The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Donald Cook (DDG 75) arrives in Algiers, Algeria, March 5, 2019.
“…The integrated electronic countermeasure system can carry out reconnaissance, interference and warning on the enemy’s electronic information systems…”
Algeria’s electronic warfare (EW) capabilities have been bolstered by recent acquisitions, including the Russian Kvant 1L222 Avtobaza ELINT system and the Chinese DWL002 passive detection radar. The latest acquisition is an integrated EW system from China. A handful of Twitter users focused on Algerian military affairs first noticed the delivery. They identified it as a CHL-906, based on visual similarities to a model exhibited last November at EDEX 2021, Egypt’s recently established annual arms show. The Algeria-focused military blog MenaDefense quickly picked up news of the delivery, and several Arabic-language media outlets subsequently reported it. The CHL-906 is manufactured by the China Electronics Corporation (CEC) and sold for export by the China National Electronics Import & Export Corporation (CEIEC) and ELINC China (ELINC), a CEC subsidiary. The ELINC website describes it as an integrated EW system that provides comprehensive “reconnaissance, interference and warning on the enemy’s electronic information systems.” The chassis-mounted CHL-906 has a purported 600 km detection radius and a 300 km jamming radius. The latest Algerian acquisition is almost certainly in part a reaction to its neighbor, Morocco, recently bolstering its UAV arsenal.
The integrated electronic countermeasure system can carry out reconnaissance, interference and warning on the enemy’s electronic information systems such as early warning detection, communication transmission, multi-dimensional reconnaissance, navigation and positioning, and guided fire control. Combat operations such as ground-to-air defense, air interdiction, border control, anti-terrorism and stability maintenance, seize and maintain the battlefield system information rights.
Image Information:
Image: The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Donald Cook (DDG 75) arrives in Algiers, Algeria, March 5, 2019. Source: Photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class Ford Williams, U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa/U.S. Sixth Fleet. https://www.dvidshub.net/image/5149959/190305-n-ji086-036 Attribution: Public Domain
Personnel from the 378th Air Expeditionary Wing trained with Royal Saudi Air Force Police Wing members in a joint counter unmanned aerial system exercise Jan. 27, 2021 at Prince Sultan Air Base, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
“…Saudi Arabia has been very late in using unmanned weapons technologies and has relied on American weapons. The price of this delay has been Iran’s expansion in the region…”
Saudi Arabia’s domestic UAV program continues to develop at what some consider a snail’s pace. While Houthi-led forces in Yemen have relied extensively on domestically assembled drones, using Iranian technology and foreign-sourced components, Saudi forces have yet to employ any of their domestic UAV technology on the Yemeni battlefield. Saudi companies have contracted with Chinese and Turkish UAV manufacturers to assemble CH-4 and Karayel drones in Saudi territory, but there is an inherent expectation of a more robust Saudi domestic UAV industry, given the Houthis’ success in employing drones and the importance that Saudi Arabia’s “Vision 2030” development program gives to localizing military industry. According to the director of the Yemeni think tank Abaad for Studies and Research, Saudi delays in employing UAVs and its reliance on U.S. weaponry has been a critical element in allowing “Iran’s expansion in the region.”
The Saudi Arabian Military Industries (SAMI) recently announced that it would begin mass production of the “Sky Guard” UAV, a domestically developed platform that was initially scheduled for production in 2018. As noted in the accompanying excerpt from the military news website Defense News, Sky Guard is a tactical UAV intended for surveillance and electronic warfare, though it can also carry small munitions. Sky Guard joins another prominent Saudi domestic UAV project, the Saqr platform, which was first announced nearly a decade ago and went into production in 2017. Still, there is no indication that Saqr drones have been employed in Yemen or elsewhere.
Riyadh intends to develop a homemade drone called Sky Guard. Will its effectiveness be tested in the Yemen war? Or is it too early for it to enter military operations?
Saudi Arabia has been very late in using unmanned weapons technologies and has relied on American weapons. The price of this delay has been Iran’s expansion in the region.
The drone was developed in 2015 and displayed in 2017 at Bahrain’s BIDEC event and the Emirati conference IDEX, with an original expected date of mass production in 2018, according to Jean-Marc Rickli, head of global and emerging risks at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy… “The payload is light, 50 kilograms; range relatively short, 150 kilometers; and endurance of 8 hours,” Rickli told Defense News. Sky Guard can also fly at a maximum altitude of 18,000 feet, and be equipped with high-resolution cameras as well as electronic warfare systems. “So this is a tactical UAV mainly used for surveillance and reconnaissance purposes. I don’t know if it has combat experience such as in Yemen,” he said, but if Saudi Arabia wants to export it, proven combat experience would help. Asked whether the system can carry guided munitions, Rickli said: “I don’t know specifically about this drone, but a payload of 50 kilograms — it is enough for transporting bombs.” “As its description mentions: It was designed to be highly adaptable with several subsystem configurations. Thus one cannot exclude that it can be weaponized.”
Image Information:
Image: Personnel from the 378th Air Expeditionary Wing trained with Royal Saudi Air Force Police Wing members in a joint counter unmanned aerial system exercise Jan. 27, 2021 at Prince Sultan Air Base, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Source: Senior Airman Leala Marquez, https://www.dvidshub.net/image/6513425/joint-force-rsaf-perform-counter-uas-exercise Attribution: Public Domain
“… there is a 100% likelihood that ISIS will launch more attacks on the Peshmerga forces and the Iraqi army in the coming period…”
Recent ISIS attacks in northern Iraq’s “disputed territories” have raised concerns that the group is ramping up disruptive activities and seeking to re-emerge as a key player in the country. The “disputed territories” lie at the edge of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and control over them is contested by the Erbil-based KRG and the Baghdad-based central government. When it comes to these territories, the absence of effective security coordination between the two parties has created a security vacuum that ISIS fighters are exploiting, according to several media reports.
The attacks, which have mostly targeted Kurdish villages and Peshmerga checkpoints, have prompted high-level meetings and promises of better coordination between the KRG and the central government. Kurdish leaders have criticized central government forces for failing to provide them with proper support and equipment, most notably surveillance drones, as noted in the accompanying excerpt from the Saudi news website Independent Arabia. A second article from Independent Arabia details how the attacks have exposed fissures between the KRG’s two main political factions, one based in Erbil and the other in Sulaymaniyah. Further entrenching the security vacuum, as explained in the accompanying excerpt from the pan-Arab daily al-Quds, is the likelihood of Shiite factions linked to Iran obstructing central government-KRG coordination, for reasons of their own. Meanwhile, a Peshmerga official, cited in the excerpted article from the Kurdish media outlet Rudaw, claimed that ISIS is receiving unspecified “financial and logistical support from abroad” and that 200 militants had recently entered Iraq from Syria to carry out attacks on the group’s behalf.
These events are unfolding as Iraq’s political factions continue to squabble over the results of the recent, low-turnout parliamentary election and as the US-led anti-ISIS coalition completed its transition from a combat to an advisory role at the end of 2021. The uptick in ISIS activities also coincides with the four-year anniversary of what may prove to be a premature declaration of victory over ISIS in Iraq, made by then-president Haidar al-Abadi in December 2017.
Source:
“داعش يصعد هجماته ضد الأكراد
(ISIS Increases Attacks Against Kurds),” Independent Arabia (Saudi news website), 2 December 2021. https://tinyurl.com/mr4385mn
Peshmerga Minister Shorsh Ismail…criticized the performance of the federal army, saying that “its very slowness in taking measures gave ISIS an opportunity to reorganize itself. The army is unable to fill this vacuum, and the Peshmerga alone is unable to uproot ISIS, as it lacks aerial surveillance capabilities to monitor the group’s movements and the federal state will not provide us with the drones that we have been requesting for a long time, nor will the United States due to the federal government’s rejection.”
Source:
انقسام كردي حول أسباب خسائر البيشمركة أمام هجمات “داعش”
(Kurdish Divisions on Peshmerga Losses from ISIS Attacks),” Independent Arabia (Saudi news website), 7 December 2021. https://tinyurl.com/3awp35wd
Representatives and officials from the two parties that govern the semi-autonomous region, the “Democratic” party led by Massoud Barzani and the “Patriotic Union” led by the late President Jalal Talabani, disagreed on the nature of the problem in military coordination and different decisions, due to conflicting political orientations. The commander of the Patriotic Union Party organizations in the Qarachogh area of Makhmour district accused Barzani’s party of openly “cooperating with ISIS” by “publicly providing supplies to its gunmen,” as he put it, noting that “there are federal forces in Qarachogh Mountain and about a brigade of the Peshmerga led by Sirwan Barzani at the top of the mountain. This prevents any other force from coming to the area. ISIS fighters can be seen comfortably roaming around, and they go to the surrounding villages, despite the presence of 35 mounds held by the brigade there. When the attack occurred, they did not respond, or provide assistance, except for the regiment consisting of locals”… For years, Washington has been leading mediation efforts to unify the divided Peshmerga forces between the two parties, who had concluded an agreement in 2006 to unify the Erbil and Sulaymaniyah administrations, after they fought a civil war, and are still facing difficulties in implementing the terms of the agreement…
According to Kurdish leaders, ISIS militants have recently begun to change their fighting methods and expanded the scope and type of their attacks, moving beyond the stage of just planting explosive devices, killing individuals and displacing others, and now engaging in military operations aimed at asserting their presence, following the recent arrival of a group of fighters coming from Syria, calling themselves “Jund Allah,” which swore allegiance to ISIS.
Source:
“معلومات استخبارية: 200 مسلح لداعش تسللوا إلى الأراضي العراقية قادمين من سوريا
The official of the Qarah Tapah – Hamrin II axis of the Peshmerga forces, Major General Mardan Jawshin, announced that they had received intelligence information that a force calling itself “Guardians of Religion,” consisting of 200 militants, “has pledged allegiance to ISIS and infiltrated into Iraqi territory coming from Syria”… regarding the recent increase in ISIS activities… he said that that ISIS is reorganizing its ranks and did not hide his belief that the organization “receives financial and logistical support from abroad,” referring to information that says that “the organization pays salaries to its militants and also pays salaries to the families of its dead…” Major General Jawshin pointed to the security vacuum between the Iraqi army and the Kurdistan Peshmerga forces as “the reason for the increase in ISIS attacks”… He noted that the ISIS threat had reached a very high level, especially after the arrival of the aforementioned 200 militants from Syria, and said that there is a 100% likelihood that ISIS will launch more attacks on the Peshmerga forces and the Iraqi army in the coming period.
Source:
“تعاون بغداد وأربيل ضد «داعش» بين الضرورة وفقدان الثقة
(Baghdad-Erbil Cooperation Against ISIS Between Cooperation and Loss of Trust),” al-Quds (pan-Arab daily), 11 December 2021. https://tinyurl.com/2p8s5hay
On the fourth anniversary of Baghdad’s declaration of the elimination of ISIS in 2017, Iraqis are following with concern the resurgence of attacks in many Iraqi provinces, despite all the security campaigns to hunt down the group’s remnants… observers fear that the state Shiite forces, which thwarted the Baghdad and Erbil agreement on the normalization of the situation in Sinjar, west of Mosul, will obstruct the agreement to deploy the Peshmerga in the disputed areas. This is especially true given that [Prime Minister] al-Kazemi, who was committed to concluding those agreements with the regional government, may not retain his post in the next government.
Therefore, the mutual accusations of exploiting terrorist organizations such as the Turkish Workers’ Party and ISIS and supporting their presence on Iraqi soil to achieve local and regional political agendas are not limited to Kurdish parties on the one hand, and the Shiites and Turkmen on the other hand, but rather also extends to leaders of the al-Fateh Alliance, which includes pro-Iranian factions, and which considers that the recent attacks in Kirkuk were intentional and motivated by political agendas aimed at providing justifications for the presence of US forces in Iraq, which are scheduled to depart at the end of this year. They also accuse the Kurdish leadership of fabricating or exploiting ISIS attacks in order to seek to restore the region’s control over Kirkuk and the areas disputed between the Baghdad and Erbil governments, after the expulsion of the Peshmerga from those areas in 2017, following the referendum on secession from Iraq.
Over the past decade, strategic competition between Qatar and the UAE has evolved into low-level information warfare. What began as disagreements on foreign policy in the wake of the Arab Spring has escalated into a conflict to shape and control information flows in cyberspace. Although not always visible, Qatari-Emirati competition has become a persistent feature of the regional Operational Environment (OE). Their competition in the cyber-information sphere is part of a broader competition for influence involving Turkey, Qatar and their allies, on the one hand, and Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE and their allies, on the other.1 One of Qatar’s main contributions to the Turkish-led axis is the employment of Arabic-language media outlets to influence local and foreign perceptions of the OE. The adversarial Qatar-UAE relationship has more recently morphed into a nascent cyber conflict to control not only the narrative but also digital data and information. Hoping to become hubs of the new digital economy, both countries are investing in cybersecurity and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in ways that will enhance their capabilities to shaper perceptions of the OE.2 Their conflict will continue to be a dynamic factor shaping the regional OE, and its evolution highlights the changing character of information war.
