Turkish Chief of General Staff Hulusi Akar’s visit to Saudi Arabia in late January, which had coincided with Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu’s official visit to the country, brought about a decision to hold joint military exercises with the participation of the two countries’ armies.
Advertisement
“There are lots of ways that Saudi Arabia and Bahrain can contribute”.
Mass shootings are rare in the kingdom.
Cavusoglu added that Saudi Arabia is also sending planes to the Turkish base of Incirlik, a key hub for US-led coalition operations against IS, already used by Britain, France and the United States carrying for cross-border air raids. Saudi Arabia has faced a series of recent attacks by Islamic State militants.
Bashar al Assad will not be ruling Syria in the future and Russia’s military interventions will not help him stay in power, Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister Adel al Jubeir told a German newspaper in an interview published on Saturday.
“Saudi Arabia welcomes and supports the initiative of HM King Mohammed VI related to the autonomy plan for the Sahara under Moroccan sovereignty”, he said, expressing hope to see the problem settled the soonest possible and asserting that his country’s stand on the Sahara remains unchanged.
“I do not assess that the Saudi ground forces would have… the capacity to take this fight on”, Vincent Stewart, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Now the kingdom is leading a coalition of countries conducting airstrikes and ground operations in Yemen to support the country’s internationally recognized government, while it works to oust Iranian-backed Shia rebels and supporters of ex-President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who control Tehran and other parts of the country.
The Saudi offer of ground troops exploits an increasingly untenable situation.
Speaking about the relations between China and Iran, the head of the Chinese Foreign Ministry said that the sides should deepen cooperation.
A Syria in which the regime and IS, rather than other rebel groups, are the only real domestic players turns Bashar al-Assad into a pivotal cog in the fight against jihadism.
Syrians were the largest single group among the almost 1.1 million people Germany registered as asylum-seekers a year ago – accounting for more than 400,000 of the total.
Advertisement
The Saudis won’t send significant numbers – they already stretched with an uphill and losing struggle in Yemen – and they won’t want to be on the front lines, as Saudi troops in Syria would be fighting and killing other Sunnis (and indeed other Saudi Sunnis).
