US accuses ally of funding mercenaries

The Pentagon has said that the UAE is funding Russian mercenaries to fight the USbacked government of Libya as the Trump administration prepares to sell the Gulf state US$23 billion (NZ$32.5b) of weapons.

President Donald Trump is attempting to rush through the proposed arms sale to Abu Dhabi, including F-35 fighter jets and armed Reaper drones, before he leaves office.

A report by the Pentagon’s inspector general, however, determines that the UAE is the main financial backer of Wagner, the Russian mercenary group in Libya, as its agents fight against the internationally recognised government in Tripoli, in the first official public linking of the two.

One US diplomat said that it amounted to a warning to the

UAE over their aggressive role in a conflict, which pits them against the interests of their western allies. Nato has warned that Russia may be using the conflict in Libya to establish a presence on Europe’s southern flank.

Chris Murphy, a Democrat on the Senate foreign affairs committee, called the proposed sale ‘‘massive and unprecedented’’ and said it was ‘‘hard to overstate the danger of rushing this through’’.

Murphy said there were ‘‘a mind-blowing number of unsettled issues and questions the administration couldn’t answer’’, including any guarantees the UAE might have given about the use of the weapons in the region, the potential for technology transfer to China and Russia, and the threat of fuelling a new arms race in the Middle East.

The UAE weapons deal would be the second largest American sale of drones after Israel.

‘‘Fuelling an arms race in the

Middle East is just bad policy – Iran will respond with its own ramp-up, and every other Gulf nation will want similar weapons to keep up with the UAE?’’ Murphy tweeted.

Israel has traditionally opposed such sales and has an agreement with the US that American weapons sales in the region would not impair its ‘‘qualitative military edge’’ over its neighbours.

However, it quietly dropped its objections when the Trump administration announced it had brokered an agreement normalising relations between Israel and the UAE, paving the way for Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, to announce the arms deal.

Jared Kushner, Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law, is on a trip to Qatar and Saudi Arabia, where it is thought he would pressure the Saudis over reaching a similar normalisation deal with Israel as the UAE.

Mohammed bin Zayed, 58, the de facto leader of the UAE, is arguably the most powerful man in the Arab world. During the Trump administration, he has forged a bellicose path in the region, targeting his twin obsessions of the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran. In Libya, he aims to blunt the influence of Islamist factions while in Yemen he co-operated with the Saudis to bomb Iranian-backed Houthi rebels. – The Times

‘Fuelling an arms race in the Middle East is just bad policy – Iran will respond with its own ramp-up, and every other Gulf nation will want similar weapons to keep up with the UAE?’’ Senator Chris Murphy