After new US strikes, Iran issues warning about suspected spy ships in the Middle-East
IRAN ISSUED a warning Sunday to the US over potentially targeting two cargo ships in the Middle-East long suspected of serving as forwarding operating base for Iranian commandos, just after America and the United Kingdom launched a massive airstrike campaign against Yemen’s Houthi rebels.
The statement from Iran on the Behshad and Saviz ships appeared to signal Tehran’s growing unease over the US strikes in recent days in Iraq, Syria and Yemen targeting militias backed by the Islamic Republic.
Those attacks, themselves a retaliatory campaign for the killing of three US soldiers and wounding of dozens of others in Jordan, all stem back to Israel’s war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip, which has escalated tensions across the wider Middle-East and raised fears about a regional conflict breaking out.
The Yemen strikes overnight Sunday struck across six provinces of Yemen held by the Houthi rebels, including in Sanaa, the capital. The Houthis gave no assessment of the damage, but the US described hitting underground missile arsenals, launch sites and helicopters used by the rebels.
“These attacks will not discourage Yemeni forces and the nation from maintaining their support for Palestinians in the face of the Zionist occupation and crimes,”Houthi military spokesman Brigadier General Yahya Saree said. “The aggressors’ airstrikes will not go unanswered.”
US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin warned the Houthis after the strikes that “they will continue to bear further consequences if they do not end their illegal attacks on international shipping and naval vessels”. That message was echoed by British Foreign Secretary David Cameron, who said, “The Houthi attacks must stop.”
Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, also warned the strikes may continue.
“We are prepared to deal with anything that any group or any country tries to come at us with,” Sullivan told CBS’ Face the Nation. “And the president has been clear that we will continue to respond to threats that American forces face as we go forward.”
In the video statement Sunday by the Iran’s regular army, a narrator for the first time describes the vessels as “floating armouries”. The narrator describes the Behshad as aiding an Iranian mission to “counteract piracy in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden”. However, Iran is not publicly known to have taken part in any of the recent campaigns against rising Somali piracy in the region off the back of the Houthi attacks.
Just before the new campaign of US airstrikes began, the Behshad travelled south into the Gulf of Aden. It’s now docked in Djibouti in east Africa just off the coast from a Chinese military base in the country.
The statement ends with a warning overlaid with a montage of footage of US warships and an American flag.
“Those engaging in terrorist activities against Behshad or similar vessels j eopardise international maritime routes, security and assume global responsibility for potential future international risks,” the video said.