ByNews Desk- The Cradle
Western allegations of Iranian support for the Ansarallah resistance movement have been fabricated in the past to justify the Saudi-led war
In an interview with Sputnik Radio on 3 March, Yousifi explained “we have self-sufficiency in weapons, and we do not need weapons, but rather a food, medicine and to break the [Saudi] siege, which is intended to continue through these allegations.”
The Yemeni official responded to claims that the US Navy and the British Royal Navy intercepted several Iranian attempts to smuggle weapons to Ansarallah in recent months.
Muammar al-Eryani, the Saudi-appointed Yemeni minister of information in the parallel government cited these British reports yesterday as proof that Ansarallah depended on Iranian weapons.
Eryani claimed on Twitter that Iran was escalating its arms shipments to Ansarallah and that this “confirms its intentions to abort international de-escalation efforts and restore the truce.”
Yousifi responded specifically to Eryani’s claims, calling them “nonsense” and claiming that “[these] statements reflect the other side’s unwillingness to dialogue and bring what has been agreed upon into effect.”
Yousifi noted that the West was using British claims of Iranian weapons smuggling to escalate the conflict and obstruct further negotiations and dialogue.
He pointed out: “it was Britain itself that adopted the recent decision to extend sanctions on Yemen, which means that Britain is the main player in the game of militarizing the Red Sea with the help of the Quartet,” which also consists of the US, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.
The issue of possible Iranian military support for Ansarallah is significant because the rationale for the Saudi-led war in Yemen has been that the group are proxies of Iran, with the primary alleged evidence for this being that Iran has been arming Ansarallah for years.
However, as US journalist Gareth Porter has shown, several previous accusations of Iranian military support for Ansarallah have been fabrications, including allegations dating back to 2009.
As Porter reports further, Ansarallah has not had to rely on Iranian military support because the group acquired a large pool of arms through purchases in Yemen’s black market, through direct investments from corrupt Yemeni military commanders, and through the group’s alliance with former Yemeni President, Ali Abdullah Saleh, which began in 2014.
Through this alliance, the Houthis acquired large caches of weapons provided by the US over the previous eight years, as the Defence Department had delivered about $500 million in military hardware to the Yemeni military from 2006 on.
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