Iran is sending increasing numbers of its Quds paramilitary force to fight alongside pro-Tehran rebels in Yemen, US intelligence agencies have warned.
Militants from the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ (IRGC) Quds Force, along with Lebanese Hezbollah fighters and Iraqi Shi’ite forces – totalling around 5,000 troops – were despatched to the southern Arab state earlier this month, according to reports on the Washington Free Beacon website.
They are being met by opposition from Sunni Arabs in Yemen who are trying to prevent Iran gaining a foothold in the region, a State Department official told the website.
Quds Force Deputy Commander Brigadier General Esmail Ghani has now been quoted as giving the first official confirmation that the IRGC is training Yemenis.
He told Iran’s Mashregh News: “Each one who is with us comes under the banner of the Islamic Republic and this is our strength. The defenders of Yemen have been trained under the banner of the Islamic Republic and the enemies cannot deal with Yemeni fighters.”
Officials believe Iran’s ultimate goal in Yemen is to control the Red Sea choke point of the Bab-el-Mandeb strait, and move closer to the House of Saud.
The Free beacon site said: “The Bab-el-Mandeb is a strategic choke point that could be used by Iran to block oil shipments and U.S. warship movements from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf. Iran already can threaten the region’s other strategic choke point, the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf.
“Control over the Bab-el-Mandeb would give Tehran additional regional power to control oil and other passage to and from the region.”
Middle East specialists have now warned that the influx of Iranian and Hezbollah fighters is a troubling indicator of a growing Iranian threat to the region.
Anthony Cordesman, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said: “It would effectively put the Quds force on the Saudi border and potentially give Iran a naval and air presence near the Bab-el-Mandeb, and the exit from the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean—a key trade route for petroleum and all trade and US naval movements through the Suez Canal.
“If the intelligence reports are confirmed, it is the first real sign that Iran is playing a major role in Yemen.”
Iranian forces in Yemen ‘could also lead to far more serious tensions between Sunni and Shiite throughout the region’, Cordesman said.
He added: “A struggle where Iran takes real chances to help Yemen’s Houthi and Shi’ite population could deeply divide a country the CIA estimates is 35 percent Shiite and 65 percent Sunni, and increase Sunni and Shiite tensions throughout the entire region.”
Michael Rubin, of the American Enterprise Institute, said Iran is following the Soviet practice of using proxies to advance regional interests.
He told the Free beacon: “There’s no excuse for ignorance. This is right out of Iran’s playbook. It’s Tehran’s equivalent of the Brezhnev Doctrine: Once an Iranian proxy takes territory, Iran will use its full array of power to make sure it keeps it.”
Shahin Gobadi, a spokesman for the Paris-based Iranian opposition group Mojahedin Organization of Iran, said the Quds Force oversees Iranian policy toward Yemen.
He said: “As the war and conflict has intensified, the presence of Iranian forces—non-Arabs and those who do not speak Arabic—has become more difficult in Yemen.
“As such, Tehran has intensified dispatching more forces from Hezbollah to Yemen. Given the current circumstances, they have more room to maneuver and function.”
Mr Gobadi said that IRGC Major General and Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani is directing several special committees to back the Houthis, and that around 50 tons of Iranian weapons and other aid was sent from Mehrabad airport in Tehran to Sanaa last march March in four shipments, which were disguised as humanitarian aid from the Iranian Red Crescent.
A Gulf intelligence official that the intervention against the Houthis by several Gulf states had revealed some of Yemen’s estimated 300 Scud short-range missiles under Houthi control had been moved to locations near the Saudi border.
As a result, Saudi and Gulf Arab allies took action to oppose what they viewed as an Iranian threat to the peninsula, the BBC reported in early May.