In 2021 and 2023, the United States Naval Forces Central Command intercepted four vessels sailing in international waters in the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea.
On those ships were thousands of weapons and nearly 800,000 rounds of ammunition the US government believes are part of an Iranian smuggling operation to support rebel forces in the Yemen Republic.
Federal prosecutors alleged in a seizure notice filed July 6 that an arm of the Iranian military — the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which the Trump administration designated as a foreign terrorist organization in 2019 — was smuggling the large cache of weapons and ammunition to support Houthi forces in Yemen.
CourtWatch first reported on the documents.
"There is no plausible way these weapons and munitions could have gotten onto the vessels between Iran and Yemen except that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has continued a pattern of smuggling letha aid to Houthi forces in Yemen," a Department of Defense official is cited in the notice.
For nearly a decade, Houthis, part of an Islamist movement, have been locked in a civil war with the Yemeni government after the group seized the country's capital, Sanaa, in 2014. Iran has widely been accused of supporting the rebel faction.
The US Navy intercepted four dhows — narrow ships that often operate without "transmitting an automatic identification signal," according to prosecutors — on May 6 and December 20 in 2021 and on January 6 and 15 this year. All four ships visited known IRGC ports and went through routes "consistent with previous IRGC smuggling operations," the DOD official said.
Altogether, US authorities seized nearly 10,000 various kinds of rifles, about 300 machine guns, 194 rocket launchers, more than 70 anti-tank guided missiles, and close to 800,000 rounds of ammunition, among other weapons.
Here's some of the photo evidence that was included in the government's seizure notice