Gulf Cooperation Council: More military cooperation because of the Iran war

The Iran war is bringing about renewed rapprochement on the Arabian Peninsula: The six states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), which are at odds with each other, are stepping up their military cooperation.

Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and the other GCC countries agreed to establish a joint command post. This is to be built in Kuwait, which is a member of the council as well as Bahrain and Oman. The "necessary troops" should also be made available for this, it was said after a meeting of the GCC defense ministers in Bahrain's capital Manama. No details or numbers on troop numbers were given.

The Gulf Cooperation Council was founded in 1981, just two years after the 1979 Iranian Revolution and in the early stages of the First Gulf War between Iraq and Iran. Right from the start, the focus was on questions about shared security. A few years later, the “Peninsula Protection Forces” were founded, which at times numbered 40,000 soldiers and were used to suppress mass protests in Bahrain in 2011. But it was about internal unrest and not a threat from outside.

Despite several initiatives, the Gulf states do not yet have a fully integrated common defense system. They lack a consistent line on which threats they want to respond to together. Questions about leadership are also unresolved. The differences became particularly visible in Saudi Arabia's conflict with the Emirates. In addition to their long-standing and most important partner, the USA, the Gulf states are also increasingly looking for new defense allies, such as Pakistan and Turkey.

Due to the renewed escalation in Yemen with the Houthi militia, Saudi Arabia in particular is currently under fire. It was only on Monday that the kingdom reported that the important east-west oil pipeline had again been the target of an attack. A fire broke out that has since been extinguished, the state news agency SPA reported, citing a representative of the ministry. The attack took place in the Medina region in the west of the kingdom.

Saudi Arabia initially did not elaborate on who carried out the attack. The Saudi Foreign Ministry had attributed a previous attack on the pipeline to pro-Iranian militias from Iraq.

The east-west pipeline, through which large quantities of oil can be transported from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea bypassing the effectively blocked Strait of Hormuz, was shut down for a while after attacks in mid-September. However, it is currently back in operation.