Jordanian forces pitch in to help Saudis expel Yemeni rebels

In response to an appeal from the Saudi King Abdullah, the Jordanian monarch this week dispatched his army’s elite Royal Special Force of 2,000 commandoes to help the Saudis drive out the Yemeni Houthi rebels, who invaded the oil kingdom with Iranian support earlier this month. debkafile‘s military sources report that the Jordanian troops are now battling the Yemeni invaders holding onto the Jebel Dukhan sector, which is split between the southern Saudi Jizan region and northern Yemen.
Day after day, Saudi troops backed by artillery, marines, tanks, engineers and air force F-15 and Tornado warplanes, together with the Yemeni army, have been fighting to dislodge the intruders from the rugged mountains which rise 6,600 ft high over a desolate landscape with no roads. They were repeatedly beaten off. The Yemeni rebels have sowed the narrow mountain passes with thousands of improved explosive devices.
In the early hours of their engagement, the Jordanian troops also took dead and wounded. It was their first experience of combat outside the borders of the Hashemite Kingdom since the 1960s, certainly the first time they had encountered Iranian-backed fighters.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly disclosed that Hashemite King Abdullah II sent this crack troops across in response to an urgent phone call Saudi King Abdullah put through on Nov. 16, appealing for Jordanian military back-up to support the Saudi effort to purge its southern border of the Yemeni rebel intrusion. An broader inter-Arab dimension was thus added to the Yemeni civil war.
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