Saudi oil attack: Trump says he has asked for more Iran sanctions
Source: The Guardian
Donald Trump announced his first practical response to the attack on Saudi oil installations when he revealed he has asked the US Treasury to increase sanctions substantially on Iran.
The US Treasury has been mounting an ever more exhaustive regime of sanctions on the country since the US pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal last year in an attempt to force Tehran to reopen and broaden the deal.
It is very unlikely a further package of already heavily deployed sanctions will be the limit of the US response to the attack on Saudi Arabia, and a range of military responses are being proposed to the president, prompting a formal written warning to the US from Tehran that any US attack will lead to a broader Iranian military retaliation.
Trump is aware he needs to build a coalition of domestic and foreign political support for a strike on Iran, and that requires providing evidence that the attack was mounted, or coordinated by Iran, and not by Houthi rebels in Yemen, as Iran claims.
Earlier, the Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, described American claims that Tehran was involved in the devastating attack on Saudi Arabian petroleum facilities as slanderous and simply part of Washington’s continuing campaign to isolate and put pressure on Iran.
In a defiant video address, Rouhani continued to insist the attack had been mounted by Houthi rebels in Yemen, and blamed Saudi Arabia for starting the four-year war there.
How long has the war been going on?
Yemen has been troubled by civil wars for decades, but the current conflict intensified in March 2015 when a Saudi-led coalition intervened on behalf of the internationally recognised government against Houthi rebels aligned with the former president Ali Abdullah Saleh.
The war is widely regarded as having turned a poor country into a humanitarian catastrophe. Riyadh expected its air power, backed by regional coalition including the United Arab Emirates, could defeat the Houthi insurgency in a matter of months.
Instead some reports suggest nearly 100,000 people have died. Others put the death toll much lower, but fighting this year alone has displaced 250,000 people. There are more than 30 active front lines. A total of 80% of the population – more than 24 million people – need assistance and protection, including 10 million who rely on food aid to survive.
What is the cause of the war?
Its roots lie in the Arab spring. Pro-democracy protesters took to the streets in a bid to force the president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, to end his 33-year rule. He responded with economic concessions but refused to resign.
By March 2011, tensions on the streets of the capital city, Sana’a, resulted in protesters dying at the hands of the military.
Following an internationally brokered deal, there was a transfer of power in November to the vice-president, Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi, paving the way for elections in February 2012 – in which he was the only candidate to lead a transitional government. Hadi’s attempts at constitutional and budget reforms were rejected by Houthi rebels from the north.
The Houthis belong to a small branch of Shia Muslims known as Zaydis. They captured the capital, forcing Hadi to flee eventually to Riyadh.
What has happened to the peace process?
The UN brokered an agreement in Stockholm in December 2018 to demilitarise the Red Sea city of Hodeidah, and after five months of tortuous talks a small part of the agreement has been implemented on the ground. The Houthis had promised a two-phase redeployment out of the city, and agreed that an alternative force – poorly defined in the Stockholm agreement – would take over security in the areas they vacated. But talks between the Houthis and the UAE-backed government forces stalled over the details.
Faced by an impasse, the UN sanctioned a unilateral Houthi withdrawal from the three main ports on Yemen’s Red Sea coast – Hodeidah, Ras Issa and Saleef. The Yemeni government described the withdrawal as a sham, saying the Houthis had merely rebadged their fighters as coastguards. They pressed for the resignation of Martin Griffiths, the UN special envoy for Yemen. Not everyone in the Yemen government agreed with this analysis and the foreign minister quit.
No progress has been made on the second phase of redeployment, or the exchange of political prisoners. Griffiths is now trying to secure enough progress in Hodeidah to get off this hook and say the time is ripe for wider political talks on a transitional government to be held in Bonn.
Patrick Wintour, Diplomatic editor
Iran also revealed it had sent an official note to the US through the Swiss embassy in Tehran, saying that Iran would immediately respond to any attack against itself and the scope of response would not be limited to the source of the threat. Tehran, in the note, denied any role in the attack on the Aramco oil facilities.
“While exerting psychological and economic pressure on the Iranian people [through sanctions], they want to impose maximum … pressure on Iran through slander,” Rouhani said of the US, according to the state broadcaster IRIB. “Meanwhile, no one believes these accusations.”
The Iranian president also sought to frame the Saudis as the aggressors in Yemen: “We don’t want conflict in the region … Who started the conflict? Not the Yemenis. It was Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, America, certain European countries and the Zionist regime [Israel] which started the war in this region.”
Rouhani said the Houthis attacked Saudi oil facilities at the weekend as a “warning” after attacks on hospitals, schools and markets in Yemen which have been blamed on the Saudi-led coalition.
The Iranian defence minister, Brig Amir Hatami, also claimed: “In military terms, the Yemenis had carried out a similar operation around two years ago, and had attacked an airport in the United Arab Emirates and fired a missile with a range of 1,200km.”
Rouhani’s video address came ahead of a Saudi defence ministry press conference at which officials said they would provide “material evidence and Iranian weapons proving the Iranian regime’s involvement in the terrorist attack”.
Riyadh has already said preliminary results showed the attack did not come from Yemen, and dismiss as fiction repeated claims by Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen that they fired the drones.
US officials have privately claimed the strikes originated in south-western Iran, and appear to be basing these claims on unexploded ordinance found at two Saudi oil refineries hit in the strike. The officials said they involved cruise missiles and drones, indicating a higher degree of complexity and sophistication than the Houthis are capable of deploying.
Saudi Arabia has welcomed the UN and other international experts to the kingdom to inspect the attack on its two petroleum facilities, Abqaiq and Khurais. The Saudi energy minister admits half of Saudi oil production has been initially knocked out and urged foreign countries to join the investigation into the culprits. Saudi Arabia also announced that it was joining the US-led maritime security force operating in the Gulf.
Tensions between the US and Iran have soared, with Washington dispatching warships to the Gulf, and Tehran resuming higher uranium enrichment.
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So far European countries, as well as Saudi’s closest regional ally the United Arab Emirates, have condemned the attack but are yet to attribute responsibility.
Saudi news agencies reported the UK prime minister, Boris Johnson, rang the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, on Tuesday and “praised the wisdom of the Saudi leadership in dealing with the attacks”. Johnson demanded a firm international stand that such criminal acts should not go unpunished, the official Saudi Press Agency reported.
The crown prince also received a call from the French president, Emmanuel Macron, who reaffirmed his country’s support for the kingdom’s security. Macron also highlighted the need for the global community not to show weakness in the face of these attacks and offered French assistance in the investigation.
There is no sign yet that France and Germany are going to respond to the assaults by pulling out of the nuclear deal signed with Iran in 2015 and abandoned by Trump in May 2018, a withdrawal that has prompted Iranian diplomatic and military reprisals. British cabinet level support for the deal, however, is wavering.
French officials, key mediators between Washington and Tehran, were in Iran to discuss ways to de-escalate the crisis and find means of avoiding US economic sanctions limiting trade between Iran and Europe, a key Iranian grievance.
Saudi, criticised for its role in the war in Yemen and losing support on Capitol Hill, appears determined to try to build an international coalition to mete out some form of punishment to Iran and does not want to be left isolated in the event of a military confrontation with Tehran. The US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, was in Riyadh to discuss the Saudi response to a crisis that has exposed the vulnerability of oil supplies and pushed oil prices upwards.
Privately, senior European politicians still blame the US withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal for triggering the conflict, but cannot justify the Iranian response.
In a sign of Saudi determination to build a multilateral coalition, the new Saudi ambassador to the UK, Prince Khalid bin Bandar Al-Saud, said the drone attacks on the kingdom’s oil installations were a blow to the “whole world” and its economy, not just for Saudi. “It’s almost certainly Iranian backed,” he said. “We are trying not to react too quickly because the last thing we need is more conflict in the region.”
The UAE remains cautious about blaming Tehran directly, as opposed to either Houthi rebel forces in Yemen or surrogate forces in Iraq. It is frustrated by the speed with which the US blamed Iran without first assembling convincing public evidence.
Nevertheless the Houthis warned the UAE that its oil companies and cities “will be among our future targets”.
A Houthi spokesman speaking to the Lebanese al-Mayadeen TV channel said the UAE should officially declare its withdrawal from the war that destroyed Yemen and stop massacres against its people.
“The unofficial announcement of withdrawal from some axes will not prevent us from targeting the UAE oil companies,” he added. The military commander pointed out the targeting came within Yemen’s legitimate right to stop the aggression and massacres of its people by the Saudi-led coalition.
A spokesman for the Yemeni armed forces said: “The deterrent operation targeting Abqaiq and Khurais refineries was carried out with a number of UAE aircraft, which operated on different type of engines.”
Brig Yahya Saree of the Houthis warned in a statement on Monday about foreign companies and workers who were present at facilities that came under attack by the Yemeni army and popular committees, saying “those places are still under our radar and we could target them again at any time”.