the Houthis fired missiles at Riyadh last November, the Western-backed coalition responded by shutting Yemen´s airports and ports. The United Nations said that blockade raised the danger of mass starvation and it was partially lifted.

"It is a war that should end, so we need a ceasefire, we need peace talks, we need an end to the embargo on many of Yemen's ports," Jan Egeland, secretary-general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, told Reuters.

"But we also ask Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Iran - who are supporting opposing sides - and for that matter, the United Kingdom, the United States, who are earning enormous sums of money on arms sales to this conflict to push the parties to the table."

Senior aid officials from Britain and the United States also called for a political solution to the conflict.</s>Almost half the $2bn promised by nations at Geneva fundraising event is from two key protagonists in the conflict

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

A UN donor conference for people affected by war in Yemen – which has been labelled as the “world’s worst humanitarian crisis” – has received pledges of more than $2bn (£1.4bn), close to half of which is promised by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, two key protagonists in the conflict.

Despite falling well short of the almost $3bn being called for by the meeting in Geneva, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, hailed the donor conference a “remarkable success”.

The conference came just a day after an airstrike by the Saudi-led coalition on the port city of Hodeidah killed a number of children, in what the UN children’s fund, Unicef, called “one of the deadliest attacks” on minors in the country for years.

“The United Nations has verified the killing of several children in an attack … in the coastal city of Hodeidah in western Yemen,” Unicef said in a statement on 2 April.

“Many children are reported missing as the injured and killed are still being pulled out from the rubble,” it added, amid reports that seven children had been killed.

Guterres told reporters that in addition to the $2bn already committed, multiple countries had promised more donations in the coming months, leaving him “optimistic that we will be able to reach the level that corresponds to the needs”.

Asked if he saw a contradiction in the Saudi stance towards Yemen, Guterres said a country’s humanitarian commitments and military actions should be kept separate.

“We all know that there is a war. We all know who the parties [are] to the war but the two things need to be seen separately,” the UN chief told reporters.

“Independent of the fact that there is a war, there are humanitarian obligations that are assumed by countries,” he said.

“The countries that are also party to the conflict were party to these international efforts to support the people of Yemen.”

Last year’s Yemen appeal for $2.5bn was 73% funded, but the needs have intensified in a country battered since 2015 by a Saudi-led military offensive aimed at repelling Iran-backed Houthi rebels who control the capital.

The UN has said that three-quarters of Yemen’s population – about 22 million people – need some form of aid.

Saudi Arabia and its allies have repeatedly been accused of hitting civilians targets, including hospitals and markets, in their three-year campaign against the Houthis.

Guterres underscored that the only way to ensure that Yemen donor conferences do not continue year after year is for the sides to negotiate a peace deal.

“There was never a humanitarian solution for any humanitarian crisis,” he said. “The solution has always been political.”

The UN’s Yemen envoy, Martin Griffiths, has recently visited Riyadh and Sana’a in hopes of revitalising sputtering peace talks.

'A cynical PR exercise': critics round on $3.5bn plan to allay Yemen suffering Read more

“I believe there is an opportunity and that opportunity must be seized,” Guterres said, explaining that Griffiths was “encouraged” by his trip and sees a window for further talks.

According to the UN, 8.4 million people are on the verge of famine in Yemen, where food imports are essential to sustain the population.

The Saudi-led coalition shut down the country’s land, sea and air borders last year in response to a missile attack by the Houthis that was intercepted near Riyadh.

While the coalition has eased the blockade, restrictions on deliveries persist.

“Humanitarians must be able to reach the people who need help the most, without conditions,” Guterres said.

“All ports must remain open to humanitarian and commercial cargo, the medicines, food and the fuel needed to deliver them,” he added, emphasising the need for unrestricted access to the country as well as within it.</s>The crown prince and de facto leader of Saudi Arabia said Israel has a “right” to a homeland, a notable shift in the kingdom’s position, in an interview published in The Atlantic on Monday but on the other hand Saudi King Salman reaffirmed support for Palestinians to US President Donald Trump, state media said Tuesday.

 Saudi Arabia and Israel still have no formal diplomatic relations, but behind the scenes, improvements in their ties have accelerated in recent years.

 Both countries see Iran as their biggest outside threat and the United States as their key ally, and both see danger from armed extremists.

 Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians has long proved an obstacle to a full rapprochement, however, as Riyadh still supports their claim to sovereignty. But now Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, speaking to the editor-in-chief of US news magazine The Atlantic, appeared to put the rival land claims on an equal footing.

 The prince was asked by Jeffrey Goldberg whether the “Jewish people have a right to a nation-state in at least part of their ancestral homeland?”

 “I believe that each people, anywhere, has a right to live in their peaceful nation,” said the prince, who is on a three-week US tour.

 “I believe the Palestinians and the Israelis have the right to have their own land,” he added. “But we have to have a peace agreement to assure the stability for everyone and to have normal relations.”

 Since 2002, Saudi Arabia has been the main sponsor of the Arab Peace Initiative, which envisions a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

 But no such senior Saudi official is known to have previously accepted that Israel has a “right” to any land beyond the practical need to secure a lasting deal.

 He told Goldberg he had no “religious objection” to Israelis living alongside Palestinians, so long as the main Muslim holy site in Jerusalem — the Al-Aqsa mosque compound — is protected.

 “We have religious concerns about the fate of the holy mosque in Jerusalem and about the rights of the Palestinian people,” he said.

 “This is what we have. We don’t have any objection against any other people.”

 When asked about the Wahhabist ideology, the crown prince told Goldberg “This Wahhabism — please define it for us. We’re not familiar with it. We don’t know about it.”

 “It’s a movement founded by Ibn abd al-Wahhab in the 1700s, very fundamentalist in nature, an austere Salafist-style interpretation…,” replied Goldberg, at which point he appeared to have been cut off by the prince.

 “No one can define Wahhabism. There is no Wahhabism. We don’t believe we have Wahhabism. We believe we have, in Saudi Arabia, Sunni and Shiite. We believe we have within Sunni Islam four schools of thought, and we have the ulema [the religious authorities] and the Board of Fatwas [which issues religious rulings]. Yes, in Saudi Arabia it’s clear that our laws are coming from Islam and the Quran, but we have the four schools — Hanbali, Hanafi, Shafi’i, Maliki — and they argue about interpretation.”

 “A ‘triangle of evil’ is trying to promote the idea that our duty as Muslims is to reestablish the caliphate, to reestablish the mindset of the caliphate — that the glory of Islam is in building an empire by force,” said the prince in a question on Islam.

 When asked to elaborate, he said: “First in the triangle, we have the Iranian regime that wants to spread their extremist Shiite ideology. The second part of the triangle is the Muslim Brotherhood, which is another extremist organisation. They want to use the democratic system to rule countries and build shadow caliphates everywhere. The other part is the terrorists — al-Qaeda, ISIS — that want to do everything with force.”

 “This triangle is promoting an idea that God and Islam are not asking us to promote […] Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Yemen — all of these countries are defending the idea that independent nations should focus on their own interests, in building good relations on the foundation of UN principles. The evil triangle doesn’t want to do that.”

 “Absolute monarchy is not a threat to any country. You say ‘absolute monarchy’ like it’s a threat,” the prince said in reply to a question. “If it were not for absolute monarchy, you wouldn’t have the United States. The absolute monarch in France helped the creation of the United States by giving it support. Absolute monarchy is not an enemy of the United States. It’s an ally for a very long time.”

 “Saudi Arabia is a network of thousands of absolute monarchies, and then has a large absolute monarchy. We have tribal monarchies, town monarchies. Moving against this structure would create huge problems in Saudi Arabia. The Saudi fabric is much more complicated than you think. And actually our king doesn’t have absolute power. His power is based in law.

 If he is making a royal decree, he can’t say, ‘I’m King Salman and I’m doing this’. If you read decrees, you first see the list of laws that allow the king to take this decision. By the way, the queen of the United Kingdom, she has absolute power with any law. But she doesn’t practice it. So it’s complicated.”

 The official Saudi Press Agency said that the king Salman “reaffirmed the kingdom’s steadfast position towards the Palestinian issue and the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people to an independent state with Jerusalem as its capital.”

 The king also emphasised the need to advance the Middle East peace process in a phone call with Trump, which came after Israeli forces killed 17 Palestinians last week during a demonstration on its border with Gaza.—Agencies</s>UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The United States accused Iran on Tuesday of supplying Yemen's Houthi rebels with a missile that was fired into Saudi Arabia in July and called for the United Nations to hold Tehran accountable for violating two U.N. Security Council resolutions. 

 U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said information released by Saudi Arabia showed the missile fired in July was an Iranian Qiam, which she described as "a type of weapon that had not been present in Yemen before the conflict."

 Saudi-led forces, which back the government in neighboring Yemen, have been targeting the Iran-allied Houthis in a more than two-year war. Saudi Arabia's crown prince on Tuesday described Iran's supply of rockets to the Houthis as "direct military aggression" that could be an act of war.

 Haley said that by providing weapons to the Houthis, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp‎s had violated two U.N. resolutions on Yemen and Iran. She said a missile shot down over Saudi Arabia on Saturday "may also be of Iranian origin." 

 "We encourage the United Nations and international partners to take necessary action to hold the Iranian regime accountable for these violations," Haley said. It was not immediately clear what action the United States was calling for. 

 Under a U.N. resolution that enshrines the Iran nuclear deal with world powers, Tehran is prohibited from supplying, selling or transferring weapons outside the country unless approved in advance by the U.N. Security Council.

 A separate U.N. resolution on Yemen bans the supply of weapons to Houthi leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, two Houthi commanders, Yemen's former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, his son, and "those acting on their behalf or at their direction."

 The United States could propose people or entities to be blacklisted by the Security Council's Yemen sanctions committee, a move that would need consensus approval by the 15-members. 

 Or it could put forward a new Security Council resolution to impose sanctions on Iran. To pass, a resolution needs nine votes in favor and no vetoes by the United States, Britain, France, China or Russia. 

 A senior Iranian official, speaking in Paris on condition of anonymity, dismissed as "very childish" the accusations that Iran has transferred missiles to Yemen.

 "Is it possible from a military point of view to send a very long missile to Yemen when all the ships surrounding Yemen are very much alert to intercept any shipments of arms to Yemen?" the official said. "The Saudis and their supporters know this is a fake story that Iran has sent missiles to Yemen."

 

 (Reporting by Michelle Nichols, additional reporting by John Irish in Paris; Editing by Susan Thomas and David Gregorio)</s>A UN donor conference for people affected by war in Yemen – which has been labelled as the “world’s worst humanitarian crisis” – has received pledges of more than $2bn (£1.4bn), close to half of which is promised by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, two key protagonists in the conflict.

Despite falling well short of the almost $3bn being called for by the meeting in Geneva, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, hailed the donor conference a “remarkable success”.

The conference came just a day after an airstrike by the Saudi-led coalition on the port city of Hodeidah killed a number of children, in what the UN children’s fund, Unicef, called “one of the deadliest attacks” on minors in the country for years.

“The United Nations has verified the killing of several children in an attack … in the coastal city of Hodeidah in western Yemen,” Unicef said in a statement on 2 April.

“Many children are reported missing as the injured and killed are still being pulled out from the rubble,” it added, amid reports that seven children had been killed.

Guterres told reporters that in addition to the $2bn already committed, multiple countries had promised more donations in the coming months, leaving him “optimistic that we will be able to reach the level that corresponds to the needs”.

Asked if he saw a contradiction in the Saudi stance towards Yemen, Guterres said a country’s humanitarian commitments and military actions should be kept separate.

“We all know that there is a war. We all know who the parties [are] to the war but the two things need to be seen separately,” the UN chief told reporters.

“Independent of the fact that there is a war, there are humanitarian obligations that are assumed by countries,” he said.

“The countries that are also party to the conflict were party to these international efforts to support the people of Yemen.”

Last year’s Yemen appeal for $2.5bn was 73% funded, but the needs have intensified in a country battered since 2015 by a Saudi-led military offensive aimed at repelling Iran-backed Houthi rebels who control the capital.

The UN has said that three-quarters of Yemen’s population – about 22 million people – need some form of aid.

Saudi Arabia and its allies have repeatedly been accused of hitting civilians targets, including hospitals and markets, in their three-year campaign against the Houthis.

Guterres underscored that the only way to ensure that Yemen donor conferences do not continue year after year is for the sides to negotiate a peace deal.

“There was never a humanitarian solution for any humanitarian crisis,” he said. “The solution has always been political.”

The UN’s Yemen envoy, Martin Griffiths, has recently visited Riyadh and Sana’a in hopes of revitalising sputtering peace talks.

“I believe there is an opportunity and that opportunity must be seized,” Guterres said, explaining that Griffiths was “encouraged” by his trip and sees a window for further talks.

According to the UN, 8.4 million people are on the verge of famine in Yemen, where food imports are essential to sustain the population.

The Saudi-led coalition shut down the country’s land, sea and air borders last year in response to a missile attack by the Houthis that was intercepted near Riyadh.

While the coalition has eased the blockade, restrictions on deliveries persist.

“Humanitarians must be able to reach the people who need help the most, without conditions,” Guterres said.

“All ports must remain open to humanitarian and commercial cargo, the medicines, food and the fuel needed to deliver them,” he added, emphasising the need for unrestricted access to the country as well as within it.</s>Baku. 6 June. REPORT.AZ/ Saudi Arabia's General Authority of Civil Aviation (GACA) has revoked the license of Qatar Airways and ordered its offices to be closed within 48 hours.

Notably, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, Maldives and Mauritius have broken diplomatic relations with Qatar, over what they say is the country's support of terrorism and destabilizing.

The conflict between Qatar and its neighbors occurred one week after the Arab Islamic American Summit in Riyadh, when the Qatari news agency posted a speech on behalf of the country's emir in support of building relations with Iran.

At the summit, Saudi Arabia on behalf of all the guests condemned Iran for its hostile policies and threatened with an adequate response. Later, the official representative of the Qatari Foreign Ministry said that the agency's site was hacked, and the speech on behalf of the emir was published by hackers and has nothing to do with the Qatari leader.

However, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Bahrain considered this refutation to be unconvincing.</s>Saudi Arabia’s 32-year-old Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is touring the West seeking to buy arms and encourage investment. Amid rising opposition to Saudi-generated carnage in Yemen, the Trump administration is seeking to sell nuclear reactors to Riyadh — even as it complains about Iran’s presumed nuclear ambitions.

The de facto ruler of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman presides over a virulently intolerant authoritarian theocracy. Yet his modest social innovations — most notably opening cinemas and allowing women to drive — have created the image of a Western modernizer.

For decades the Saudi royals enforced the Wahhabist clergy’s fundamentalist interpretation of Islam in return for the latter urging obedience to the Saudi state. Hence ruling princes mixing private libertinism with public piety, treating women as inferior, prohibiting non-Muslim faiths, and deploying the mutawa, or religious police. As well as providing large-scale subsidies to spread Wahhabism abroad.

While undermining virtually every Western value and interest, the doddering monarchy deployed oil and money to make U.S. friends. In January 2015 Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, now 81, became king.

Within two years he installed his favorite son, Mohammad bin Salman, as crown prince. Mohammed bin Salman has crushed any potential opposition. So far his rule — his father formally remains king — is the good, the bad and the ugly.

The good is social reform. Mohammed bin Salman has reduced the power of the religious police, ended some restrictions on women, including on driving and otherwise begun to moderate social strictures.

The bad is domestic political and religious repression. The State Department’s 57-page human rights report cited “citizen’s lack of the ability and legal means to choose their government; restrictions on universal rights, such as freedom of expression, including on the internet, and the freedoms of assembly, association, movement, and religion; and pervasive gender discrimination and lack of equal rights that affected most aspects of women’s lives.”

Those who oppose the regime feel the lash, literally. Raif Badawi, a dissident blogger who in 2014 was sentenced to ten years imprisonment and 1000 lashes.

In January the founders of the Union for Human Rights, Abdullah al-Attawi and Mohammed al-Otaibi, were sentenced to seven years and fourteen years, respectively, in prison. Observed Amnesty International, “Just like his predecessors, the Crown Prince seems determined to crush the Kingdom’s human rights movement.”

Last fall Mohammed bin Salman even turned the Ritz-Carlton hotel into a prison and arrested a host of leading Saudis. The price of their freedom was to sign over significant portions of their assets.

Nor does being outside of the country insulate one from the tender mercies of Saudi “justice.” The Kingdom kidnapped at least three dissident princes living outside of Saudi Arabia.

Nor is there any religious liberty in KSA. Explained the State Department: “Freedom of religion is not provided under the law and the government does not recognize the freedom to practice publicly any non-Muslim religion.”

The ugly is most worrisome for the rest of the world. Mohammed bin Salman launched a reckless and aggressive campaign to extend Saudi influence in the Middle East, actively destabilizing the region while promoting repression and tyranny.

Riyadh has underwritten Egypt’s al-Sisi dictatorship, more brutal than the Mubarak regime at its worst. When Bahrain’s Sunni monarchy suppressed Shia democracy activists, the KSA sent Saudi troops as back-up.
• Los Angeles is delusional about the Delta tunnels
• Is the California economy headed for another bust?
• California education should be better than last Lebanon’s government is divided along sectarian lines as a result of the devastating civil war. Last year Mohammed bin Salman detained Lebanon’s Prime Minister Saad Hariri and forced the latter to resign, in a bizarre attempt to pressure Hezbollah, a Lebanese Shia force allied with Iran. Under international pressure Harari was released, when he repudiated his resignation.

Riyadh joined with the United Arab Emirates to isolate Qatar for similarly dubious reasons — the latter’s support for political movements and media critical of Riyadh and other Arab regimes. The Kingdom also intervened in Syria, mostly to empower jihadist forces against the al-Assad government, even though they also were hostile to America.

Finally, Mohammed bin Salman is the principal architect of the disastrous attack on Yemen. To reinstall a puppet government in Sanaa the Saudis triggered a human horror. Tehran used the opportunity to bleed Saudi Arabia, which discovered that tens of billions of dollars in sophisticated weapons do not a competent military make.

Washington’s relationship with the KSA is embarrassing, counterproductive and unnecessary. The Kingdom is as much foe as friend of American principles and interests. The U.S. should tell Mohammed bin Salman that in the future it will deal with the Kingdom when convenient, without any pretense of friendship.

Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan. He is author of Foreign Follies: America’s New Global Empire.</s>Saudi Arabia’s 32-year-old Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is touring the West seeking to buy arms and encourage investment. Amid rising opposition to Saudi-generated carnage in Yemen, the Trump administration is seeking to sell nuclear reactors to Riyadh — even as it complains about Iran’s presumed nuclear ambitions.

The de facto ruler of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman presides over a virulently intolerant authoritarian theocracy. Yet his modest social innovations — most notably opening cinemas and allowing women to drive — have created the image of a Western modernizer.

For decades the Saudi royals enforced the Wahhabist clergy’s fundamentalist interpretation of Islam in return for the latter urging obedience to the Saudi state. Hence ruling princes mixing private libertinism with public piety, treating women as inferior, prohibiting non-Muslim faiths, and deploying the mutawa, or religious police. As well as providing large-scale subsidies to spread Wahhabism abroad.

While undermining virtually every Western value and interest, the doddering monarchy deployed oil and money to make U.S. friends. In January 2015 Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, now 81, became king.

Within two years he installed his favorite son, Mohammad bin Salman, as crown prince. Mohammed bin Salman has crushed any potential opposition. So far his rule — his father formally remains king — is the good, the bad and the ugly.

The good is social reform. Mohammed bin Salman has reduced the power of the religious police, ended some restrictions on women, including on driving and otherwise begun to moderate social strictures.

The bad is domestic political and religious repression. The State Department’s 57-page human rights report cited “citizen’s lack of the ability and legal means to choose their government; restrictions on universal rights, such as freedom of expression, including on the internet, and the freedoms of assembly, association, movement, and religion; and pervasive gender discrimination and lack of equal rights that affected most aspects of women’s lives.”

Those who oppose the regime feel the lash, literally. Raif Badawi, a dissident blogger who in 2014 was sentenced to ten years imprisonment and 1000 lashes.

In January the founders of the Union for Human Rights, Abdullah al-Attawi and Mohammed al-Otaibi, were sentenced to seven years and fourteen years, respectively, in prison. Observed Amnesty International, “Just like his predecessors, the Crown Prince seems determined to crush the Kingdom’s human rights movement.”

Last fall Mohammed bin Salman even turned the Ritz-Carlton hotel into a prison and arrested a host of leading Saudis. The price of their freedom was to sign over significant portions of their assets.

Nor does being outside of the country insulate one from the tender mercies of Saudi “justice.” The Kingdom kidnapped at least three dissident princes living outside of Saudi Arabia.

Nor is there any religious liberty in KSA. Explained the State Department: “Freedom of religion is not provided under the law and the government does not recognize the freedom to practice publicly any non-Muslim religion.”

The ugly is most worrisome for the rest of the world. Mohammed bin Salman launched a reckless and aggressive campaign to extend Saudi influence in the Middle East, actively destabilizing the region while promoting repression and tyranny.

Riyadh has underwritten Egypt’s al-Sisi dictatorship, more brutal than the Mubarak regime at its worst. When Bahrain’s Sunni monarchy suppressed Shia democracy activists, the KSA sent Saudi troops as back-up.
• Los Angeles is delusional about the Delta tunnels
• Is the California economy headed for another bust?
• California education should be better than last Lebanon’s government is divided along sectarian lines as a result of the devastating civil war. Last year Mohammed bin Salman detained Lebanon’s Prime Minister Saad Hariri and forced the latter to resign, in a bizarre attempt to pressure Hezbollah, a Lebanese Shia force allied with Iran. Under international pressure Harari was released, when he repudiated his resignation.

Riyadh joined with the United Arab Emirates to isolate Qatar for similarly dubious reasons — the latter’s support for political movements and media critical of Riyadh and other Arab regimes. The Kingdom also intervened in Syria, mostly to empower jihadist forces against the al-Assad government, even though they also were hostile to America.

Finally, Mohammed bin Salman is the principal architect of the disastrous attack on Yemen. To reinstall a puppet government in Sanaa the Saudis triggered a human horror. Tehran used the opportunity to bleed Saudi Arabia, which discovered that tens of billions of dollars in sophisticated weapons do not a competent military make.

Washington’s relationship with the KSA is embarrassing, counterproductive and unnecessary. The Kingdom is as much foe as friend of American principles and interests. The U.S. should tell Mohammed bin Salman that in the future it will deal with the Kingdom when convenient, without any pretense of friendship.

Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan. He is author of Foreign Follies: America’s New Global Empire.</s>Saudi Arabia’s 32-year-old Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is touring the West seeking to buy arms and encourage investment. Amid rising opposition to Saudi-generated carnage in Yemen, the Trump administration is seeking to sell nuclear reactors to Riyadh — even as it complains about Iran’s presumed nuclear ambitions.

The de facto ruler of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman presides over a virulently intolerant authoritarian theocracy. Yet his modest social innovations — most notably opening cinemas and allowing women to drive — have created the image of a Western modernizer.

For decades the Saudi royals enforced the Wahhabist clergy’s fundamentalist interpretation of Islam in return for the latter urging obedience to the Saudi state. Hence ruling princes mixing private libertinism with public piety, treating women as inferior, prohibiting non-Muslim faiths, and deploying the mutawa, or religious police. As well as providing large-scale subsidies to spread Wahhabism abroad.

While undermining virtually every Western value and interest, the doddering monarchy deployed oil and money to make U.S. friends. In January 2015 Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, now 81, became king.

Within two years he installed his favorite son, Mohammad bin Salman, as crown prince. Mohammed bin Salman has crushed any potential opposition. So far his rule — his father formally remains king — is the good, the bad and the ugly.

The good is social reform. Mohammed bin Salman has reduced the power of the religious police, ended some restrictions on women, including on driving and otherwise begun to moderate social strictures.

The bad is domestic political and religious repression. The State Department’s 57-page human rights report cited “citizen’s lack of the ability and legal means to choose their government; restrictions on universal rights, such as freedom of expression, including on the internet, and the freedoms of assembly, association, movement, and religion; and pervasive gender discrimination and lack of equal rights that affected most aspects of women’s lives.”

Those who oppose the regime feel the lash, literally. Raif Badawi, a dissident blogger who in 2014 was sentenced to ten years imprisonment and 1000 lashes.

In January the founders of the Union for Human Rights, Abdullah al-Attawi and Mohammed al-Otaibi, were sentenced to seven years and fourteen years, respectively, in prison. Observed Amnesty International, “Just like his predecessors, the Crown Prince seems determined to crush the Kingdom’s human rights movement.”

Last fall Mohammed bin Salman even turned the Ritz-Carlton hotel into a prison and arrested a host of leading Saudis. The price of their freedom was to sign over significant portions of their assets.

Nor does being outside of the country insulate one from the tender mercies of Saudi “justice.” The Kingdom kidnapped at least three dissident princes living outside of Saudi Arabia.

Nor is there any religious liberty in KSA. Explained the State Department: “Freedom of religion is not provided under the law and the government does not recognize the freedom to practice publicly any non-Muslim religion.”

The ugly is most worrisome for the rest of the world. Mohammed bin Salman launched a reckless and aggressive campaign to extend Saudi influence in the Middle East, actively destabilizing the region while promoting repression and tyranny.

Riyadh has underwritten Egypt’s al-Sisi dictatorship, more brutal than the Mubarak regime at its worst. When Bahrain’s Sunni monarchy suppressed Shia democracy activists, the KSA sent Saudi troops as back-up.
• Los Angeles is delusional about the Delta tunnels
• Is the California economy headed for another bust?
• California education should be better than last Lebanon’s government is divided along sectarian lines as a result of the devastating civil war. Last year Mohammed bin Salman detained Lebanon’s Prime Minister Saad Hariri and forced the latter to resign, in a bizarre attempt to pressure Hezbollah, a Lebanese Shia force allied with Iran. Under international pressure Harari was released, when he repudiated his resignation.

Riyadh joined with the United Arab Emirates to isolate Qatar for similarly dubious reasons — the latter’s support for political movements and media critical of Riyadh and other Arab regimes. The Kingdom also intervened in Syria, mostly to empower jihadist forces against the al-Assad government, even though they also were hostile to America.

Finally, Mohammed bin Salman is the principal architect of the disastrous attack on Yemen. To reinstall a puppet government in Sanaa the Saudis triggered a human horror. Tehran used the opportunity to bleed Saudi Arabia, which discovered that tens of billions of dollars in sophisticated weapons do not a competent military make.

Washington’s relationship with the KSA is embarrassing, counterproductive and unnecessary. The Kingdom is as much foe as friend of American principles and interests. The U.S. should tell Mohammed bin Salman that in the future it will deal with the Kingdom when convenient, without any pretense of friendship.

Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan. He is author of Foreign Follies: America’s New Global Empire.
At a United Nations donor conference nations pledge US$2 billion in aid for Yemen, with almost half coming from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.