The United States Navy says it has seized a weapons shipment in the Arabian Sea from Iran likely heading to war-torn Yemen, the third such seizure in the month of March alone.
The U.S. Navy said in a statement Monday that the USS Sirocco on March 28 intercepted and seized the shipment of weapons hidden aboard a small dhow, a type of ship commonly used in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean.
The Navy said the shipment included 1,500 Kalashnikov assault rifles, 200 rocket-propelled grenade launchers and 21 .50-caliber machine guns. It said those aboard the dhow were released after sailors confiscated the arms.
A Saudi-led coalition is fighting in support of Yemen’s government against Houthi rebels and their allies there.
The arms shipment appears to mark the latest provocative action from the mullahs’ regime, which reported last month that it tested missiles marked with the phrase “Israel must be wiped out.” And on Monday, the Iranian regime warned the U.S. to butt out of trying to control its missile program, Fox News reported. “The White House should know that defense capacities and missile power, especially at the present juncture where plots and threats are galore, is among the Iranian nation’s red lines… and we don’t allow anyone to violate it,” Deputy Chief of Staff Brig. Gen. Massoud Jazayeri told state media.
On Friday, President Barack Obama said Iran’s regime was obeying the “letter” of its nuclear agreement with the West, but not the “spirit” of it.
In January, Iran’s regime captured 10 U.S. Navy sailors in the Persian Gulf, on the same day President Obama delivered his State of the Union address. Tehran released the sailors one day later.
Last year, naval forces from the regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) seized a Marshall Islands-flagged cargo ship and held it for weeks. The Iranian regime’s vessels also later surrounded a U.S.-flagged vessel but did not detain it.
In late December, the Iranian regime’s military fired rockets near the USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier, a move the U.S. called “unnecessarily provocative and unsafe.”
Based in part on wire reports