DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (Dispatches) -- The U.S. Navy said Wednesday it will begin a new task force with allied countries to patrol the Red Sea.
Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, who oversees the Navy’s Mideast-based 5th Fleet, declined four times to directly name Yemeni fighters in his remarks to journalists announcing the task force.
The Red Sea runs from Egypt’s Suez Canal in the north, down through the narrow Bab el-Mandeb Strait in the south that separates Africa from the Arabian Peninsula.
“In a macro sense, this region literally and figuratively fuels the world,” Cooper said. “The area is so vast that we just can’t do it alone so we’re going to be at our best when we partner.”
The Combined Maritime Forces command, a 34-nation organization which Cooper oversees from a base in Bahrain, already has three task forces that allegedly handle piracy and security issues both inside and outside of the Persian Gulf. The new task force will be commissioned Sunday and will see the USS Mount Whitney, a Blue Ridge class amphibious command ship previously part of the Navy’s African and European 6th Fleet, join it.
Cooper said he hoped the task force of two to eight ships at a time would target those smuggling coal, drugs, weapons and people in the waterway.
A Saudi-led coalition has been waging a war on Yemen since March 2015. Years of inconclusive fighting has pushed the Arab world’s poorest nation to the brink of famine. A truce around the holy Muslim fasting month of Ramadan appears for now to be still be holding.
The U.S. has been providing logistical and direct military aid to Saudi Arabia in the war.
In Yemen’s current war, missile fire in the Red Sea has come near a American warship in the past. In October 2016, the U.S. Navy said the USS Mason came under fire from two missiles launched out of Yemen.
The U.S. Navy’s possibly more overt involvement in the Saudi war would make its vessels vulnerable to retaliation by Yemeni forces.
The week before, the Emirati vessel SWIFT-1 came under missile attack. The Emirati government asserted the SWIFT-1 at the time carried humanitarian aid; UN experts later said of the claim that they were “unconvinced of its veracity.” The vessel had been sailing back and forth in the Red Sea between an Emirati troop base in Eritrea and Yemen and reportedly carrying weapons.
More recently in January, the Yemeni fighters seized the Emirati-flagged ship Rwabee in the Red Sea off Yemen. The Saudi-led coalition asserted the ship carried medical equipment from a dismantled Saudi field hospital. The Yemeni forces released video showing military-style inflatable rafts, trucks and other vehicles on the vessel, as well as rifles. Another Yemen missile launch into the Red Sea happened in March as well.
For now, the occupying regime of Israel hasn’t announced plans to join the Combined Maritime Forces though the U.S. Navy has held drills with it, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in November. Cooper declined to say whether the Zionist regime had expressed interest in joining the joint command.