Along a narrow road in Yemen choked by natural gas tankers and heavily armed soldiers lies an ancient temple neglected and threatened in a nation now at war.

A soldier allied to Yemen's internationally recognized government walks through the Awwam Temple, also known as the Mahram Bilqis, in Marib, Yemen [Credit: AP/Jon Gambrell]

The Awwam Temple links a region now on the front lines of the Saudi-led war against Shiite rebels to Arabia's pre-Islamic past, a time of spice caravans and the mysterious Queen of Sheba.

Experts fear the temple, as well as other historic and cultural wonders across Yemen beyond those acknowledged by international authorities, remains at risk as the country's stalemated war rages on.

"All the villages are historic in a way," said Anna Paolini, the director of UNESCO's regional office in Qatar that oversees Yemen and Gulf Arab nations. "They're still heritage of the country. It's sad to see what's happening."

A Yemeni official explores the Awwam Temple, also known as the Mahram Bilqis, in Marib, Yemen [Credit: AP/Jon Gambrell]

The nearly 3-year-old Yemen war has killed more than 10,000 people, displaced 2 million and helped spawn a devastating cholera epidemic in the Arab world's poorest country. Amid its humanitarian crises, Yemen's culture and historical sites also have been affected.

Saudi-led airstrikes have destroyed historic mud homes in Saada, the birthplace of the Shiite rebels known as Houthis. Airstrikes also have hit the over 2,500-year-old Old City in Yemen's rebel-held capital of Sanaa, a UNESCO World Heritage site for its intricately decorated burnt-brick towers. Shelling and airstrikes also have struck museums and other sites in the country. In 2015, airstrikes damaged part of the Great Marib Dam, near the Awwam Temple and built by the same civilization, according to UNESCO.

Even just the shockwaves of an explosion in the distance can be enough to damage delicate structures. UNESCO has shared coordinates of some 50 historical sites with militaries involved in the fighting to try to protect them, Paolini said, though many remain unguarded now in the chaos of the war.

An official points to ancient South Arabian script at the Awwam Temple, also known as the Mahram Bilqis, in Marib, Yemen [Credit: AP/Jon Gambrell]

"Although we've seen less collateral damage and targeting of heritage, it still happens," she said.

Foreign historians and archaeologists also fled the country over the fighting, halting work at sites like the Awwam Temple, also known as the Mahram Bilqis. Scholars believe the temple, with parts dating to the 7th century B.C., served as a shrine to the god Almaqah.

The nearby city of Marib was the capital of the Saba dynasty, which ruled the area for centuries before the birth of Christ. The kingdom built the Great Marib Dam and controlled spice and incense trade routes. The legendary Queen of Sheba, said in the Bible to have visited King Solomon in the 10th century B.C., has been linked to Saba, though Ethiopians claim her as their own.

In this 1957 photo, two Yemenis stand near a column bearing ancient South Arabian script at the Awwam Temple, also known as the Mahram Bilqis in Marib, Yemen [Credit: AP/Jon Gambrell]

"She gave the king ... gold, large quantities of spices and precious stones. Never again were so many spices brought in as those the Queen of Sheba gave to King Solomon," the enigmatic Bible story goes. "King Solomon gave the Queen of Sheba all she desired and asked for. ... Then she left and returned with her retinue to her own country."

The Sabaean dynasty later succumbed to challenges from other kingdoms and the Great Dam gave away in the 6th century A.D. Islam quickly spread across the Arabian Peninsula soon after. Islam's holy book, the Quran, blames the dam collapse on Sabaeans being ungrateful to God.

Marib, which has grown into a city where many displaced by Yemen's war now live and gunfire echoes through the day and night, has never been a particularly easy place in modern history. Famed American archaeologist and oilman Wendell Phillips began excavation of the Awwam Temple in 1951, but had to abandon all his equipment and flee raiding Bedouin tribesmen with his team.

A militiaman allied to Yemen's internationally recognized government walks through the Awwam Temple, also known as the Mahram Bilqis, in Marib, Yemen [Credit: AP/Jon Gambrell]

Associated Press correspondent Wilton Wynn and his photographer wife Leila visited the temple in 1957 on a royal tour of the then-Kingdom of Yemen, apparently becoming the first Americans since Phillips to see the ruins. Wynn described Marib at the time as so remote "our plane was lost for more than a half hour trying to find it."

After the dam burst, "the city of Sheba was drowned and the kingdom never recovered," Wynn wrote in his AP dispatch. "Its population drifted away, leading to tribes moving to Syria, Mesopotamia and Palestine."

German archaeologists resumed work in the region in 1988, though foreign tourists remained a target of militants and tribesmen eager for ransom money. In July 2007, a suspected al-Qaida militant detonated a suicide car bomb in a crowd of tourists, killing eight Spaniards and two Yemenis.

A Yemeni militiaman stands atop a limestone column at the Awwam Temple, also known as the Mahram Bilqis, in Marib, Yemen [Credit: AP/Jon Gambrell]

Today, a simple fence surrounds the temple, just off a heavily guarded road leading to a Saudi coalition air base and an oil refinery. A watchman lives in a small makeshift shack against the fence with his children.

Foreign journalists and officials on a recent tour of Yemen organized by Saudi Arabia slipped through a large hole in the fence to marvel at the ancient South Arabian script inscriptions on stones inside. Some still bore what appeared to be red paint.

Eight limestone pillars towered over the site, though weathered, chipped and marred by the occasional bit of graffiti. A Yemeni militiaman with a Kalashnikov assault rifle over his shoulder quickly shimmied up between two pillars, looking down with a smile at once was one of ancient Yemen's holiest sites.

Author: Jon Gambrell | Source: The Associated Press [February 08, 2018]

A federal judge in Hawaii blocked President Donald Trump's latest bid to impose restrictions on citizens from eight countries entering the United States, which had been set to take effect this week.

The open-ended ban, announced last month, targeted people from Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Chad and North Korea, as well as certain government officials from Venezuela. It was the latest version of a policy that had previously targeted six Muslim-majority countries but had been restricted by the Supreme Court.

U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson on Tuesday granted Hawaii's request to temporarily block the federal government from enforcing the policy. It was supposed to take effect at midnight Wednesday.

Hawaii argues the updated ban is a continuation of Trump's "promise to exclude Muslims from the United States."

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/17/us-judge-blocks-latest-trump-travel-restrictions-to-the-us-from-eight-countries.html

President Donald Trump has signed a new executive order blocking the arrival of most travelers from six conflict-prone countries for 90 days, and freezing the inflow of refugees from any country for the next 120 days.
The new order shifts the task of stopping the refugees from officers at U.S. airports over to officials at U.S. embassies overseas, who have been told to stop preparing needed travel documents until Trump’s aides complete a national security review, according to documents released today by the White House.

The shift to overseas embassies may prevent judges from trying to block the new order, just as three California judges on Feb. 3 blocked part of Trump’s Jan. 27 executive order on refugees. Under the Constitution, judges have even less authority to block administrative actions in overseas embassies than judges now claim to have over officers working for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

The order blocks document processing for would-be refugees from Sudan, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen. A seventh country, Iraq, was dropped from the list when Iraqi officials promised to upgrade their security checks, the White House said.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/03/06/trump-new-refugees-executive-pushes-back-judges/

The Obama administration has taken the extraordinary step of authorizing the targeted killing of an American citizen, the radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who is believed to have shifted from encouraging attacks on the United States to directly participating in them, intelligence and counterterrorism officials said Tuesday.

He has been the focus of intense scrutiny since he was linked to Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people at Fort Hood, Tex., in November, and then to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian man charged with trying to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Dec. 25.

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No U.S. citizen has ever been on the CIA's target list, which mainly names al-Qaida leaders, including Osama bin Laden, according to current and former U.S. officials. But that is expected to change as CIA analysts compile a case against a Muslim cleric who was born in New Mexico but now resides in Yemen.

Anwar al-Awlaki poses a dilemma for U.S. counter-terrorism officials. He is a U.S. citizen and until recently was mainly known as a preacher espousing radical Islamic views. But al-Awlaki's connections to November's shootings at Fort Hood and the failed Christmas Day airline plot have helped convince CIA analysts that his role has changed.

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After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush gave the CIA, and later the military, authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or U.S. interests, military and intelligence officials said. The evidence has to meet a certain, defined threshold. The person, for instance, has to pose "a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests," said one former intelligence official.

The Obama administration has adopted the same stance. If a U.S. citizen joins al-Qaeda, "it doesn't really change anything from the standpoint of whether we can target them," a senior administration official said. "They are then part of the enemy."

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by F. William Engdahl

For some months the world has seen a steady escalation of US military involvement in Yemen, a dismally poor land adjacent to Saudi Arabia on its north, the Red Sea on its west, the Gulf of Aden on its south, opening to the Arabian Sea, overlooking another desolate land that has been in the headlines of late, Somalia. The evidence suggests that the Pentagon and US intelligence are moving to militarize a strategic chokepoint for the world’s oil flows, Bab el-Mandab, and using the Somalia piracy incident, together with claims of a new Al Qaeda threat arising from Yemen, to militarize one of the world’s most important oil transport routes. In addition, undeveloped petroleum reserves in the territory between Yemen and Saudi Arabia are reportedly among the world’s largest.

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by Webster G. Tarpley

Officials in the Obama White House are considering the possibility that the Christmas day attempt by Nigerian terrorist Umar Farouk Mutallab to blow up an airliner about to land in Detroit was deliberately and intentionally facilitated by unnamed networks inside the US intelligence community. This was the gist of a report by Richard Wolffe delivered in this evening’s edition of cable network MSNBC’s Countdown program, hosted by Keith Olbermann:

Wolffe attributed his account to top officials in the Obama White House. The intentional sabotage of US antiterrorist screening procedures would explain why Mutallab had been able to use his US visa, escape interrogation and special searches, and board his flight, even though he was festooned with every red flag in the annals of airport security. If Wolffe’s report is accurate, these Obama officials may be pulling on a thread which could begin to unravel the entire secret structure of illegitimate power which has afflicted this country — in this case, the apparatus which manufactures terrorist incidents for political purposes of mass manipulation, dictatorship, and war.

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Former CIA and DIA officer Philip Giraldi discusses evidence that documents contradicting the 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate on Iran are forgeries, the history of Rupert Murdoch-owned media passing along propaganda from Israeli and British intelligence, how bogus news stories create a deeply ingrained false narrative and distort public perception, the overwhelming Congressional support for warlike sanctions on Iran, the possibility Osama bin Laden is long-dead and how ending military occupations would almost completely eliminate terrorism.

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http://scotthorton.org/radio/09_12_29_giraldi.mp3»»