US Using Yemen as ‘Staging Area’ for Special Ops: Analyst

• US using Yemen as ‘staging area’ for special ops: Analyst
  by http://www.presstv.com/  
  The United States has been using Yemen as a “staging area” for its special military operations as the poor Arab country is a “very strategic military spot” in the region, says an analyst from New York.
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  Don DeBar made the comments Saturday when asked about Washington’s concern about losing Yemen as a base for “counterterrorism efforts” against al-Qaeda affiliates in the Arabian Peninsula.
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  Army General Joseph Votel, the chief of US Special Operations Command, said Friday that he was “concerned” about losing a presence on the ground in Yemen, where his forces had previously worked with Yemeni forces against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).
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  “It’s interesting to watch the US military admit essentially that they have militarized Yemen,” DeBar told Press TV. “Yemen has been handled as a staging area for operations in the area.”
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  The US faces the “political problem” of basing its troops in Saudi Arabia and Yemen serves as the next best country to provide a “very strategic military and naval spot” in the Middle East, the analyst pointed out.
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  US special operations forces pulled out of Yemen in March, when the government of fugitive former president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi collapsed.
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  Hadi came to power in February 2012 in a one-man election backed by Saudi Arabia and the United States. Ansarullah fighters of the Houthi movement say Hadi, who is now in Riyadh, lost his legitimacy as president of Yemen after he fled the capital to Aden in February.
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  DeBar said “Hadi was nothing more than a client of the United States, a vassal of the United States to use a medieval term.”
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  Saudi Arabia and its Western backers dismiss the Yemeni revolution as an ethnic or religious uprising, DeBar said, “but in fact, people of Yemen are firmly united against the colonial status that they had been subjected to by the United States and the proxy government that was installed by the United States.”
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