United Arab Emirates signs arms deals worth 3.3 billion dollars

The United Arab Emirates announced Monday it had signed deals worth more than $1.6 billion for the purchase of Patriot missile launchers from US arms giant Raytheon, state media said.

The deals, inked on the second day of an international military exhibition in Abu Dhabi, come a day after the UAE announced it would buy $353 million worth of Patriot missiles from Raytheon.

Some $3.3 billion in deals have been signed between the oil-rich state and western companies at the expo, set to run through Thursday, state-run WAM news agency said.

The deals were signed with 57 national and international companies at the International Defence Exhibition and Conference (IDEX 2019) and the Naval Defence and Maritime Security Exhibition (NAVDEX 2019), the spokesmen for the two fairs said.

The international companies include the United States' Raytheon, which was awarded a 5.7-billion-dirham contract to supply rocket launchers for the UAE air force.

Others include Austria's Sawi Electronic, Russia's JSC High Precision and France's Thales Air and Renault Trucks.
The arms purchases come at a time when defence spending is surging in the Middle East amid regional tension.

The UAE, long a key ally of the United States, maintains close ties with the adminstration of President Donald Trump.

The US is preparing to build a military hospital, funded by the UAE, in Abu Dhabi to treat Emirati soldiers and American troops based in the region, a US army official said Sunday.

The facility would be "very similar" to the one in Landstuhl, Germany, the biggest American hospital outside the US, said Lieutenant General Charles Hooper, director of the US Defence Security Cooperation Agency.

The UAE is part of a Saudi-led coalition that intervened in the Yemen war in 2015 to bolster the government against Iran-backed Huthi rebels.

The war in Yemen has pushed the Arab world's poorest country to the brink of famine and has killed an estimated 60,000 people.