Moroccan Prime Minister Abdelilah Benkirane arrived the afternoon of March 9 in Saudi Arabia to represent Morocco at the closing ceremony for “Thunder of the North”, a major military maneuver lead by Saudi Arabia.
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HAFR AL-BATIN, Saudi Arabia (AP) – U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry landed Friday at a sprawling military facility in northeastern Saudi Arabia where the kingdom just finished a three-week-long counter-terrorism drill that included 20 nations and which observers say was a show of force against its foes. The training focused on how to co-ordinate combat operations and guerilla warfare tactics among the Muslim-majority countries that are members of a larger counter-terrorism alliance announced by the kingdom in December.
Tensions between Sunni and Shia Muslim powers have been on the rise as sectarian wars rage in Syria, Yemen and Iraq, and the Arab League has become a forum for predominantly Sunni countries, led by Saudi Arabia, to air grievances with regional Shia power Iran.
Saudi Arabia and fellow Gulf nations also accuse Iran of supporting Shiite rebels in Yemen, as well as attempting to destabilise their own regimes. It also sent a strategic message to Iran, and extremist Sunni groups like al-Qaida and the Islamic State group.
Last week, the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) comprising Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Bahrain and Kuwait, officially added Hezbollah, and all groups affiliated to it, to its so-called list of terrorist organizations.
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Prime Minister Muhammad Nawaz Sharif was received by Khadim al Haramain al Sharifain, King Salman bin Abdulaziz in the Saudi city of Hafr al-Batin on Thursday evening. According to IHS Jane’s Defense Weekly Middle East and Africa editor Jermey Binnie, the exercise appears to have been smaller in troop size than the “Bright Star 2000” held in Egypt in 1999, which involved 73,000 troops from 11 countries.
