Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Thursday that “military assets” had been deployed to the Middle East as a contingency plan.<\/p>\n
Countries have rushed to evacuate their citizens from the Middle East this week after US-Israeli strikes on Iran that killed its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and sparked a regional war.<\/p>\n
Albanese told the Australian parliament the government had sent six crisis response teams to the region.<\/p>\n
“And we’ve already deployed military assets as part of our contingency planning earlier this week,” he said.<\/p>\n
“I thank those Australians going into a dangerous situation to help their fellow Australians,” he added.<\/p>\n
The Australian leader did not give further details about the nature of the assets, though local outlet SBS News reported they were planes.<\/p>\n
AFP contacted Albanese’s office and the Australian defence ministry for further information.<\/p>\n
Australia has said it has 115,000 citizens in the region.<\/p>\n
New Zealand also ordered two military aircraft to the Middle East on Thursday in preparation for evacuations of its citizens from the region.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Thursday that “military assets” had been deployed to the Middle East as a contingency plan. Countries have rushed to evacuate their citizens from the Middle East this week after US-Israeli strikes on Iran that killed its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and sparked a regional war. Albanese told the …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2046,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pakistantimesusa.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pakistantimesusa.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pakistantimesusa.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakistantimesusa.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakistantimesusa.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2041"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pakistantimesusa.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2041\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2049,"href":"https:\/\/pakistantimesusa.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2041\/revisions\/2049"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakistantimesusa.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2046"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pakistantimesusa.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakistantimesusa.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakistantimesusa.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}