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According to Foreign Minister Abu Bakr Al-Qirbi, terrorism and tribal rebellions have cost Yemen more than $2bn in economic losses. He has appealed to international donors to help. In early October, President Ali Abdullah Saleh arrived

Although the word 'coup' has been thrown around regularly in Baghdad since 2004, it has typically related to an imagined American step to seize direct control of the government once again by ousting elected leaders. Now, for the first time since Saddam Hussein's fall, the prospect of a slow-burning military takeover of politics is re-emerging as a credible threat.

It was only a matter of time before Iraq’s regional defence role returned in some shape or the other, and that day may come sooner than many would have expected, with Baghdad pushing to create a national force that would place over a million Iraqis in uniform, some of them in units loyal to Prime Minister Al-Maliki, and aiming to snuff out domestic threats.

US construction company Perini Corporation has been awarded work worth $170m from the US Army Corps of Engineers (Usace) in Iraq to provide its blast-resistant overhead coverage systems (OCS). The projects come under an existing contract for design, build and construction services

An Iraqi-led operation in Diyala province shows how Baghdad’s most intractable opponents are being squeezed. Operation Bashaer Al-Khair (Omens of Prosperity) kicked off three days earlier than anticipated in Diyala province, but otherwise came as no surprise. After other supposedly intractable security blackspots had been tackled this year – first Basra, then Baghdad’s Sadr City, then Mosul and

The US Department of Defence has approved the sale to Saudi Arabia of 12 AH-64D Apache Longbow helicopters built by The Boeing Company, in a deal valued at up to $598m.

The jihadist threat to foreign interests may be waning with the gradual whittling down of the cadre of (known) hardened Yemeni militants. This war of attrition – analysed at length in GSN over the past year, with an update on Al-Qaeda in Yemen/Jund Al-Yemen in Defence and security, below – may not yet signal the threat’s end. But it has convinced governments and corporations that Yemen remains a place where their citizens can travel and where money can be made if care is taken.

The death of the Al-Tamimi brigade’s Hamza Al-Qayti deprived the jihadist movement of a senior leader and suggested that the security forces may have turned the tide against ‘Al-Qaeda’s’ Jund Al-Yemen arm, following confidence-sapping attacks in H2 2007 and H1 2008. But it is premature to say that the threat has gone away.

Qatar’s ties with France have been extremely close since independence, when Sheikh Khalifa Bin Hamad Al-Thani was anxious to establish his distance from former colonial power, the U.K., but was reluctant to fall into the embrace of either Cold War superpower. Although Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani does not pursue the overtly pro-French policies of his father— or his strongly francophile half-brother, former Oil and Finance Minister Sheikh Abdelaziz Bin Khalifa—his leadership continues to maintain strong contacts in Paris.

The US public  was  shown  further  grounds  to  support  an attack  on  Iraq,  when  a  leaked  intelligence  report  suggested that  a  US Navy pilot  lost  in  1991  might  still  be  alive  and  in captivity. It touched on a topic of exceptional sensitivity in the USA — where  many  people  still  believe  missing  servicemen from  the  Korean and Vietnam wars  are  either  alive  or  were held  until  their  deaths.  It  also  forced  a  reluctant  Pentagon  to publicly admit that the Iraqi Air Force (IrAF) scored a single air-to-air victory on the first night of the Gulf War.

The  New  Yorker magazine,  required  reading  for  MidEast watchers,  has  revived  suggestions  of  a  “new”  link  between Iraqi intelligence  and  Osama  Bin  Laden’s Al-Qaeda network. Its claim that the two pariahs jointly ran a terrorist organisation in Kurdish northern Iraq—if true—could provide the smoking gun  that  US hawks  have  been  seeking  to  take  the  “war against terrorism” to Iraq. Efforts to link 11 September suicide hijacker Mohammed  Atta with  Iraqi  intelligence  in  the  Czech Republic did  not  convince,  and  until  now  the  Central Intelligence  Agency — but  not  its  influential  former  directorJames  Woolsey—had  largely  discounted  reported  links between President Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda.

Defence ministers of the GCC states, meeting in Kuwait, endorsed an earlier proposal by Oman that the Peninsula Shield joint defence force be increased tenfold to 100,000 men. Currently the Peninsula Shield force, based at Hafr Al-Batin in north-eastern Saudi Arabia, has a strength of about 10,000 men.

Saudi Arabia Newsletter: The present urgent political concerns of Saudi Arabian leaders may be concentrated on the latest Iranian irruption into Iraqi territory,' but not so exclusively that the breakdown of the King Hussein-Yasser Arafat joint peace process is not a matter of equal pre-occupation for the Saudi government.