HOUTHI REBELS STEP UP ATTACKS AGAINST SAUDI ARABIA

Bottom Line Up Front:

Since April, Houthi rebels have conducted at least ten separate missile or drone strikes on Saudi targets, including airports, oil pipelines, and other energy infrastructure.

Despite boasting the world’s third largest military budget, the Saudis’ Patriot missile-defense system has performed inconsistently in the face of mounting Houthi attacks.

Boko Haram in Buhari’s speeches in 2015 and 2019 [Data and content analysis]

Presidential inaugural speeches give heads of states with a periodic opportunity to renew their social contract with their people. Carefully crafted and pored upon for, perhaps, weeks before their delivery, such political rhetoric are expected to leave sweet tastes in the mouth of their audience. Quotable quotes, take-away promises, renewal of hope, paradigm shifts and critical data that support government’s renewed zeal are the usual components of such epoch-making speeches. Some of these were not well-pronounced in President Muhammadu Buhari’s speech in 2019.

The US Should Designate Muslim Brotherhood a Terrorist Organization

The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, is a pro-jihad, Islamist movement that has branches throughout the world and seeks to implement Islamic sharia under a global caliphate. Terrorism is only one of the methods the Brotherhood employs, and among its, goals, “democratization” has never been seen as one of them.

THE U.S.-IRAN CRISIS

The U.S. and Iran are close to a conflict that would have no clear end and could quickly spread throughout the Middle East and beyond.

Iran has acquired leverage by building proxies and allies into politico-military forces, arming them with short-range missiles, rockets, and other weaponry.

UK: A Clash of Educations

While Britons are striving to promote British values, those increasingly appear not to be the values everyone here wants.

The No Outsiders curriculum… teaches acceptance of people different from oneself, which is what brings pupils into contact with mutual respect for Christians, Muslims and Jews, the disabled, gays and everyone who might be considered “other”. “It should make absolutely clear that no group should be left out….”

Coastal breakdown in Syria creates opportunities for Russia

As the Assad regime claws territory back across Syria from rebel and Islamist forces, it has had to mortgage its monopoly over the use of force to paramilitary groups to overcome its openly acknowledged manpower shortages. It has occasionally called on these militias to augment the army’s fighting capacity, but more often than not it has directed them to protect, and in some cases even police, areas away from the frontlines. This has been particularly true in Tartous and Latakia. In recent months, the loyalist militias tasked with providing security in these coastal areas, some connected directly to the president’s family, have challenged the regime’s primacy, prompting external intervention. The growing power of these groups and the response of Bashar al-Assad’s foreign backers illustrates how local skirmishes over smuggling routes can have much broader geopolitical implications as Russia gains ground at the expense of both the regime and Iran.