Al Qaeda-Linked Militants In Yemen Fire Rocket Towards U.S. Embassy, Say Revenge For Drone Strike
Source: REUTERS
SANAA (Reuters) - An al Qaeda splinter group launched a rocket attack on the U.S. embassy in Sanaa on Saturday, injuring several guards, to retaliate for what it said on social media was a U.S. drone strike in a northern province the day before.
The rocket landed 200 meters from the heavily fortified embassy, which lies in a compound surrounded by high walls, hitting members of the Yemeni special police force who guard the site. At least two were injured, police said.
The attacker fired the rocket from a M72 light anti-tank weapon from a car before speeding away, a police source told Reuters.
Several hours after the attack, Ansar al-Sharia, an affiliate of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), said on its Twitter account it had targeted the embassy with a rocket, injuring several guards and damaging a vehicle.
Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/rocket-fired-yemeni-special-police-guarding-u-embassy-160028450.html
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TwilightGardener
(46,416 posts)
GitRDun
(1,846 posts)
marble falls
(57,137 posts)
ColesCountyDem
(6,943 posts)
ConservativeDemocrat
(2,720 posts)Seriously. We left Afghanistan. We had wound down much of our Middle East presence. It didn't help.
This al Qae'ida splinter group may still be able to fire off a rocket or two, but that's peanuts in comparison to what they were doing prior to us ensuring that there was a consequence to their belligerence.
Counter-terrorism is more like police-work than big grandiose wars which have identifiable beginnings and ends. But it's also nowhere near the same level of violence either.
- C.D. Proud Member of the Reality Based Community
ColesCountyDem
(6,943 posts)Cruise missiles and air strikes in Afghanistan AND Iraq under Clinton, coming hard on the heels of Bush the Smarter's Iraq War, a/k/a 'Desert Storm'. Before that, we were intervening by arming the mujahadeen In Afghanistan, who became al Qaeda.
Again, when did we try 'non-intervention'?
ConservativeDemocrat
(2,720 posts)When is the last time you heard about an airstrike in Trinidad and Tobago? Here's the answer, in case you're too deep in the partisan weeds to understand it: never.
This is because there aren't groups from there that try to murder people for political purposes.
We sent in cruise missiles and air strikes into Afghanistan's Taliban training bases because they were attacking us.
We attacked Iraq in Desert Storm because Iraq invaded Kuwait.
When people don't do that kind of shit, we don't feel the need to return back to them a consequence for doing so.
And when we don't hand out consequences, such as what happened in Rwanda, people around the globe ask America why not?
Furthermore, you are utterly, laughably, wrong when you say that we were "the mujahadeen in Afghanistan, who became al Qaeda". Those were two entirely different groups. The northern alliance were made of completely different sorts of tribal people, while most of al Qae'ida are Pushtun who came from Pakistani Madrasas.
- C.D. Proud Member of the Reality Based Community
George II
(67,782 posts)ColesCountyDem
(6,943 posts)Unless you are better informed about them than Zbigniew Brzezinski and Robert Gates, then you are wrong. Both gentlemen have been very candid about the CIA organizing and supporting bin Laden. You might want to try reading 'Sleeping With The Devil', before next pontificating to us mere mortals about the mujahadeen-alQaeda connection.
ConservativeDemocrat
(2,720 posts)...but hell, let me make a small attempt anyway. In the quote you showed, Zbigniew Brzezinski did not talk about the "Taliban". He talked about the US funding the Mujaheed.
"Mujaheed/mujahid" just means "one who does jihad" - if you 'jahaada' (do jihad) from the root j/h/d, you are mujahid, a jihadi; a 'striver'.
It is as general as you can get if you want to talk about someone motivated in some sense by Islam who is going to undertake some action or conflict, possibly by arms, to achieve those ends.
Whenever people talk about "The mujahid" being funded by the US turning into The Taliban (which Talib?), it is deeply infuriating and amusing.
Are they referring to The Northern Alliance? Sheikh Ahmad Massoud's (mostly Tajiki) guys?
Hell yeah the US funded them. We'd do it again. They were straight ballin. Their leader was a religiously respectful, English and French fluent speaking wordly man. He was one of the best hopes for Afghanistan.
Or maybe they mean Gulbuddin Hekmatyar?
Or maybe Jalaluddin Haqqani? This here is about the best argument you got - we supported the Pakistanis, and they supported him, so you could say that "we did", kind of in the same way that "the US supports" drug-dealers because some small percent of welfare money get spent each month on illegal drugs, and we know that.
Oh, and then when they say "Taliban", are they referring to those 'students' who fight for the Taliban in their late teens and early 20s now?
Because that sort of complicates the timeline of them being the same Taliban, as Pashto Afghans and not NWFP Pakistanis speaking Urdu who fought the Northern Alliance in the Afghan Civil War of the 90s - - - you know, before they fucking existed.
There are so many problems with the masturbatory narrative of "AMERIKKAAA FUNDED THE TURRRISTS!!!11" it's not even funny, but the defining feature is a bunch of hyper-partisans wanting so desperately to opine that the single most effective counterintelligence paramilitary operation in modern history was actually evil (because Amerikkka), that they entirely conflate different racial, ethnic, linguistic, and political groups into the same "thing", just so that any distinction or incredibly important nuance goes away.
I mean - - -they're all brown Muslims wearing flipflops with RPGs, right? So they must be the same. Sadly, this is what many on the hard left actually believe.
Same thing is happening with the appraisal of the Iraqi Kurdistan issue, wherein they've apparently sometimes decided that the PKK and regional government of Iraqi Kurdistan are one and the same, because both employ "Peshmerga" for their battles.
No they very much are not
"Peshmerga" - -what a glamorous, exotic name for the fighters?
pêş-merg; "before death" - - confronting death.
(c.f. Sanskrit: paśya mrtyú - 'look/face' 'death', -pasa- as a root coming from metathesis of spacha*, c.f. Latin 'specere' to look, mod. German spähen 'to peer, to look'; more at English "spy, espy something", mortal, mortality; Latin 'mortalis' 'subject to death', Sanskrit mrtih, Old Persian 'martiyh')
It just means "the ones who behold/see death" in Kurdish, and the Kurds happen to be Indo-Iranian kin in the Indo-European family, instead of being Arabs with some strange Semitic grammar.
It's as general as you can get for a 'soldier' and still be talking specifically about soldiers who happen to be Kurdish.
The PKK are not people the US is arming, and they're very much also "peshmerga".
- C.D. Proud Member of the Reality Based Community
/ (much of this is info cribbed from the internet)
kickysnana
(3,908 posts)It was outlined on a conservative groups blog for years for all to see.
Nobody ever really conquered Iraq or Afghanistan and you sure couldn't do it from arms length like we tried to do. The original crowd here knew that and that this is what the end game would be way back then. All we did was create hundreds of thousands of new freedom fighters, er terrorists who have reason to hate our guts and want revenge bankrolled by our enemy, er ally Saudi Arabia.
Stealing oil, enriching the govt contractors while destroying the middle class, decimating other countries is bad for America far into the foreseeable future.
Your "reality" sits smack dab in the lala land they would like us to believe. You have a lot of research to do before their smoke and mirrors clear and you reach reality. When enough people reach reality and throw the bums out then we can maybe save ourselves and the world.
BTW Pres Obama is right of Eisenhower, one great American, the former one great speaker.
Scootaloo
(25,699 posts)We've been tangled up in the middle east since the Truman administration and have been poking around in there since Theodore Roosevelt. There has never in modern history been a moment of US "Non-intervention" in the Middle East / Western Asia.
But I guess i can't blame a conservative for living in an ignorant dreamland. it's the only way to preserve that philosophy.
ColesCountyDem
(6,943 posts)If CD is a member of the "reality based community", that 'reality' must be an alternate one.
Scootaloo
(25,699 posts)Rapture is kinda the community i imagine his reality is based in...
ConservativeDemocrat
(2,720 posts)...but really, I more feel sorry for you.
Let me give you the exact same advice that I just gave a Republican screamer on Discussionist: get out of the house, put down the keyboard, smell some roses, maybe get a girlfriend, and try to realize that there is more to life than pushing discredited conspiracy theories on a website where no one cares anyway.
- C.D. Proud Member of the Reality Based Community
quadrature
(2,049 posts)Libya --> Mali --> general unrest in the area
Libya --> Syria
happyslug
(14,779 posts)The M72, a US made Anti Tank Rocket COULD be fired at that range, but that is NOT its ideal range. THe M72 was designed to give every Soldier the ability to take out a tank if he had to, but at ranges much less then 200 METERS.
Even Wikipedia gives its range as 200 meters or less.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M72_LAW
Thus this rocker had to be fired way beyond its range to land 200 meters SHORT of the Embassy. Something was hit and caused injuries. Given that the M72 fires a HEAT (High Explosive Anti Tank) round, it may have been used against a vehicle or a building the the people injured were caused by what the round blew up, as opposed to the explosive in the round.
HEAT rounds are lously anti-personal rounds, through Wikipedia has reported the US has produced M72s with High Explosive (HE) rounds as opposed to HEAT rounds. Such High Explosive (HE) rounds are less effective against armor or buildings but more effective on troops in the open.
The M72 was supposed to be replaced in the 1990s by more powerful "Light" Anti-tank rockets. Technically they were, but in the recent wars in Iran and Afghanistan the LAW became the preferred weapon for it was much lighter then the weapons that "Replaced" it AND every bit as effective against people the US was fighting (i.e NOT the Soviet Red Army Tanks of the 1980s, instead the US was fighting guerrillas who use little or no armor). Thus, like other Vietnam War era Weapons that were found to be better suited to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (The 106 mm recoilless rifle instead of its replacement the TOW Anti-tank system, and the 90 mm Recoilless rifle instead of its replacement the M47 Dragon Anti tank Missile and the M47 Dragon's Replacement the Javelin Anti Tank Missile).
Another weapon of note in both conflicts was the Russian RPG, Rocket Propelled Grenades. RPGs were NOT used by the US, but became the most feared weapon of the Guerrillas.
The Dragon, Javelin and Tow were found to be to specialized for the combat going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the older, less specialized weapons were preferred. Note, no one called the older systems BETTER anti-tank weapons then the new weapons, but given the lack of tanks in both conflicts such specialized weapons were NOT needed.
In fact, in many ways, the US Army that went into Iraq was ideal for the two weeks of fighting before the fall of Baghdad, but much less effective in the subsequent occupation and guerilla wars. Till the 1990s several National Guard Divisions were kept as traditional leg infantry so they could participate in any armor war that NATO fought with the Soviet Union AND also do occupation and anti-Guerilla war activities when and if NATO forces forced the Soviet Red Army back to Russia. In the 1990s my old National Guard Division, the Pennsylvania 28th Division, was converted from such a leg infantry to an Armor Division for it was decided leg infantry would not be needed in any future war. That was so true, when my old Artillery Unit was called into Service in Iraq, they were shipped in Iraq less Artillery and tanks and used as Military Police to guard the supply convoys (Which would have been one of their functions when they were leg infantry in the 1980s).
Don't worry, the Army is again saying its mission is to win the next armor clash, thus we must improve our tanks and other armored vehicles and ignore weapons that may be helpful against guerillas.
