Who provides the Houthis with drone technology and who finances its cost?

English - Thursday 20 January 2022 الساعة 08:36 am
NewsYemen, Muhammad Al-Haggam:

The Iranian-backed Houthi militia, by escalating its attacks with drones, seeks to balance the military power and work to deplete the Patriot stocks of the UAE and Saudi Arabia.  The militia also focuses its attacks on vital, economic and oil installations and related airports and ports, in an attempt to show its ability to influence economic activity. Therefore, the Houthis’ unmanned weapons may become more threatening after the militia put the ports and airports of the Gulf states under serious threat.

The Houthis declared 2019 the “Year of Drones,” stressing their ability to produce a plane every day. That year witnessed a qualitative and quantitative shift in drone attacks, which alarmed Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, and sparked controversy in Washington.

Before that, Houthi drones began to evolve from primitive reconnaissance planes with a range of 1 kilometer to medium and large planes with a longer range and more accurate attacks.  In 2017, the militia created a "drone air force unit", and then carried out more than 100 attacks by drones. The UAE had two attacks targeting Abu Dhabi and Dubai airports, while most of the operations focused on the cities of southern Saudi Arabia and the Yemeni interior.

Since 2016, Iran has started smuggling advanced guidance systems, spare parts, and powerful small engines for the Houthis' drones. It has also sent technicians and engineers from the Revolutionary Guards and Hezbollah to train the militia to install drones in manufacturing and installation workshops established by the militia in a number of  From the regions, the drones at that time were characterized by their small sizes and their role was limited to monitoring and reconnaissance over short distances, then Iran began developing them into attack aircraft over long distances.

A report by the German Channel One on “Iran’s Drone Industry” showed Iran’s use of German and Swiss engines, Chinese control units, and Italian sensors, noting that Tehran bought German engines through a Greek company on June 22, 2015, and then moved the engines 10 days later on  On board a Turkish Airlines flight to a company in Tehran, from which it was secretly transferred to Yemen, where the drones were manually assembled based on Iranian technology.

Iran openly boasts about the capabilities of its drones and makes outrageous claims about its capabilities, as it claims that its drones can fly thousands of kilometers and are able to arm some of them with missiles, and although “drones” are not a weapon that wins wars, they can carry out precise attacks on military parades, airports, oil installations and tankers when they are pre-programmed with a set of coordinates.

The Houthis have found in drones a low-cost and highly effective alternative compared to ballistic missiles, as the cost price in some countries starts from $300 to $3,000, as well as the ability to hide from monitoring devices.

According to military experts, "Drones" are characterized by the ability to bypass air defense systems that fail to track, as they are undetectable by air defense radars, originally designed to detect missiles and large and fast aircraft. If any unmanned aircraft were intercepted and shot down, the cost of this would be very high;  As shooting down a drone requires launching a Patriot missile, which means that shooting down a drone with a value ranging between $500-3,000 costs $3 million in value to the Patriot missile.

Jason J., who worked in Qatar for a year as a secret agent to collect information on the financing of terrorism, said in response to a question by the German channel about who finances the cost of the aircraft launched by the Houthis?: “The financial resources for purchasing engines and manufacturing drones, which eventually reach the hands of the Houthis, come from  Qatar".