Secret mission, from the US aircraft carrier to Elmas

Lethal chessboard

A corridor that hour after hour risks becoming a lethal chessboard of a global conflict, with the tension becoming escalation, minute after minute. That something is moving can be seen from that landing, between last Tuesday and Thursday, in sequence, a few moments apart, of three imposing cargo planes stationed on the largest aircraft carrier in the world, the USS Gerald R. Ford, the United States Navy warship named after America's thirty-eighth President.

From civilian to military

The flight plan is clear: from Cyprus, where the US-branded giant of the seas is located, to Cagliari. Not Decimomannu, but Elmas, the civil port of the Sardinian capital, suddenly transformed, without any warning, into a "land aircraft carrier" of the American Navy. The step was lightning fast, from an airport for Ryanair tourists in search of unspoiled Sardinia to an operational base for the Grumman C-2A, the planes that since 1966 have "transformed" into Charons of the skies to load and unload all kinds of material from American aircraft carriers to the ground and vice versa. The flight paths reconstructed on the military satellite platforms mark the landing of the three aircraft in Elmas on Tuesday, not even 24 hours after New Year's Eve, before reaching the American-Spanish military base of Rota on the Atlantic Ocean and shortly after returning right on Cagliari and set off again after hours towards the Middle Eastern scene. The question is an obligatory step, as long as we don't take everything for granted, to be filed away in the drawer of indifference: what were those three American cargo planes doing on the Santa Gilla runway? And above all, why was a similar triple flight recorded by military radar on October 9th, exactly two days after the Hamas attack on Israel? Questions which, as military practice dictates, will not have any official answers. The Americans, but also the military leaders at all levels, are used to not having too many scruples in suddenly transforming a runway usually dedicated to civilian air traffic into a war stopover. It's a shame, however, that Cagliari airport is not located on a desert or on an Antarctic glacier, but is to all intents and purposes, and until proven otherwise, a civil airport in a democratic country with popular sovereignty and, not again, military. Posing and asking the question is not only legitimate but in a liberal state it is a duty, precisely due to the very function of that airport and the proximity to the military one of Decimomannu. The Grummans, moreover, are aircraft with a clear connotation, that of the cargo function.

No Carasau bread

They transport everything and more, with urgency and immediacy. Not Christmas presents. Given that the military occupation of the main runway of the Sardinian airport with those three "Ford" planes cannot be attributed to the supply of carasau bread and pecorino, beer or myrtle, it is evident that that simultaneous landing cannot in any way be declassified, as some of the military sources let slip, as a technical stop. After all, what sense would there have been in not carrying out those landings in a theoretically more discreet manner in the more secluded military airport of Decimomannu? Historical memory, the most recent one, however, leads to more than one suspicion. It is not the first time, in fact, that the Elmas airport has been "inappropriately" and "seriously" transformed into an airport dedicated to intercontinental "trafficking" of weapons, coincidentally the same devastating bombs that have shocked the Middle Eastern chessboard today in a state of permanent war.

Nefarious memory

The gaze of the past is entirely turned to those cargo ships coming from Azerbaijan which for entire nights, in the Cagliari airport, protected only by four passenger buses lined up in front of the deadly Mk bombs, loaded thousands of projectiles weighing hundreds of kilos each, lethal and destructive, destined for the warlords of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. An image that had gone around the world for the boldness with which they had moved in a civil airport, but above all for the full involvement of Sardinia, through the bombs produced by Rwm, the German factory stationed in Domusnovas, used then to devastate the populations of Yemen. A "traffic" blocked after the international uprising and the clear violation of Italian rules on the sale of weapons which prevent commercial relations with states at war, such as the Saudis.

Sardinia, at the service

Now, however, the Italian government has apparently given the green light to the resumption of that bomb trade. One thing is certain, the United States has placed itself at the head of an interventionist coalition towards Yemen, to protect commercial traffic in that body of water. Italy, without any parliamentary resolution, joined that American call. The Ford aircraft carrier and its warplanes have wasted no time: Cagliari, Sardinia, is already fully at the service of American plans in the Middle East.