Military drills ‘Ferocious Falcon’ end in Qatar with a strategic seminar

The 2015 Doha military exercise ‘Ferocious Falcon’ has come to a close with a ‘senior leaders’ seminar.

The seminar held on Tuesday focussed on security and stability of the region, and its relations with the NATO military alliance.

The planning and the field drills of the multinational exercise on managing natural disaster and handling terrorist threats ended on May 20.

Bangladesh had been a lead participant in most of the events.

Its delegation also attended Tuesday’s concluding seminar in which political aspects of the Middle East crisis and Iran, and its spillover effect on other countries were mostly discussed.

At the beginning of the seminar, a 20-minute documentary on the exercise was screened before Qatar Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, who attended briefly to watch the video.

The defence ministers of the Gulf nations, chiefs of staff, and head of the delegations of the 27 participating countries attended the seminar, which was addressed by three speakers from Qatar, Kuwait and Italy.

“GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) is the cornerstone of stability for the Middle East. You have to work together more,” said Andrea Margelleti, a former strategic advisor of the Italian defence minister.

He was speaking on NATO and its relations to security of the Gulf region.

Qatar, a small peninsular state in the Persian Gulf has positioned itself as mediator and interlocutor in a number of regional conflicts in recent years.

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It has also signalled a new assertiveness with the deployment of military aircraft to support NATO-led operations in Libya, and the US-led operations against the Islamic State in Syria.

Participants say the Qatar exercise, fourth of its kind, was all about bringing forces of brotherly and friendly nations, and partner countries to address key security issues such as terrorism, cyber threats, and natural catastrophe that any country can face.

This exercise has been instrumental in getting forces together, discussing those issues, and looking in some of the techniques that are being used to address them.

An observer of a European country told bdnews24.com that with this exercise, Qatar also tried to make sure that if it faced such crisis, there would be partners for them to work together.

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This also portrayed Qatar as a “leading responsible” nation, said the observer, who wished to remain anonymous.

“It (Qatar) is a leading nation with a capacity to deal with such issues, and is taking all necessary steps in advance to address such challenges,” he said.

“Overall the exercise has been quite successful.”

Participating nations were able to know each other’s culture, which the observer said, was a “good thing” to address the challenges together.

Qatar has involved all of its civil agencies to evaluate their capabilities to work with its military in any crisis situation like terrorist attacks ahead of 2022 FIFA World Cup.

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Bangladesh joined with a large military delegation, including its medical as well as engineering cores, and special force, in almost all drills related to natural disaster and terrorists attack.

“We were one of the lead role players in field training,” Brigadier General Abdullah Al Yusuf, Bangladesh team leader, toldbdnews24.com.

He said his soldiers had demonstrated their skills and capabilities to work in a multinational environment during the exercise.

“It has been a good experience as well as exposure for our soldiers,” he said.

He said Bangladesh’s participation had also been widely recognised.

In the video documentary, he said, there was hardly any event where Bangladesh’s logo was not displayed.

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“In the seminar, we just attended. We didn’t give any view,” he said. “It (seminar) provided a window of opportunity to know security issues from the Gulf perspective”.

“Every country has its own perspective when it comes to security threats. But these are mutually interdependent,” he toldbdnews24.com.

“Security breach in any part of the world has a cascading effect on the other part.

“Any security threat in the Middle East will have its effect on Bangladesh since we have migrants working there,” he said.

The Bangladesh delegation will return to Dhaka on Wednesday on a Qatar Air Force C-17 special aircraft.