All the telltale signs of Iranian arms smuggling were there when sailors from the USS Normandy boarded a dinghy in the Arabian Sea on Feb. 9.
A Yemeni crew was concealing a deadly weapons cache. It included 150 Iranian-manufactured copies of Russian-designed Kornet anti-tank guided missiles, surface-to-air 358 missiles only produced in Iran, and components of the Qasef-3 and Samad unmanned aerial vehicles, the same used in the September Saudi Aramco oil installation attacks.
“Certainly, 150 anti-tank guided missiles do not just walk away. They are illicitly smuggled for a purpose, and that purpose is to spread lethal assistance to the Houthis, to Iranian proxies,” said U.S. Central Command spokesman Navy Capt. William Urban at a Pentagon briefing on Wednesday. The briefing was to provide further clarity about the previously announced seizure.
“There’s not a plausible explanation on how these weapons got onto a vessel in Yemen without the sanction of the Iranian government,” Urban said.
The killing of Iranian Quds Force leader Qassem Soleimani has not stemmed the flow of Iran’s lethal support to proxies in the region, Urban said. “I think the Quds Force has demonstrated a consistent pattern of trying to provide weapons to the Houthis in Yemen.”
The pattern described by CENTCOM on Wednesday is consistent with what the Navy destroyer USS Forrest Sherman found on Nov. 25. On that date, the crew seized 21 Dehlavieh anti-tank guided missiles, five 358 surface-to-air missiles, 13,000 blasting caps, and components for land-attack cruise missiles and UAVs.
That cache was reviewed by a United Nations panel and was determined to be of Iranian origin, violating U.N. Security Council resolutions prohibiting the “direct, or indirect supply, sale or transfer” of weapons to the Islamic rebel Houthi group fighting the Yemeni government.
The prolonged conflict in Yemen is viewed by many as a proxy war between coalition-leader Saudi Arabia and Iran, but sometimes, the United States is caught in the middle.
In 2016, the Houthis fired anti-ship missiles at the USS Mason while it was transiting the Red Sea. In September 2019, 10 Iranian-produced UAVs flown by Houthis attacked Saudi oil tankers, rattling international markets and delaying Saudi Aramco’s initial stock market offering.
In five years, the U.S. has interdicted six illegal arms shipments to Yemen, but Urban said that is only a small fraction of the sea and land arms smuggling that likely reaches the conflict zone.
“Maritime interdictions are difficult work,” Urban said. “I don’t have any answers on the consequences other than to say that we’re doing everything we can to expose the malign activities that we observe and are able to interdict.”
