Saudi Troubles

[blankall]

It does seem very strange that the Iranians would deviate from their current stance of supplying weapons to the Houtis by doing something so brash, almost non-sensical.


The only motivation I can think of would be for the purpose of asserting their position. Middle East politics are very much about proving what you can get away with, without military intervention. It's the same reason Assad used nerve gas.

[CaptainCrunch]

Originally Posted by afc wimbledon

If you think or know it will be tracked, which any country would, then you wouldn't fire it from inside your own country, you'd fire it from Iraq, or Yemen or somewhere off the Saudi coast from a boat, or a few miles inland after smuggling it all off a boat into the Saudi desert.

The only reason you would fire a missile that would be almost certainly tracked from inside Iran is if you are trying to start a war between Iran and the US as you work for the Saudi secret service, maybe because you were worried by the sacking of John Bolton that the US weren't going to go to war with Iran after all and needed a bit of a kick in the pants to get things going.

I don't know man, I don't know. until we get a report on the origin point of the launches, its all just like I don't know man.

[Fuzz]

It was probably the Russians. It's always them.

[CaptainCrunch]

[InglewoodFan]

My 5 cents of technical analysis. Abqaiq facility is what Aramco calls a GOSP, gas-oil separation plant. They take the production from the field and separate the light ends and water from the crude so you have a stabilized product to go down the pipeline to the gulf where it is loaded on tankers or refined at Ras Tanura. Looking at the satellite pictures, it looks like the targets were LPG or butane spheres. These hold the lighter hydrocarbons that are removed from the crude so you don't run into vapour pressure problems in storage and transport. If you don't have a place to put your light ends, you can't run that part of the plant so you can't stabilize the crude. Hence the outage on the production.

My guess is that they are getting back on line so fast because they realized that #### it, we are Saudi Arabia. We'll just flare the hell out the light ends instead of capturing them.

One other reason that the LPG spheres may have been targeted is that they would make one of the more impressive explosions/fires compared to a crude tank or one of the process units.

[afc wimbledon]

Originally Posted by InglewoodFan

My 5 cents of technical analysis. Abqaiq facility is what Aramco calls a GOSP, gas-oil separation plant. They take the production from the field and separate the light ends and water from the crude so you have a stabilized product to go down the pipeline to the gulf where it is loaded on tankers or refined at Ras Tanura. Looking at the satellite pictures, it looks like the targets were LPG or butane spheres. These hold the lighter hydrocarbons that are removed from the crude so you don't run into vapour pressure problems in storage and transport. If you don't have a place to put your light ends, you can't run that part of the plant so you can't stabilize the crude. Hence the outage on the production.

My guess is that they are getting back on line so fast because they realized that #### it, we are Saudi Arabia. We'll just flare the hell out the light ends instead of capturing them.

One other reason that the LPG spheres may have been targeted is that they would make one of the more impressive explosions/fires compared to a crude tank or one of the process units.

so you are saying it would be a really impressive looking explosion but do nothing much to actually hurt production or the soon to come Aramco share offering, kind of like what you might expect a false flag operation might see as the ideal target?

[nik-]

oh here we go

[afc wimbledon]

Originally Posted by nik-

oh here we go

9/14 was a hoax man, they found thermite in the desert sheeple!!!

[InglewoodFan]

Originally Posted by afc wimbledon

so you are saying it would be a really impressive looking explosion but do nothing much to actually hurt production or the soon to come Aramco share offering, kind of like what you might expect a false flag operation might see as the ideal target?

Never really occurred to me, I was more thinking of the "shock and awe" angle.

[Fuzz]

I had read the plant was for removing the sulphur, but maybe it does other stuff as well.



But why wouldn't the tanks explode if they were filled with gases? The shot I posted just shows holes poked in them. FALSE FLAG! They were empty!


All the black smoke was coming from some sort of tailing pond, here:


https://goo.gl/maps/PuAoWvv7oFjiCfQf9


It is empty in the google photo, but was obviously full. Why target that? I can't imagine it was an accidental ignition considering the distance. Make it look worse? CONSPIRACY!

[Jeff Lebowski]

Originally Posted by blankall

It does seem very strange that the Iranians would deviate from their current stance of supplying weapons to the Houtis by doing something so brash, almost non-sensical.


The only motivation I can think of would be for the purpose of asserting their position. Middle East politics are very much about proving what you can get away with, without military intervention. It's the same reason Assad used nerve gas.

I doubt it.

Houthi striking capability – from drone swarms to ballistic missile attacks – has been improving remarkably for the past year or so. It’s not by accident that the UAE saw which way the geopolitical and geoeconomic winds were blowing: Abu Dhabi withdrew from Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman’s vicious war against Yemen and now is engaged in what it describes as a “peace-first” strategy.

Even before Abqaiq, the Houthis had already engineered quite a few attacks against Saudi oil installations as well as Dubai and Abu Dhabi airports. In early July, Yemen’s Operations Command Center staged an exhibition in full regalia in Sana’a featuring their whole range of ballistic and winged missiles and drones.

Orientalism strikes again
The US intel refrain that the Houthis are incapable of such a sophisticated attack betrays the worst strands of orientalism and white man’s burden/superiority complex.

The only missile parts shown by the Saudis so far come from a Yemeni Quds 1 cruise missile. According to Brigadier General Yahya Saree, spokesman for the Sana’a-based Yemeni Armed Forces, “the Quds system proved its great ability to hit its targets and to bypass enemy interceptor systems.”

Houthi armed forces duly claimed responsibility for Abqaiq: “This operation is one of the largest operations carried out by our forces in the depth of Saudi Arabia, and came after an accurate intelligence operation and advance monitoring and cooperation of honorable and free men within the Kingdom.”

Notice the key concept: “cooperation” from inside Saudi Arabia – which could include the whole spectrum from Yemenis to that Eastern province #####es.

Even more relevant is the fact that massive American hardware deployed in Saudi Arabia inside out and outside in – satellites, AWACS, Patriot missiles, drones, battleships, jet fighters – didn’t see a thing, or certainly not in time. The sighting of three “loitering” drones by a Kuwaiti bird hunter arguably heading towards Saudi Arabia is being invoked as “evidence”. Cue to the embarrassing picture of a drone swarm – wherever it came from – flying undisturbed for hours over Saudi territory.

UN officials openly admit that now everything that matters is within the 1,500 km range of the Houthis’ new UAV-X drone: oil fields in Saudi Arabia, a still-under-construction nuclear power plant in the Emirates and Dubai’s mega-airport.

My conversations with sources in Tehran over the past two years have ascertained that the Houthis’ new drones and missiles are essentially copies of Iranian designs assembled in Yemen itself with crucial help from Hezbollah engineers.

US intel insists that 17 drones and cruise missiles were launched in combination from southern Iran. In theory, Patriot radar would have picked that up and knocked the drones/missiles from the sky. So far, absolutely no record of this trajectory has been revealed. Military experts generally agree that the radar on the Patriot missile is good, but its success rate is “disputed” – to say the least. What’s important, once again, is that the Houthis do have advanced offensive missiles. And their pinpoint accuracy at Abqaiq was uncanny.

Professor Mohammad Marandi from the University of Tehran, who has very close relations with the Foreign Ministry, is adamant: “It didn’t come from Iran. If it did, it would be very embarrassing for the Americans, showing they are unable to detect a large number of Iranian drones and missiles. That doesn’t make sense.”

Marandi additionally stresses, “Saudi air defenses are not equipped to defend the country from Yemen but from Iran. The Yemenis have been striking against the Saudis, they are getting better and better, developing drone and missile technology for four and a half years, and this was a very soft target.”

https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/09/ar...he-chessboard/

[Fuzz]

Haha, wut?

Professor Mohammad Marandi from the University of Tehran, who has very close relations with the Foreign Ministry, is adamant: "It didn’t come from Iran. If it did, it would be very embarrassing for the Americans, showing they are unable to detect a large number of Iranian drones and missiles. That doesn’t make sense."

So the guy with close relations to the Iranian foreign ministry says "oh no, it wasn't Iran. If it was that'd be hella embarrassing for America. " wink wink.

[Jeff Lebowski]

Originally Posted by Fuzz

Haha, wut?



So the guy with close relations to the Iranian foreign ministry says "oh no, it wasn't Iran. If it was that'd be hella embarrassing for America. " wink wink.

Again:

Even more relevant is the fact that massive American hardware deployed in Saudi Arabia inside out and outside in – satellites, AWACS, Patriot missiles, drones, battleships, jet fighters – didn’t see a thing, or certainly not in time. The sighting of three “loitering” drones by a Kuwaiti bird hunter arguably heading towards Saudi Arabia is being invoked as “evidence”. Cue to the embarrassing picture of a drone swarm – wherever it came from – flying undisturbed for hours over Saudi territory.

UN officials openly admit that now everything that matters is within the 1,500 km range of the Houthis’ new UAV-X drone: oil fields in Saudi Arabia, a still-under-construction nuclear power plant in the Emirates and Dubai’s mega-airport.

Saudi air defenses are not equipped to defend the country from Yemen but from Iran

[Baron von Kriterium]

Countries such as the USA typically make a couple of errors: they under estimate the abilities and tech of their adversaries and they over estimate their own abilities and tech.

If we're to believe (and I don't at this time) the USA and the Clown Prince, Iran launched this attack "from the north". But that means their weapons penetrated a heavily monitored part of the world that was supposedly defended with a significant air defence network. Thus, The Iranians, with alleged lower tech weapons, evaded the high tech systems of the USA. So, by pinning this on Iran, the USA is tacitly admitting their systems are useless.

The most obvious answer is often the correct one. That is, the Houthis, as they have admitted, launched this attack. Even worse for the Americans and Sauds is admitting the barefooted desert-dwellers of Yemen were capable of this attack. "They're not capable."

"We have no evidence the attack came from Yemen," stated Counsel Minimus Pompeo. Hahaha, so right there the Americans admit that they could not detect the attack from Yemen.

So, whether Iranians or Houthis, the American and Saud air defence network has demonstrated an ability to deal with the "less advanced" weapons of Iran and Yemen.

At the end of the day, it matters not who launched the attack. The Sauds deserved it. Karma for their brutal campaign in Yemen. Ironically, one of the Saud's pretexts for attacking Yemen was their "alarming build-up of missiles". If the Sauds want the Houthis to stop attacking their infrastructure, perhaps they should sue for peace.

[Baron von Kriterium]

It appears that the "Yemenis aren't capable of doing this" was once again proven wrong as the incapable Yemenis captured beaucoup Saudi thugs and equipment over the last 72 hours..

https://twitter.com/user/status/1178031688150061059

https://twitter.com/user/status/1178103728315998208

The operation took place in Saudi territory along the border on the Najaran axis.

- Yemeni operation dubbed VICTORY FROM GOD.
- Three Saudi Brigades eliminated. A couple of thousand captured, approx 400 KIA. The majority were Saudi-paid mercenaries; however one platoon of all Sauds was captured.
- large quantities of weapons and vehicles seized. Yes, those are Canadian-made LAVs in the video.

Sauds haven't confirmed any of this, but I'm sure they will blame Iran at some point.

Oh, the King's bodyguard is dead:

https://twitter.com/user/status/1178111763755212802

[blankall]

Originally Posted by Jeff Lebowski

I doubt it.






https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/09/ar...he-chessboard/

The argument is that it couldn't have been the Iranians because it's not technologically possible for them to do that? That's a pretty poor argument IMO, right up there with 911 must be a conspiracy, since the beams couldn't melt.

There are many ways that Iranians could circumvent defences, particular if the other angles of attack are, as stated, so undefended. Additionally, most air defence systems don't pick up drones. There are just as many articles discussing the inherent failure of the current anti air systems in dealing with drones and cruise missiles:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-s...-idUSKBN1W22FR

I'm not saying it was Iran. However, I certainly don't think that it was physically impossible for them to have made the attack either. The ongoing Houti conflict offers the perfect scape goat to take blame for the attack, which reminds the Saudis that Iran is still a major regional power.

At the end of that day does it matter if Iran attacked Saudi Arabia directly or equipped a proxy army to make the attack?

[Baron von Kriterium]

A massive fire in the Jeddah train station...

https://twitter.com/user/status/1178266444246720515

Tough few days for the Al Saud household.

[Jeff Lebowski]

Originally Posted by blankall

The argument is that it couldn't have been the Iranians because it's not technologically possible for them to do that? That's a pretty poor argument IMO, right up there with 911 must be a conspiracy, since the beams couldn't melt.

There are many ways that Iranians could circumvent defences, particular if the other angles of attack are, as stated, so undefended. Additionally, most air defence systems don't pick up drones. There are just as many articles discussing the inherent failure of the current anti air systems in dealing with drones and cruise missiles:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-s...-idUSKBN1W22FR

I'm not saying it was Iran. However, I certainly don't think that it was physically impossible for them to have made the attack either. The ongoing Houti conflict offers the perfect scape goat to take blame for the attack, which reminds the Saudis that Iran is still a major regional power.

At the end of that day does it matter if Iran attacked Saudi Arabia directly or equipped a proxy army to make the attack?

What?!!? The argument that it couldn't be the Yemeni because its beyond their capabilities is the point. I'm unsure what you are arguing. Of course it being Iran is in the realm of possibilities but so is Yemen. When you factor in this current operation cited by Baron, one can see Yemen is indeed fighting back - the Saudi war on Yemen is terrible.

The point in those articles was that Iran was being watched by massive amount of US surveillance. Iran has all the eyes on it - if it was Iran that is embarrassing to US capabilities. Russia has been able to repel these swarm drone attacks in Syria. People dismissing Yemen as the attacker are underestimating them.

[blankall]

Originally Posted by Jeff Lebowski

What?!!? The argument that it couldn't be the Yemeni because its beyond their capabilities is the point. I'm unsure what you are arguing. Of course it being Iran is in the realm of possibilities but so is Yemen. When you factor in this current operation cited by Baron, one can see Yemen is indeed fighting back - the Saudi war on Yemen is terrible.

The point in those articles was that Iran was being watched by massive amount of US surveillance. Iran has all the eyes on it - if it was Iran that is embarrassing to US capabilities. Russia has been able to repel these swarm drone attacks in Syria. People dismissing Yemen as the attacker are underestimating them.

The yemeni had to get the equipment from somewhere. I seriously doing they engineered the kind of weapons required for this attack on this own. These aren't drones you buy at Best buy. This is long range guided equipment capable of high speed flight at very high altitudes.

Once again the Yemeni are already getting weapons from Iran already. The most likely source for weapons like this is Iran. Even in the off chance it wasn't, the Houtis get so much support and weapons from Iran, they wouldn't be in the position for this attack without them.

Your argument about it being impossible to attack from Iran is clearly flawed, as there are multiple sources pointing out the weaknesses to drones on the SA air defence. Your point about Syria and cluster drone attacks only weakens your argument. As Israel has been able to successfully use drones in Syria. What this shows is that primitive drone attacks are easy to defend against, but advanced drone attacks, like the kind Iran and Israel have, are much harder to defend against.

[Jeff Lebowski]

@ Blankall

Sure. No one is saying Iran didn’t supply weapons even though it thought that Yemen made copies of Iranian tech. The point is that Iran can’t be “blamed” for the attack, if Yemen conducted it.

Unless the premise is supplying weapons to Yemen is bad or act of complicity but US, UK supplying weapons to Saudi is ok. The wanton destruction paid upon Yemeni civilians (kids in school buses) is being done by Saudi - with Western tech. Is the West complicit too?