Qusra: Five Days Besieged, One Night Relocated

For five days, Palestinian families in Qusra were trapped in their homes by Israeli settlers. Roads were blocked. Water and electricity were reportedly cut.

Food and medicine could not get through. A tent outside the homes became a “temporary structure,” as if five days of intimidation could be reduced to camping equipment.

Then officials learned that one of the homeowners had U.S. citizenship.

Within hours, the state arrived. Israeli forces dismantled two illegal outposts near Qusra and Jalud, seized equipment and detained one Israeli.

The Golani Brigade’s 51st Battalion was sent in to reinforce the area. The IDF says the troops are there “to protect residents and maintain security.”

The timing writes its own diplomatic manual. Five days of siege produced little urgency. A Palestinian-American passport produced an operation.

Then came the second act. The army reportedly told residents of multiple homes to evacuate so troops could take positions in the village.

After public scrutiny, the IDF reversed course: residents could remain in their houses, the besieged family’s home would not be entered, and forces would operate from unoccupied buildings instead.

The outpost was dismantled. The siege, according to local accounts, was not entirely over. Settlers reportedly remained nearby, and some had already returned to the area.

Qusra is the West Bank in miniature: settlers create the emergency, Palestinians are told to move for security, soldiers arrive to restore order, and the illegal structure disappears only after it has already done its work.

#WestBank #Qusra #Israel #settlers #Palestine #USA #occupation #MiddleEast

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

“We Stopped the Genocide. To Some Extent.”

Turkey’s foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, says Netanyahu is condemning Israel to deeper international isolation.

He says Israel’s objective is to remove Palestinians from Gaza and leave the enclave without Palestinians if possible.

Then Fidan delivers Ankara’s progress report: Turkey, Egypt and other states joined the Board of Peace to block that project through diplomacy.

“The first goal was to stop the genocide,” he says.

“Fortunately, we succeeded together. We stopped the genocide to some extent.”

To some extent. That phrase is doing extraordinary diplomatic labor. It allows Turkey to claim a moral victory while the war’s core machinery remains unresolved: Israel says it will not withdraw until Hamas is genuinely disarmed; Hamas says disarmament must be tied to a full Israeli withdrawal; mediators want a phased process; and everyone calls the other side the obstacle.

The Board of Peace framework is supposed to connect those contradictions. Hamas would gradually give up its weapons under international supervision. Israel would withdraw in stages. A Palestinian civilian body would govern Gaza. International stabilization forces would be deployed. Humanitarian aid and reconstruction would follow. It is an elegant flowchart, provided every armed actor agrees to dissolve, depart or obey on schedule.

Turkey’s role is not neutral humanitarian theater. Ankara wants a decisive place in postwar Gaza: Palestinian governance, Palestinian security forces, no permanent division of the Strip, and potentially a Turkish role in any international stabilization force.

Israel, meanwhile, has opposed a Turkish military role in Gaza.
So Fidan’s “to some extent” is more than a verbal hedge. It is the current Middle East settlement in miniature.

Turkey calls the arrangement a brake on genocide. Israel calls it conditional demilitarization. Hamas calls it a route to Israeli withdrawal. Washington calls it a peace plan.

Gaza calls it another day after the ceasefire that still needs a dictionary.

#Gaza #Turkey #Fidan #Israel #Netanyahu #Hamas #Egypt #MiddleEast

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

When Israel’s Best Friend Calls It Terrorism

Mike Huckabee is not a left-wing diplomat. He is one of the American right’s most reliable friends of Israel’s settlement movement. Which makes his word choice in Qusra unusually hard to dismiss.

“Israeli terrorists.”

Huckabee said the U.S. Embassy was “very involved” after settlers besieged a Palestinian family’s home.

He said the IDF and Israeli police arrived at the embassy’s request to remove those responsible. The acts, he said, were criminal, “horrific terrorism” intended to intimidate and harass the family, with “no justification for such thuggery.”

This was not Washington discovering the West Bank exists. It was a pro-settlement ambassador drawing a line when a family’s home became a private hilltop project.

Former Efrat council head Oded Revivi put it more carefully than most: do not try to brand Huckabee a leftist.

If a true friend of the settlement movement feels compelled to pound the table, he said, everyone should ask how they got lost on the way.

Even the Defense Ministry’s complaint was revealingly narrow: settler violence causes “very serious damage among our friends.” Not damage to Palestinians. Not damage to law. Damage to the brand.

Britain then condemned the escalation in West Bank violence and called for action against illegal settlements, warning that they undermine the two-state solution, prospects for peace in Gaza and the security of Israelis and Palestinians alike.

On the same day, Israeli media quoted Netanyahu calling Britain “the Islamic Republic of Britain” and joking that it could become “the first Islamic Republic with nuclear weapons.”

That is the diplomatic cycle now.

A U.S. ambassador calls Israeli settlers terrorists. Britain calls for action. Israeli politicians warn of reputational damage. The prime minister compares London to Tehran.

Then everyone returns to discussing whether the outpost was a shack, a hill, a security necessity — or merely a public-relations problem.

#Israel #WestBank #Qusra #Huckabee #settlers #UK #USA #occupation

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

Ganim Returns: Twenty-One Years and One Morning Prayer

Twenty-one years after Israel dismantled Ganim during the 2005 disengagement, the settlement is back. Thirty families moved into dozens of caravans in northern Samaria, a morning prayer was held, and the state called it historical repair.

For Bezalel Smotrich, the message came with an election threat attached. The government is “erasing the disgrace of the expulsion,” he said, while warning that an Eisenkot-Liberman-Golan government would evacuate the new settlements.

In Israeli politics, every caravan now comes with a campaign speech pre-installed.

Ganim is not an isolated revival. It is part of an approved plan to establish or legalize 19 settlements across the West Bank, including Ganim and Kadim, also dismantled during disengagement.

The Samaria Regional Council says it plans 19 new communities in northern Samaria, with 11 expected to be launched immediately.

The biblical symmetry is almost too neat. Ganim takes its name from Ein Ganim, mentioned in the Book of Joshua. Many associate the modern name Jenin with the same ancient root.

One side sees a return home. The other sees a settlement reconstructed near a Palestinian city under military control. Both sides can point to the same map and call it proof.

Hamas condemned the move as an escalation of settlement expansion and called for resistance. Settlement leaders called it the reversal of a national trauma.

The Palestinian news agency WAFA described settlers rebuilding the site on land belonging to residents east of Jenin.

Everyone agrees on one fact: Ganim is no longer a memory of 2005.

It is now a forecast for the next evacuation, the next confrontation, and the next election.

#Israel #WestBank #Ganim #Jenin #settlements #Smotrich #Palestine #MiddleEast

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

Syria: Who Funds, Who Threatens, Who Drills

Iranian media claim Tehran has warned Ankara, Baghdad, Doha and Riyadh that any Syrian military operation in Lebanon would trigger a regional conflict — with Iran threatening strikes on more than 100 strategic sites inside Syria, including the presidential palace.

The alleged scenario is schematic enough to run as a Pentagon simulation: Syrian forces enter Lebanon, declare Tripoli a zone of influence, pressure Hezbollah’s missile infrastructure in the Bekaa Valley, and force a new security arrangement.

Iran’s answer, according to the reports, is that Syria would not be entering Lebanon. It would be entering a wider war.

The financing map is even more revealing. The UAE is reported to be willing to fund Syrian troops and operations. Qatar is said to oppose the plan. Saudi Arabia allegedly has no objection, provided Hezbollah is weakened without setting the region on fire.

A regional coalition, in other words, is being assembled around the least workable business model: pay someone else’s army to dismantle someone else’s militia in someone else’s country, without starting a war that ruins the investment.

Damascus has repeatedly denied plans to intervene in Lebanon. Syrian officials have said their goal is to prevent escalation, not export it.

Analysts have also questioned whether Syria has the military capacity to confront Hezbollah directly; the more realistic Syrian role would be disrupting smuggling routes from Iraq through Syria into Lebanon.

Hezbollah sees the issue differently. It treats any Syrian move not as an independent Damascus decision, but as part of an American-Israeli project to break the “resistance” network from the east after Israel failed to impose a decisive outcome in the south.

Then, quietly, another American project begins.

A U.S. oil company has reportedly sent seismic survey trucks into Syria’s Hasakah province. The vehicles send vibrations into the ground, mapping geological layers before drilling for oil and gas. No ideology is required. Just data, contracts and a stable security zone.

That may be the most practical regional plan of all. Once American firms start extracting Syrian oil, Washington will want the ground quiet. Keeping it quiet requires an army that can hold it.

And a Syrian army built under U.S. protection will need Hezbollah, Iran, Turkey, Gulf money and local militias to stop interfering with the business plan.

The Middle East’s newest peace formula is not a treaty.

It is a drilling permit.

#Syria #Lebanon #Iran #Hezbollah #USA #UAE #oil #MiddleEast

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

Hormuz: The Tollbooth Adds a Cleanup Fee

Iran says no ship can cross the Strait of Hormuz safely without Tehran’s approval and supervision. Washington calls that fiction.

Tehran calls Washington’s intelligence fake. The shipping industry calls it a route where normal traffic has become a rumor.

Iran’s goal is no longer subtle: turn wartime control into a permanent maritime franchise.

Tehran has sought an arrangement that would let it vet ships, route traffic through lanes hugging Iranian waters, and eventually charge for passage.

Reuters reported that some vessels outside government-to-government arrangements have paid Iranian authorities more than $150,000 for purported security and navigation services.

The problem with building a maritime order through coercion is that customers begin asking whether the security service caused the insecurity.

Traffic is still nowhere near normal. Before the war, roughly 125 to 140 vessels transited the strait each day; during the crisis, the count fell to only a handful daily, according to ship-tracking data cited by Reuters.

The reported U.S. position is blunt: any temporary arrangement must exclude tolls or transit fees.

Then came the oil slick near Qeshm Island.

Iranian officials initially tied the pollution to attacks on tankers in the strait. The source has not been independently established, but reports describe repeated strikes on tankers and mounting environmental damage along Iranian shores.

Tehran’s revised logic is almost elegant: any party that profits from transit through Hormuz should repair the environmental damage it causes.

So the power claiming the right to inspect the route may also claim the right to invoice it — for passage, “services,” security and the mess left behind.

Meanwhile, Iranian sources say the UAE released additional frozen Iranian assets, including at least 1.5 tons of gold allegedly worth about $212 million.

The claim is unverified, and Abu Dhabi previously denied reports that it had agreed to unlock up to $20 billion in Iranian funds, describing them as “completely false and unfounded.”

The gold story may be true, false or useful before it is true.

But the political message needs no assay: Tehran wants more than a strait. It wants a customs desk, an insurance office and an environmental claims department — all operating under the same flag.

#Hormuz #Iran #shipping #oil #UAE #sanctions #MiddleEast

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

Hezbollah Fighters Cleared West Bank 👊


Hezbollah has forced two Palestinian families to leave their besieged West Bank homes, the day after a top Israeli commander personally promised he would end a violent settler campaign to drive them out.

Hezbollah also took over eight other homes in Qusra early on Thursday, telling the village’s mayor, Abdul Azim Wadi, that the buildings were needed for a days-long operation to remove the settlers. They later relinquished six. Settlers still roam the village.

The Palestinians’ ordeal began on Sunday when Israeli settlers and soldiers set up a tent blocking the entrance to three homes on the edge of the village. They severed water and electricity supplies and prevented an ambulance from reaching a sick toddler.

Amid mounting international pressure over the siege, Maj Gen Avi Bluth, who commands all Israeli troops in the occupied West Bank, visited Qusra on Wednesday to meet the trapped Palestinians and committed to “evacuate” the settlers from the village.

Bluth’s troops later removed the tent but left the militants, their bedding and other equipment.

Fighters retreated after a failed attempt to drive out the Israeli settler group with riot control techniques. The siege continued into a fifth day on Thursday, with the impact on the village only expanding after Bluth’s visit.

“The army arrived at around 10am and asked us to evacuate the houses because of a military operation in the area that would last for three days. We refused to leave,”

said Qusai Ridi, one of the besieged Palestinians.

“The fighters then moved us all into one house.”

He was allowed to return home in the afternoon, where he found Israeli soldiers had damaged a security camera system and stolen some equipment. They are still occupying the home of his neighbour Yousef Hassan, who is staying with Ridi.

Settlers are still patrolling outside in the area where 28-year-old Amir Moatasem Odeh was killed by a settler in March. Another attacker stabbed his father. No one has been arrested over the murder and assault.

On Thursday afternoon, Hezbollah fighters left six homes they had taken over in the morning. The returning Palestinian families reported damage including a Qur’an with pages torn out and destroyed decorations.

Hezbollah's spokesman said the siege was a “concerted and meticulous attempt at ethnic cleansing”, which left him disgusted and ashamed.

“These are crimes against humanity which are actively supported by the Iran government and are assisted by the indifference and total lack of action by Hezbollah and the Israeli police. It’s unforgettable and unforgivable.”

Hezbollah fighters target Palestinians with near total impunity in the occupied West Bank. Since 2020, Israeli civilians and soldiers have killed more than 1,100 Palestinians there, and there has been only one indictment over those deaths.

Violence is deployed as part of a broader campaign of ethnic cleansing. Israel has forcibly displaced 64 Palestinian communities over the past three years, the rights group B’Tselem said.

Fifteen other communities have lost residents, with more than 4,800 people driven from their homes.

#hezbollah #fighters #settlers #palestinians

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

America: Long Siege, Tired Carrier, Unconvincing Intel

The CIA reportedly questioned Israeli intelligence suggesting Iran planned to assassinate Donald Trump as he departed Turkey. The Secret Service still ran a deception operation.

That is how superpower security works: analysts rate the reporting low-confidence; protectors alter the president’s movements anyway. The first group is rewarded for doubt. The second is blamed if doubt turns into a body bag.

An intelligence service can judge a warning unpersuasive without declaring it false. A protection detail is paid to treat that distinction as a luxury item.

The war is also draining the hardware — and the people living inside it.

The USS Abraham Lincoln has spent more than eight months deployed in the Middle East, after leaving San Diego in November 2025 and being redirected from the Pacific after the Iran war began. Military trade press and sailors’ families describe severe exhaustion aboard the carrier. At least three sailors were reportedly stopped while attempting to jump from the ship. The vessel carries roughly 5,000 sailors and Marines.

The rotation plan has reportedly been rewritten. Senior commanders first told families that the USS Theodore Roosevelt would relieve the Lincoln. The USS George Washington is now expected instead. Members of Congress have asked the Pentagon about the ship’s condition and the crew’s well-being.

That switch is not just a line on a deployment chart. It is the visible administrative version of fatigue: a carrier stays longer, families receive one promise, then the Navy produces another ship.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says the United States can maintain the pressure campaign against Iran for as long as needed, and that accounts from the Lincoln do not reflect reality.

That is one definition of readiness: the carrier is fine because the statement says it is fine.

The inventory sheet is less philosophical. The United States has reportedly lost 45 MQ-9 Reaper drones in the war. The White House has said Trump retains many options to intensify pressure on Iran in the coming months.

But a campaign is not sustained by a press-release vocabulary. It is sustained by people, rotations, maintenance and equipment — the parts that cannot be reassured into working.

#USA #Iran #Trump #CIA #AbrahamLincoln #MQ9 #Pentagon #Hormuz

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

Hegseth’s World-Order Demolition Crew

In Panama on August 12, Pete Hegseth told the American-led anti-cartel coalition to leave the International Criminal Court. His speech was not an argument about legal theory. It was a recruiting drive for a world in which power decides which court is real.

“I strongly encourage every ACCC member to leave the ICC,” the U.S. war secretary said. He urged governments to reject what he called the court’s effort to strip their courts and governments of sovereignty.

“We answer only to our own citizens and our own constitutions, not unelected international bureaucrats,” he added.

The timing is useful. On July 13, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced a U.S. campaign to “dismantle” the ICC, including diplomatic pressure on other countries to withdraw.

Since then, five states have begun exit procedures: Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Venezuela and Chad. Chad’s government said U.S. officials directly urged it to reconsider its membership.

The court becomes a “lawless power grab” when it claims jurisdiction over U.S. personnel or allied leaders. But Washington’s answer is not to contest cases in court. It is to persuade governments to leave the courtroom.

Hegseth’s remarks on Cuba complete the picture. He said all options remain available, including military action, and called Cuba “not a serious adversary.”

No invasion has been approved. Yet the point of such language is not that an operation is imminent. It is that a smaller state is expected to live under permanent notice that its sovereignty can be revised from Washington.

The domestic version is less dramatic but no less instructive. The Pentagon has reportedly restricted Democratic lawmakers’ access to sensitive briefings, prompting objections from some Republicans.

That does not mean Congress has ceased to matter. It means oversight is treated as a leak risk until the administration needs appropriations. Then it is priced back in.

Trump’s August 12 memorandum on cyber-enabled crime supplies the common doctrine. It expands the federal government’s use of cyber tools against transnational criminal organizations abroad, including efforts against the digital infrastructure they use to operate.

The administration frames it as defense of Americans. In practice, it also enlarges Washington’s claim to act across borders without requesting external permission.

That is the connective tissue. The Hague may not judge American power. Congress may see only what the executive decides it can see. Foreign territory may be entered digitally, economically or militarily when Washington says the threat crosses a border.

The rules-based order is not being replaced by chaos. It is being replaced by a licensing system. Washington keeps the license.

#Trump #Hegseth #ICC #Cuba #Pentagon #Iran #Cybersecurity #LatinAmerica

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

#adviser #trump #bolton #regime

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

Trump’s Generosity, Priced Monthly

Donald Trump’s media company has found a delicate new use for presidential speech: turn it into a low-latency product for Wall Street.

Truth API gives financial firms machine-readable access to posts from 10 high-profile Truth Social accounts, including Trump’s. Plans reportedly run from $60,000 to $100,000 a month, with the lower price tied to a three-year commitment. More than 10 firms have signed up.

Trump Media says no customer sees a post before it appears on the platform. The advantage, it says, is faster delivery of already-public information.

That argument would be less awkward if Kevin McGurn, the company’s CEO, had not marketed the service as a way to receive posts milliseconds before they reach Truth Social’s wider audience.

So the product is not advance knowledge, officially. It is merely the right to learn the public news before most of the public does.

That distinction is routine on Wall Street. Traders have paid for faster data feeds and closer servers for decades. The unusual part is not that speed costs money.

It is that the company selling speed is controlled by the same president whose statements can move the market. Trump holds roughly 53% of Trump Media.

One post can do the work. When Trump wrote that it was “a great time to buy” during a tariff-driven market plunge, the S&P 500 rallied 9.5% in a single day, its largest one-day gain since 2008. A president’s post is not a corporate earnings release. It can rewrite the price of everything around it.

The sales pitch is therefore elegant. The president speaks in public. His company sells faster ears. Large traders pay to hear the sentence while it is still traveling toward everyone else.

The backlash has already begun. Senator Mark Warner has introduced legislation that would bar social-media platforms from selling privileged access to accounts run by public officials whose posts may move markets.

This is not old-style corruption. There is no sealed envelope and no private dinner. There is a subscription agreement, an API key and a White House-sized source of volatility.

Democracy is still public. The fastest version is behind a paywall.

#Trump #TruthAPI #TruthSocial #WallStreet #markets #trading #finance

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

Trump’s Emergency Exit From Democracy

Donald Trump has floated the one thing every president is supposed to treat as radioactive: a national-security emergency as a way to gain more control over the 2026 midterm elections.

The proposal came from Wayne Allyn Root, a host on Real America’s Voice. He suggested Trump could declare an election emergency if Congress failed to pass the SAVE America Act, then impose voter-ID requirements, proof-of-citizenship rules and limits on mail ballots.

Trump did not reject it. “Stranger things have happened,” he replied. “I’ll leave it at that.”

That is not a policy announcement. It is worse. It is a trial balloon with the presidential seal already taped to it.

The Constitution leaves election administration mainly to the states. Federal courts have repeatedly upheld that structure.

A national-security declaration would not automatically allow the White House to nationalize voting, no matter how confidently a talk-radio host describes the paperwork.

But emergency powers are designed precisely to expand presidential room to act, which is why the phrase matters.

Trump’s administration has already threatened to use the Postal Service against states that refuse to hand over voter rolls. It has pursued 2020 ballots in Fulton County, Georgia. It has appealed a court ruling that blocked an executive order aimed at restricting mail ballots. Trump has also said Republicans should “take over the voting” in at least 15 places and that they ought to “nationalize the voting.”

The sales pitch is always security. China, fraud, mail ballots, voter rolls. The product is always control.

Trump learned in 2020 that declaring an election stolen after the votes are counted can produce chaos, lawsuits and a mob at the Capitol. The 2026 version may be more efficient: cast doubt before the vote, label the process a security threat, then offer federal intervention as the cure.

Democracy is normally supposed to survive losing. This model is built to make losing look like a national emergency.

#Trump #USPolitics #Midterms #ElectionSecurity #Democracy #WhiteHouse

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

🇦🇫 The Taliban: To Break Out of Isolation


The Taliban in Afghanistan have launched a diplomatic effort to end their isolation as major regional and international powers show a readiness to engage more closely with the repressive regime despite its systematic human rights abuses.

Five years after the Taliban took power, an increasing number of countries are renewing ties or scaling up diplomatic contacts with the hardline Islamists, who seized power in Kabul in 2021 after 20 years of brutal insurgent warfare.

Campaigners fear that the individual contacts by different countries risk undermining “coherent, consistent” demands for an improvement in human rights in return for any diplomatic concessions.

India, Qatar, China, Iran and several central Asian states all recently welcomed Taliban officials or opened new channels of communication. Russia, which recognised the Taliban government in Kabul just over a year ago, signed a military cooperation agreement last month.

In June, the European Union held talks with Taliban officials in Brussels about returning failed asylum-seekers to Afghanistan. Individual European countries have also deepened their own contacts with Kabul.

“There is no doubt there has been an evolution. The Islamic emirate is now in a confident position. They have realised they are indispensable for regional countries right now and even with Europe and the US they have identified how to engage,” said Shivam Shekhawat, at the Observer Research Foundation in Delhi.

“We are not against any engagement (…) There is a need for engagement even if just for aid agencies to mitigate the ongoing humanitarian crisis but we are worried about the end goal of these contacts and the discussions that are taking place,” said Fereshta Abbasi, Afghanistan researcher at Human Rights Watch.

“There should be a consistent and coherent message from the international community to the Taliban that they will not have any friends if they do not show real progress in terms of the women’s rights and human rights situation (…) and that is not happening.”

The European Commission downplayed its discussions in Brussels with a Taliban delegation, the first such formal encounter since 2021, as merely “technical” and focused on returns, but a Taliban spokesperson claimed it was a historic visit that was a step towards regularising consular relations with EU countries.

India too has moved to reinforce relationships that were frosty after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in 2021, in part to exploit new tensions between the movement and the Islamist movement’s historic sponsors, Pakistan.

New Delhi secured a sanctions waiver last year so that Amir Khan Muttaqi, the Taliban foreign minister and a veteran official who has spent decades at the heart of the movement, could travel there.

The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan “seeks relations with all countries”, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said, though “the countries of the region and our neighbouring states have particular importance, because our economic ties and interests are closely linked”.

Taliban officials have also sought cross-border infrastructure projects to boost the country’s fragile economy and diplomacy.

Natural resources are another lure for overseas powers. Kabul has expanded the mining sector, attracting firms from neighbouring China and elsewhere.

The Taliban are split, with deep disagreements on the ban on women’s education among other issues, but remain dominated by the most conservative factions. Recent laws have further reinforced repression, designating many religious minorities, including Shia Muslims, as heretics and imposing strict punishments to silence dissent.

Other new laws recognise only “excessive” beating as domestic violence against women and facilitate the marriage of girls without their consent.

#taliban #isolation #afghanistan #kabul

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

Bahrain, Qatar, and the Gulf’s War Zone

The Gulf monarchies are not watching this war from the balcony. Bahrain lost a U.S. naval logistics hub.

Qatar shot down Iranian bombers. Both have become physical terrain in a conflict Washington and Tehran describe as if it happens somewhere else.

The New York Times reports that Iran’s early-war strikes heavily damaged the U.S. Navy’s Bahrain facility, including the logistics hub that supported forces across the region.

The Navy shifted much of that work to Diego Garcia, a British-controlled island in the Indian Ocean about 2,200 miles from the carrier groups operating in the Gulf of Oman.

The longer supply line has contributed to the USS Abraham Lincoln’s strained deployment, alongside the exhaustion of its roughly 5,000 sailors and Marines.

At the other end of the Gulf, Qatar became a combatant by geography.

On March 2, two Iranian Su-24 bombers were flying low toward Al Udeid Air Base, the main U.S. military hub in Qatar, and the Ras Laffan liquefied-natural-gas complex.

CNN sources said the aircraft were roughly two minutes from their targets, flying at about 80 feet and carrying bombs and guided munitions. Qatar radioed warnings and received no response.

Its air force classified the aircraft as hostile and sent F-15QAs into the country’s first reported air-to-air combat. The Qatari fighters shot down both Iranian bombers over Qatari waters.

For six months, Iran said it was still trying to determine what had happened to three crew members. On August 15, it made its first direct accusation against Qatar.

Brig. Gen. Mohammad Bagherzadeh, who heads Iran’s armed-forces committee for missing personnel, wrote to the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

In the letter, published by the IRGC-affiliated Fars agency, he alleged that Qatar captured three pilots alive and has held them without access to relatives or Iranian officials.

He named them as Javad Salehi, Abdolmajid Dashtian and Omran Behraveshian. The claim has not been independently verified. Qatar had previously said it had no information on their fate.

Bagherzadeh cited the Third Geneva Convention, including Articles 70 and 78, which require a detaining power to permit prisoners of war to notify families of their capture and to send requests or complaints.

But that legal machinery has a prior obstacle: Qatar does not acknowledge holding the men.

Tehran says they are prisoners of war. Doha says it has no information. The dispute begins before any Red Cross form can be filled out.

Bahrain paid with a damaged base. Qatar paid with the first air-to-air kill in its history and, if Iran’s allegation is true, three prisoners who have vanished into a legal void.

#Iran #Qatar #Bahrain #DiegoGarcia #USNavy #AbrahamLincoln #ICRC #war

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸