Over a year ago we reported on the fact that the Saudi-US-UAE coalition in Yemen has been increasingly reliant on foreign mercenaries, including even officers, from Sudan to execute its three-year long ground war against Shia Houthi rebels as coalition jets pounded urban areas from the skies. As this was long before the brutal Jamal Khashoggi killing at the hands of the Saudis, we were among a tiny handful that bothered to cover it — aside from a few Middle East outlets — significantly before western mainstream media suddenly "discovered" the tragedy unfolding in Yemen, a Saudi-driven conflict the UN has belatedly called "the world's worst humanitarian crisis".
But Khashoggi's death and crown prince MbS' new pariah status means The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and others have finally decided to spotlight Yemen and dig into inconvenient truths of the war at a moment the United States has pledged to greatly lessen its role and as the US Senate is scrutinizing American involvement, including the Pentagon's recently halting its aerial refueling program to Saudi-UAE jets. What does the latest NYT coverage find? The Saudi coalition — made up of America's closest Middle East allies — is sending child mercenaries from Darfur to the front lines of the Yemen war.
According to the Times report:
Led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudis say they are battling to rescue Yemen from a hostile faction backed by Iran. But to do it, the Saudis have used their vast oil wealth to outsource the war, mainly by hiring what Sudanese soldiers say are tens of thousands of desperate survivors of the conflict in Darfur to fight, many of them children.
At any given time throughout the past almost four years of war (the Saudis entered Yemen in early 2015), some 14,000 Sudanese mercenaries have been fighting alongside pro-Saudi forces, often on the front lines in places their UAE officers won't dare to go.
For families in war-torn Sudan, the Saudis' deep pockets and lucrative payment offers to send their young to fight in Yemen has proven irresistible given no other means of survival, according to the story of one such family:
Then, around the end of 2016, Saudi Arabia offered a lifeline: The kingdom would pay as much as $10,000 if Hager joined its forces fighting 1,200 miles away in Yemen.
Hager, 14 at the time, could not find Yemen on a map, and his mother was appalled. He had survived one horrific civil war — how could his parents toss him into another? But the family overruled her.
“Families know that the only way their lives will change is if their sons join the war and bring them back money,” Hager said in an interview last week in the capital, Khartoum, a few days after his 16th birthday.
Noticeably, unlike all prior scant reporting on Yemen, the New York Times actually features Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's name front and center as responsible for such evils and injustice.
More at: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-...es-fight-yemen
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