World War III Warning Thread - Weeks of 1/9/19- 1/21/19

[danielboon]

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-y...-idUSKCN1P40N9

World News January 9, 2019 / 11:23 PM / Updated an hour ago

Yemen's Houthi drones strike government military parade, several killed

2 Min Read

ADEN (Reuters) - Houthi drones on Thursday attacked a Yemeni government military parade in Lahaj province, killing several people, Saudi and Houthi media reported.

The parade was taking place inside a military base in al-Anad district when a loud explosion rocked the area, eyewitnesses said, adding high-ranked officials including Yemen’s deputy chief of staff were wounded in the attack.

Saudi-owned Al Arabiya TV said five were killed and several were injured. The Houthi’s Al-Masirah TV said the attack targeted “the leadership of the invaders.”

A military source said the attack targeted the podium where officials were sitting.

It was unclear if military officials were present from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the two Gulf states leading a coalition that intervened in Yemen in 2015 to restore President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi.

The Houthis said in November they were halting drone and missile attacks on Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and their Yemeni allies, but tensions have risen recently over how to implement a U.N.-sponsored peace deal.

The Iranian-aligned Houthis and the Saudi-backed government agreed to a ceasefire in the strategic port city of Hodeidah and to withdraw forces at peace talks in Sweden in December following months of diplomacy and Western pressure to end the nearly four-year-old war that has killed tens of thousands of people.

But its implementation has stalled as the agreement did not spell out who would control Hodeidah city after the troop withdrawal.

Reporting By Mohammed Ghobari and Aziz El Yaakoubi; Editing by Toby Chopra

[danielboon]

ELINT News Retweeted

*Walter Bloomberg
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@DeItaOne
1h1 hour ago
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PARAGUAY PRESIDENT ABDO SAYS CLOSING EMBASSY IN VENEZUELA, WITHDRAWING DIPLOMATS IMMEDIATELY

[danielboon]

ELINT News Retweeted


AFP Beirut
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@AFP_Beirut
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#BREAKING
US seeks to 'expel every last Iranian boot' in Syria: Pompeo
@AFP

[danielboon]

EndGameWW3 Retweeted

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8h8 hours ago
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UPDATE: Cargo plane with 10 people onboard crashes near Karaj, central #IranIntelSky
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‏ @Intel_sky
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⚠️KEEP YOUR EYES �� on Strait of Hormuz and Bab-el-Mandeb.IntelSky
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‏ @Intel_sky
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I will not say that there are chances but there are facts of great military mobilization in the region and the goal is Iran and Yemen. What would you expect if they will react? From the 11th of February, we are in front of a big event. Save the date

[danielboon]

ELINT News Retweeted


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Ukrainian military reports increased Russian UAV flights over Donbas, says 8 times such UAVs were identified and jammed https://liveuamap.com/en/2019/14-jan...ed-russian-uav … #Ukraine

[danielboon]

Four killed, 44 wounded in Kabul car bomb attack : officials A car bomb exploded near a heavily fortified foreign compound in Kabul on Monday, killing at least four people and wounding 44, officials said, in the latest attack to rock the Afghan capital.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the huge blast, which shook the city, but it comes as diplomatic efforts to end the 17-year war with the Taliban gather pace.

Militants targeted Green Village, located near a busy road in the east of the city and where some foreign workers are based, said interior ministry spokesman Najib Danish.

At least 10 children were among the wounded, he added.

Until recently some United Nations’ staff had lived and worked at the highly secure compound, but Danish said the area was now largely empty and “only a number of guards” were left.

“Residential houses nearby have sustained heavy damage,” Danish said.

“Special police forces’ units have been deployed to the site to check if there are more attackers.”

The explosion happened in the early evening when traffic is normally heavy.

The last assault on a foreign compound was in late November when a Taliban-claimed vehicle bomb exploded outside the compound of British security firm G4S, killing at least 10 people.

Five G4S employees were among the dead.

That was followed by a suicide and gun attack on a government compound in Kabul on December 24 that killed at least 43 people, making it one of the deadliest assaults on the city last year.

The latest bombing comes as US peace envoy Zalmay Khalilzad visits the region for meetings aimed at bringing an end to the 17-year war in Afghanistan, which by some estimates was the world’s deadliest conflict zone in 2018.

Khalilzad, who met Taliban representatives last month in Abu Dhabi, is travelling to Afghanistan as well as China, India and Pakistan on the trip lasting through January 21.

The leaking of US President Donald Trump’s plan to slash troop numbers in Afghanistan, however, has threatened to derail those efforts.

The recent flurry of activity to get the Taliban to the negotiating table has caused disquiet in Afghanistan, with the government feeling sidelined from the discussions.

The Taliban has repeatedly refused to talk to Kabul, which it sees as a US puppet and ineffective.https://www.24matins.uk/topnews/asia...ficials-134609

[danielboon]

Vietnam risks Beijing’s ire as it uses US freedom of navigation exercise to stake its claim in South China Sea Hanoi typically performs a balancing act in its relations with Beijing and Washington, but opportunity presented by row over USS McCampbell was too good to miss
PUBLISHED : Monday, 14 January, 2019, 2:04am
UPDATED : Monday, 14 January, 2019, 9:57am As China and the United States continue to wrestle over trade disputes and geopolitics, Vietnam is performing a balancing act in the stormy South China Sea as it seeks to maintain its strong ties with Washington while not upsetting Beijing, experts said.


Earlier this week, Hanoi used the latest row over a US freedom of navigation operation in the disputed waterway to not only show its support for its Western ally but also reaffirm its territorial claims there.

“Vietnam has sufficient legal grounds and historical evidence testifying to its sovereignty over the Hoàng Sa [Paracel] and Truong Sa [Spratly] archipelagoes in conformity with international law,” foreign ministry spokeswoman Le Thi Thu Hang said on Wednesday.Derek Grossman, a senior defence analyst at Rand Corporation, said that while the statement was fairly typical of the way Vietnam tended to align itself with Washington on issues like freedom of navigation, its timing was surprising given the current high levels of tension between the US and China.

“The growing closeness of US-Vietnam defence ties is remarkable as Hanoi typically likes to remain below the radar to avoid unnecessarily antagonising Beijing,” he said.

US warship sails near disputed Paracels in South China Sea
Last Monday, Beijing slammed Washington after the USS McCampbell, a guided missile destroyer, sailed near the disputed Paracel Islands, which are claimed not only by Vietnam, but also mainland China and Taiwan.

Foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang told a regular briefing that Beijing had issued “stern representations” to Washington as a result of the US operation, which, he said, violated China’s law.

US Pacific Fleet spokeswoman Rachel McMarr said in a statement that the freedom of navigation operation, which saw the McCampbell sail within 12 nautical miles of the Paracel chain, was intended to “challenge excessive maritime claims”.Collin Koh, a maritime security specialist at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, said that while Hanoi’s support for the US freedom of navigation exercise came as no surprise, it was influenced by the fact that it took place close to islands it claims.

“Vietnam’s response to exercises in the Spratlys, for example, tend to be more muted, in part because the disputes [over them] are multilateral and Hanoi doesn’t want to get involved in a complicated situation.”

The Spratly Islands are claimed by Vietnam, China, the Philippines and Malaysia.

US Admiral John Richardson to hold talks with China’s top military leaders
While Hanoi had used the McCampbell incident to restate its claims in the South China Sea, it did not want to antagonise or upset China, its largest trading partner, said Carl Thayer, emeritus professor at the University of New South Wales and an expert on the Vietnam.

Hanoi wanted to remain “equidistant in its relations with the major powers”, he said.A recent study by the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore found that among Southeast Asian nations, Vietnam was the biggest supporter of US power in the region.

Of the 1,000 academics, analysts and other experts polled, more than half of the respondents from Vietnam expressed either “strong” or “some” confidence in the US as a strategic partner and provider of regional security.

On Tuesday, Washington’s ambassador to Vietnam Daniel Kritenbrink met Vietnam’s deputy prime minister Pham Binh Minh and Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh to discuss trade, diplomacy and security cooperation.

He said the US hoped to strengthen collaboration on freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/dipl...dom-navigation

[Green Man]

Pentagon Officials Fear Bolton’s Actions Increase Risk of Clash With Iran

At the direction of its leader, John R. Bolton, the National Security Council asked the Pentagon last year to provide military options to strike Iran after militants hit an empty American lot in Baghdad.

By Eric Schmitt and Mark Landler NYT

• Jan. 13, 2019

WASHINGTON — Senior Pentagon officials are voicing deepening fears that President Trump’s hawkish national security adviser, John R. Bolton, could precipitate a conflict with Iran at a time when Mr. Trump is losing leverage in the Middle East by pulling out American troops.

At Mr. Bolton’s direction, the National Security Council asked the Pentagon last year to provide the White House with military options to strike Iran, Defense Department and senior American officials said on Sunday.

The request, which alarmed then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and other Pentagon officials, came after Iranian-backed militants fired three mortars or rockets into an empty lot on the grounds of the United States Embassy in Baghdad in September.

In response to Mr. Bolton’s request, which The Wall Street Journal first reported, the Pentagon offered some general options, including a cross-border airstrike on an Iranian military facility that would have been mostly symbolic. But Mr. Mattis and other military leaders adamantly opposed retaliating, arguing that the attack was insignificant — a position that ultimately won out, these officials said.

Such a strike could have caused an armed conflict and could have prompted Iraq to order the United States to leave the country, said a senior American official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal policy deliberations.

Since Mr. Bolton took over from H.R. McMaster in April, he has intensified the administration’s policy of isolating and pressuring Iran — reflecting an animus against Iran’s leaders that dates back to his days as an official in the George W. Bush administration. As a private citizen, he later called for military strikes on Iran, as well as regime change.

Mr. Bolton has made headway on some issues, like persuading Mr. Trump to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, but has had less success with others, like maintaining an American military presence in northeastern Syria to counter Iranian influence — something Mr. Bolton vowed to do only weeks before the president announced in December that he was pulling out.

In asking for military options, a senior administration official said, Mr. Bolton was merely doing his job as national security adviser. He pointed out that the Iranian-backed militants also targeted the American Consulate in Basra.

“The N.S.C. coordinates policy and provides the president with options to anticipate and respond to a variety of threats,” said a spokesman for the National Security Council, Garrett Marquis.

Mr. Bolton, 70, is not the only Iran hawk in Mr. Trump’s circle of top advisers. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared in a speech at the American University in Cairo last week that “countries increasingly understand that we must confront the ayatollahs, not coddle them.”

Earlier this month, he warned Iran against launching three spacecraft, describing them as a pretext for testing missile technology that is necessary to carry a warhead to the United States and other nations. His statement appeared aimed at building a legal case for diplomatic, military or covert action against the Iranian missile program.
It was surprising because Iran has used these modest space missions, mostly to deploy satellites, since 2005. The senior American official said that the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies disagreed with Mr. Pompeo’s interpretation of the threat posed by the satellite launches.

Speaking on Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation” during a visit to Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, Mr. Pompeo discounted the argument that Mr. Trump’s decision to withdraw 2,000 American troops from Syria in the coming months undercuts Washington’s ability to achieve its other goals in the region.

“That certainly includes in Syria,” he said. “It certainly includes into Iran, if need be.”

But Mr. Pompeo also opposed the idea of an airstrike on Iran after its attack on the embassy, according to a former senior administration official. On Sunday, he declined to comment about The Journal’s report. On each stop of his Middle East trip, Mr. Pompeo, a former Army officer, has spoken of the need to counter Iran, but has not talked of military action.

When Mr. McMaster, then a three-star Army general, took over as national security adviser in early 2017, he ordered a new overall war plan for Iran. Mr. Mattis, who is himself an Iran hawk from his days as a Marine Corps commander in the region, delivered options. But those plans were not for the kind of pinpoint strikes that Mr. Bolton envisioned after the attack on the American Embassy on Sept. 6.

On the Sunday following the attack, the senior American official said, Mr. Bolton’s deputy at the time, Mira Ricardel, convened an emergency meeting of national security aides to Mr. Trump, called a deputies committee meeting, and asked for retaliatory options.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Sunday. On each stop of his Middle East trip, Mr. Pompeo has spoken of the need to counter Iran, but has not talked of military action.

On Sept. 11, the White House said in a statement, “The United States will hold the regime in Tehran accountable for any attack that results in injury to our personnel or damage to United States government facilities. America will respond swiftly and decisively in defense of American lives.”

What happened next illustrates Mr. Bolton’s management style. As the president’s national security adviser, he has largely eliminated the internal policy debates that could air high-level disagreements.

Mr. Bolton does not want to hear opposing views, these officials said, abhors leaks and wants to control everything that flows to the president. But the result is that there is not much consideration of options and, more important, the risk of escalation, according to these people.

The Pentagon declined to comment on Mr. Bolton’s request for military options, saying in a statement, “The Department of Defense is a planning organization and provides the president military options for a variety of threats; routinely reviewing and updating plans and activities to deal with a host of threats, including those posed by Iran, to deter and, if necessary, to respond to aggression.”

A senior administration official said the United States would continue to pursue the withdrawal of Iranian-backed forces from Syria and a political solution in that country. He said the United States was leaving a contingent of American troops at the Al Tanf base in south-central Syria, as a deterrent to Iranian movements in that region.

The past few days have been turbulent for Mr. Bolton. He traveled to Turkey to present a list of conditions for the Syria withdrawal, including a pledge by the Turks not to attack America’s Kurdish allies in Syria. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan rejected that demand and refused to see Mr. Bolton.

On Sunday, Mr. Trump backed up his national security adviser, declaring on Twitter that the United States would “devastate Turkey economically if they hit Kurds.”

With Mr. Pompeo overseeing the nuclear negotiations with North Korea and taking a prominent role on China policy, Mr. Bolton has made Iran the heart of his focus as national security adviser. He scored an early victory when Mr. Trump withdrew from the nuclear deal negotiated by his predecessor, Barack Obama.

Mr. McMaster, backed by Mr. Mattis and former Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson, had talked Mr. Trump out of withdrawing from the deal on multiple occasions. Even Mr. Pompeo tried to salvage the deal with the Europeans in the days before the president’s decision.

In March 2015, when Mr. Obama was negotiating the agreement, Mr. Bolton called for a military strike on Iran, writing in The New York Times that diplomacy would never prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons.

“The inconvenient truth is that only military action like Israel’s 1981 attack on Saddam Hussein’s Osirak reactor in Iraq or its 2007 destruction of a Syrian reactor, designed and built by North Korea, can accomplish what is required,” Mr. Bolton wrote. “Time is terribly short, but a strike can still succeed.”

Before he joined the Trump administration, Mr. Bolton advocated “the overthrow of the mullahs’ regime in Tehran.” Once in office, he told Voice of America that leadership change was “not the objective of the administration.”

The news of Mr. Bolton’s effort to find a way to strike back at Iran comes as evidence is rising that Tehran is considering — or at least threatening — to leave the nuclear agreement.

The chief of Iran’s nuclear program, Ali Akbar Salehi, an M.I.T.-educated physicist who helped negotiate the deal, said on Sunday that Tehran had begun “preliminary activities for designing” a process for enrichment of uranium.

The actual enrichment — which he said would be at 20 percent purity, just short of being sufficient to build a nuclear weapon — would violate the accord. Under its provisions, Iran could not enrich uranium at any significant quantities until 2030.

But the Iranian government has been under pressure to respond to Mr. Trump’s withdrawal and the reimposition of sanctions by the United States. European powers have been urging Iran not to leave the deal, fearing it would give the United States an excuse for military action.

Mr. Salehi did not say what the “preliminary activities” were, or give a timetable for action. But he said the country wanted to produce “modern fuel” for its Tehran Research Reactor, a small, aging reactor that was given to it, during the shah’s reign, by the United States.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/13/u...gtype=Homepage

[danielboon]

Gunmen attack 14 Riverside in Nairobi, KenyaGunmen have attacked the 14 Riverside complex in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, causing an unknown number of casualties, officials and witnesses say. Several explosions have been heard.



The attack began at about 3:20 p.m. local time on Tuesday when a group of gunmen arrived in 1 or 2 vehicles at 14 Riverside, which is home to the Dusit Hotel and other businesses.

Heavy gunfire erupted and scores of people were seen fleeing the complex. Loud explosions were also heard and several vehicles were on fire outside one of the buildings.

Several victims were visible in footage shared on social media, but the total number of casualties was not immediately known as the scene remains active. The St John Ambulance service confirmed that it is treating victims.

“Police wishes to confirm that there has been an attack incident along 14 Riverside Drive,” the National Police Service said in a tweet. “The area has since been cordoned off and motorists are advised to use alternative routes to facilitate smooth operations of the Police.”

The al-Qaeda-linked militant group Al-Shabaab has claimed responsibility for the attack. Al-Shabaab is seeking to control Somalia and impose a strict interpretation of Sharia law.https://bnonews.com/index.php/2019/0...ex-in-nairobi/

[danielboon]

Guy Elster
‏Verified account @guyelster
18m18 minutes ago

#BREAKING Eyewitness claims he saw 4 armed men enter and start shooting #Nairobi #KenyaInstant News Alerts
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8m8 minutes ago

#UPDATE: Reports of at least 3 killed and 14 injured in this attack in #Nairobi #KenyaMrRevinsky
‏ @Kyruer
10m10 minutes ago

#Breaking #Kenya
Al-Shabaab (al-Qaeda in Eastern #Africa), claims responsibility for #Nairobi attack