Persian Gulf – The Faithful Watchman

U.S. Sends Two B-52s on ‘Show-of-Force’ Mission over Persian Gulf

Simon Kent – December 11, 2020

A pair of U.S. B-52H Stratofortresses flew a show-of-force mission across the Persian Gulf on Thursday in a display intended to deter attacks from Iran. The bombers were joined by fighter escorts from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Qatar.

The aircraft, assigned to Louisiana’s Barksdale Air Force Base-headquartered 2nd Bomb Wing, flew a short-notice nonstop mission the military said was “designed to deter aggression” and assure allies and partners the United States can rapidly deploy military power.

“Potential adversaries should understand that no nation on earth is more ready and capable of rapidly deploying additional combat power in the face of any aggression,” U.S. Central Command’s commander, Gen. Frank McKenzie, said.

“Our ability to work together as partners on a mission like this heightens our collective readiness to respond to any crisis or contingency,” McKenzie said.

UPI reports this is the second U.S. show-of-force mission involving B-52s in the region in as many months.

The mission comes two weeks after the assassination of top nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in Iran and amid escalating tentions between the United States and Iran, as Breitbart News reported.

https://www.breitbart.com

Africa’s Huge Locust Swarms Are Growing at the Worst Time

Matt Simon – April 16, 2020

As the coronavirus pandemic exploded across the world earlier this year, another even more conspicuous plague was tearing through East Africa: locusts. The voracious little beasts are particularly fond of carbohydrates like grains, a staple of subsistence farmers across the continent. Back in January, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) predicted the worst was still to come, and that by June, the size of the swarms could grow by a factor of 500.

And now, at the worst time, a second wave of locusts 20 times bigger than the first has descended on the region, thanks to heavy rains late last month, according to the FAO. The swarms have infiltrated Yemen and firmly established themselves across the Persian Gulf, having laid eggs along 560 miles of Iran’s coastline. New swarms are particularly severe in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Somalia.

“The timing is really horrendous, because the farmers are just planting, and the seedlings are just coming up now since it’s the beginning of the rainy season,” says Keith Cressman, senior locust forecasting officer with the FAO. “And it’s right at the same time when you have an increasing number of swarms in Kenya and in Ethiopia. There’s already pictures and reports of the seedlings getting hammered by the swarms. So basically that’s it for the farmers’ crops.”

“This represents an unprecedented threat to food security and livelihoods,” FAO officials wrote in a brief last week. All this is happening while the region locks down to stave off the coronavirus pandemic, and as travel restrictions mean experts can’t get to countries to train people. It’d be hard to imagine a more brutal confluence of factors. “The problem is that most of the countries were not ready, and are now invaded with swarms,” says ecologist Cyril Piou, of the French Agricultural Research Center for International Development, which helps economically developing countries with agricultural issues. “The solution is to try to control as much as you can.”

https://www.wired.com

Trump instructs US Navy to shoot down and destroy all Iranian gunboats if they ‘harass our ships at sea’

RT – April 22, 2020

President Donald Trump has ordered the US Navy to “shoot down and destroy” Iranian gunboats, should they harass American vessels at sea. His declaration comes after a confrontation in the Persian Gulf.

“I have instructed the United States Navy to shoot down and destroy any and all Iranian gunboats if they harass our ships at sea,” the president tweeted on Wednesday morning.

A week earlier, the US Navy accused the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) of “dangerous and provocative” actions, claiming that nearly a dozen Iranian vessels buzzed a group of American ships in the Persian Gulf. The US Fifth Fleet later published video footage of the encounter, which showed the gunboats circling a larger US ship.

Tehran brushed off the accusations, disputing the “Hollywood” scenario portrayed by the US. The Iranian government considers US naval activity in the gulf highly provocative, and condemned the patrol as “adventurism.”

The US and Iran almost came to war at the beginning of the year, when the US assassinated General Qassem Soleimani with a drone strike at an airport in Baghdad, apparently in retribution for a series of Iranian-sponsored attacks on US bases in Iraq. However, tension in the Persian Gulf has been high since last summer, when the US and its Western allies blamed Iran for a series of sabotage attacks on oil infrastructure in the region.

US-led naval patrols were stepped up, and American troops and air defense systems were sent to Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

Based in nearby Bahrain, the US Fifth Fleet has been active in the gulf both before and since the flareup last year. The US insists patrols are essential to protect shipping routes against Iran’s “malign behavior.”

https://www.rt.com