Members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps are in Yemen and assisting the county’s Houthi rebel terror group in its ongoing assault on civilian shipping in the Red Sea, a new report claims.
Those attacks are affecting global shipping as the narrow sea that connects the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea by way of the Suez Canal has essentially become a bottleneck for vulnerable freighters.
On Monday, a U.S.-owned ship was stuck by a missile in the Gulf of Aden as it prepared to navigate the area.
The cargo ship sustained damage and turned back to its point of origin. No one was injured in the missile attack, which was launched from the Yemen City of Aden.
A second missile was fired, but malfunctioned. A day earlier, a smiler attack was launched against a U.S. Navy ship, but the missile missed its target.
U.S. forces spent the weekend hitting targets inside Yemen using fighter jets and submarines.
The Houthi rebels have long been linked to Iran, but according to the news outlet Semafor, Iranian military officials are training the militants in person as they disrupt shipping and carry out missile and drone attacks against Israel and its allies — including the U.S.
Semafor reported Monday:
“The IRGC has stationed missile and drone trainers and operators in Yemen, as well as personnel providing tactical intelligence support to the Houthis, U.S. and Middle East officials told Semafor.
Will the United States and Iran go to war with one another?
“The IRGC, through its overseas Qods Force, has also overseen the transfer to the Houthis of the attack drones, cruise missiles, and medium-range ballistic missiles used in a string of strikes on Red Sea and Israeli targets in recent weeks, these officials said.”
🔸 Iran’s Revolutionary Guard deployed in Yemen
Commanders and advisors from Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps are on the ground in Yemen and playing a direct role in Houthi rebel attacks on commercial traffic in the Red Sea.https://t.co/yXgHzY4f97
— *Walter Bloomberg (@DeItaone) January 15, 2024
Semafor further reported Iranian Gen. Abdul Reza Shahlai is overseeing the attacks.
The Pentagon attempted to assassinate Shahlai in 2020 at the direction of then-president Donald Trump, The New York Times reported.
The Trump administration designated the Houthis as a terror group in the weeks before Trump left office in January 2021.
Then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo described the Houthis as a “deadly Iran-backed militia group” and said designating it as a terrorist organization would hold it “accountable for its terrorist acts, including cross-border attacks threatening civilian populations, infrastructure, and commercial shipping,” PBS News reported at the time.
Weeks later, the Biden administration removed the group from the U.S. government’s list of terror organizations.
In a statement, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, “I am revoking the designations of Ansarallah, sometimes referred to as the Houthis, as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.”
Blinken said he was concerned that designating the Houthis as a terror group risked depriving Yemen of food and fuel, citing information from the United Nations.
He concluded the administration would seek a “lasting political solution” to the Iran-backed group’s aggression in the region.
