ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

Vietnam has celebrated the 40th anniversary of what it calls Reunification Day in Ho Chi Minh City [Reuters] Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam - Pham Quoc Hung felt calm when the end finally came. It was the morning of April 30, 1975, and North Vietnamese tanks were rumbling towards their final military objective: Saigon. Those tanks were a sign that the war in Vietnam was finally over, said Hung, recounting the last hours, 40 years ago today, of the country once known as the Republic of Vietnam, and the fall of its former capital, Saigon, to North Vietnamese forces. "I felt calm because I could expect the result," said the 75-year-old Hung, who was a battlefield photographer with the defeated South Vietnamese army at that time. After years covering the war that brought so much death and destruction on his country, Hung said he wasn't filled with dread at the prospect of a Communist victory. He was just relieved that peace would finally arrive. "I wasn't afraid because I...

Houthi militants gesture in the yard of the residence of the military commander of the Houthi militant group, Abdullah Yahya al Hakim, after it was hit by an airstrike, in Sanaa April 28, 2015. (Reuters/Khaled Abdullah) Download video (36.7 MB) In order to break the stalemate in the ongoing conflict in Yemen, Saudi Arabia has reportedly started training hundreds of Yemeni tribesmen to fight the Houthis on the ground, while Riyadh continues its bombardment campaign. “You cannot win a war against the Houthis from the air – you need to send ground forces in, but now there's a program to train tribal fighters on the border,” a Doha-based military source familiar with the matter told Reuters. According to another Yemeni official source, some 300 fighters have already managed to return to Yemen after getting Saudi training. They were allegedly send the Sirwah district in the central Marib province to battle Houthis in the area. According to the source the newly trained unit managed to p...

RT collage As Victory Day looms closer, Russia remembers the millions of Soviet lives lost in WWII to make the Nazi defeat possible. RT is launching a project that amongst personal stories and letters will also feature a unique battle map of the Eastern Front. World War II was the world's biggest and bloodiest military conflict. It affected 61 countries with a total population of 1.7 billion people. Battles took place in 40 of those states and it was the first and only war in which nuclear weapons were used. By far the greatest losses were suffered by the Soviet Union. Out of the 55 million lives lost, 27 million were Soviet. Over 1,700 Soviet towns and settlements and 70,000 villages were razed by the Nazis, and half of the country's infrastructure was destroyed. The USSR's confrontation with Nazi Germany lasted from June 1941 until May 1945 and became known as the Great Patriotic War, the name it acquired after a nation-wide radio address by Joseph Stalin. ...