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Bahrain and Kuwait Deny Granting U.S. Rights to Buildup Air Power
MANAMA, Sept 23 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Bahrain denied reports on Sunday that U.S. warplanes had landed in the Gulf state as part of military buildup in the "war on terrorism", and Kuwait said Washington had not requested any extra facilities, news agencies reported.
"No American plane has arrived in Bahrain and the question is still being studied by both countries," Bahrain's junior Foreign Minister Mohammad Abdul Ghaffar said, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.
"It was being dealt with in the light of existing bilateral understandings and signed agreements," he added, commenting on press reports about a buildup of U.S. aircraft ready to strike at Afghanistan from the archipelago, where the U.S. Fifth Fleet is based.
He also said there were constant contacts between Bahrain, the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) states and the U.S. to form a unified position against terrorism.
The clarifications were issued after Saturday's Washington Post reported that Saudi Arabia was showing reluctance towards allowing the U.S. military to use a major new command center at one of its bases in the kingdom for possible air raids against targets across the region.
Saudi Arabia is resisting U.S. requests to use a new command center on a Saudi military base in any air war against terrorists, forcing Pentagon planners to consider alternatives that could delay any campaign for weeks, defense officials said Friday, the
Washington Post reported Saturday.
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell is reportedly trying to persuade the Saudi government to reverse a decade-old policy in which it has refused to allow the United States to stage or command offensive air operations from Saudi air bases, the
Post said officials added.
While high-level talks aimed at resolving the matter are underway, the Pentagon is already considering moving the operations center to another country, said officials. They did not specify where, the
Post reported.
Meanwhile in Kuwait, Defense Minister Sheikh Jaber al-Mubarak al-Hamad al-Sabah insisted Washington had not requested extra facilities in the Emirate, from where U.S. and British aircraft patrol and bomb Iraq on an almost daily basis.
"The United States have until now asked for nothing of the sort from Kuwait," he told the official KUNA news agency.
"If they make a request we will study it. Kuwait stands alongside the United States and the international community against terrorism," he added.
The Gulf monarchies are close allies of the United States and have granted broad military facilities, notably since the 1990-1991 Gulf War to evict Iraq from Kuwait.
However, the issue of foreign troops on the Arabian Peninsula, the cradle of Islam, is highly explosive.
Muslim scholars around the world have declared that collaborating with the United States to attack Afghanistan is
haram (forbidden in Islam), due to the lack of solid evidence against Osama bin Laden and the prospect of millions of innocent civilians dying in the attacks.
In his fatwa (Islamic ruling) regarding establishing foreign military bases in Muslim countries, Sheikh Faysal Mawlawi, vice-chairman of the European Council for Fatwa and Research, issued a ruling which stated that, "It is not permissible, as far as Islam is concerned, to establish foreign military bases in Muslim countries."
Mawlawi said that the reason is that the primary goal of such military bases is to serve foreign interests. "In reality, they do not care about our national interests, and in no way are the two interests supposed to gain common ground. In return, we shouldn't help establish such bases at all because helping them is considered a kind of co-operation on sin and aggression, which is forbidden."
He said that such bases constitute a direct foreign intervention in Muslim affairs that have serious repercussions on the independent decision-making process in Muslim countries.
The Gulf States have assured Washington of their cooperation but have not specified what exactly that support would entail.
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