Officers from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard are present in Yemen and taking part in training missions and combat operations, charges the Southern Resistance, a group allied to the embattled Yemeni President, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi. The long held belief that Iran was behind the ascendancy of the Houthis has reportedly been corroborated following the interrogation of hundreds of Shi’ite fighters who were captured during clashes.
Captured Houthi fighters revealed that Iranian Revolutionary Guard personnel fought alongside them in Yemen, Naif Al-Bakery, a Southern Resistance leader in Aden, told The Media Line. Al-Bakery also said that detainees claimed that they had received training in Tehran and that others had been coached by Iranian officers at facilities on islands that are off the coast of Eritrea.
The Southern Resistance is a conglomeration of civilian administrators from the south of Yemen and soldiers from brigades that declared their loyalty to President Hadi. Other parts of the army are aligned to former president Ali Abdullah Saleh and his Houthi allies. Formed in February 2015 to stand in President Hadi’s place after he fled the country, the Southern Resistance has as many as 46,000 fighters, according to estimates given to The Media Line by various commanders from the group.
An exact figure of the number of Iranian nationals present in Yemen is unknown but it is believed to be relatively low.
Iranian officers were captured in April, according to a statement released by the Southern Resistance on an affiliated television channel, Sawt Al-Janub. The pair of Iranian had been supervising the military operations of the Houthis and army units loyal to former president Saleh, it was reported.
“Two Iranian officers were arrested on 4 April” Radfan Al-Dubais, the director of Sawt Al-Janub channel, told The Media Line. There exact location is unknown, he said.
One of the captives was killed following his detention, Anis Mansur, a journalist and the editor-in-chief of Huna Aden news website, said.
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“One Iranian detainee was killed instantly after he was arrested – the location of his body and of the other detainee is unknown,” Mansur, who at the time of writing was reporting from the front line, said. Mansur added that that officials prevented him from taking photos of either of the Iranian officers.
The officers were named “Shahbour, a captain, and Asef Zadah, a colonel” Naif Al-Bakery, told The Media Line. There was no indication which of the two men was allegedly killed.
Evidence for Iran’s involvement with the Houthis is clear enough, Al-Bakery explained. Captured military plans and maps are written in Farsi and the Shi’ite fighters’ combat skills are good, sometimes matching that of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard who have trained them, the Southern Resistance commander said.
“The world does not need evidence indicating Iran’s involvement [in Yemen] – President Hadi and also (former) President Saleh have given evidence… to the UN and the Gulf countries, proving Iran’s involvement in Yemen’s wars”, Al-Bakery said.
“These accusations are not new, they have been around since 2004 when Saleh was president,” Dhaif Allah Al-Shami, head of the Houthis’ Press Relations Department, told The Media Line in response to the allegations. Al-Shami argued that the Southern Resistance were incapable of providing any evidence linking Iran to the war in Yemen, adding “all these charges are lies.”
“It is true that we have a bilateral relationship [with Iran], and we have the right to have relationships with any country. However, not every country that we have a connection with will come and fight alongside us,” he said.
Al-Shami went as far as to mock the Southern Resistance saying that they made excuses for their defeats at the hands of the Houthis by claiming that the Shi’ite group was backed by Iranian soldiers.
Last September, negotiations took place between the governments of Iran and Yemen, according to a source, who did not wish to be identified. The talks, which took place in Muscat, Oman, were aimed at facilitating an agreement by which Tehran would end its support to the Houthis and President Hadi would release a number of Iranian nationals and Hizbullah members who were in Yemeni prisons. Ultimately the talks collapsed due to a lack of Iranian interest, the source said.
Following this, Houthi fighters attacked and besieged the headquarters of the Yemeni National Security Organization in Sana’a and the home of the bureau’s senior official, demanding that Iranian citizens imprisoned in Yemen be released. According to the source, the sieges were ended only after a number of Iranians were allowed to leave custody.
Iran’s actions in Yemen are consistent with its wider foreign policy of operating through Shi’ite proxies with which they are trying to control the whole of the Arabian region, Mohammed Al-Shubairi, a political analyst, told The Media Line. The Houthis in Yemen, Hizbullah in Lebanon, Bashar Al-Assad in Syria and various Shi’ite actors in Iraq are all controlled by Tehran, he charged.
The Houthis have been backed by Iran since 2009, Al-Shubairi said with “thousands of their fighters trained in Tehran (and) officers from the Revolutionary Guards, (being) brought in to train the Houthis in Sa’dah (a city in the north of Yemen).” Evidence for this could be seen on a number of occasions in recent years where the Yemeni government arrested Iranian nationals or seized weapons shipments destined for the group, Al-Shubairi explained, adding that these incidents had been documented by the UN.
Al-Shubairi went on to say that he advised the Southern Resistance to document any evidence they uncovered implicating Iran but that during a time of war this might not always be possible.