Italian newspaper: The Houthis transferred Iranian weapons to ISIS and Al-Qaeda in Africa
English - Saturday 09 April 2022 الساعة 02:45 pm
Aden, NewsYemen:
An investigation by the Global Initiative to Combat Transnational Organized Crime says that a portion of the weapons Iran provided to Houthi rebels in Yemen ends up in the hands of terrorist groups in the Horn of Africa.
The report, published by the Italian newspaper "Negritzia", said that field surveys documented a total of 417 light weapons that were transported on board a dhow to 13 different locations in Somalia, including 38 Type 56-1 assault rifles, which is the Chinese version of the Kalashnikov assault rifle with Retractable stock.
He added that the serial numbers of these Chinese-made rifles are in sequence with those recorded in other Type 56-1 stocks, which have been subject to previous seizures. Documents accompanying these arms shipments indicate that they came from the Iranian state's arsenal.
However, it is still difficult to determine when and how the 38 guns arrived in Somalia. Particular uncertainty relates to whether the assault rifles were transferred from shipments carried out by Iranian ships en route to Yemen, or whether they were transferred to Somalia only after arriving in the country at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula.
Regardless, it is possible that some of the 1,400 assault rifles and 200,000 rounds of ammunition carried on a stateless dhow that the US Navy intercepted on December 20, 2021 off the coast of the North Arabian Sea, ended up in Somalia to fuel the Al-Shabab insurgency. The US Navy stated that the weapons likely came from Iran, and that the sea route is the one that is usually used to smuggle Houthi rebels in Yemen, in clear violation of UN Security Council resolutions on arms embargoes.
In addition, the coordinates of the GPS device found on a sailboat intercepted by US forces in February 2021 indicated; At the end of January, the boat had docked in the small port of Jask, on the western part of the Iranian coast. It is a strategically important port, located near the Strait of Hormuz, and has hosted an Iranian naval base since the end of October 2008.
Evidence also indicates that smuggling networks repeatedly used the same dhows to transport multiple shipments of weapons.
Mozambique Telecom
The report covered the flow of weapons in the Cabo Delgado region of northern Mozambique, where the insurgency of the local Sunni and jihadist group, known to the local population, has erupted since October 2017. Several analysts have claimed that the terrorist group also obtained weapons from outside Mozambique, allowing it to carry out deadly attacks. and increasingly complex. In this regard, the hypothesis was presented that the jihadists used criminal networks in the region that would have brought weapons through the tested routes of smuggling drugs, precious stones and timber along the coasts of the Indian Ocean.
The weapons were supposed - says the report - to arrive through expeditionary voyages carried out by dhows that crossed from southern Tanzania towards rebel-held territory along the coast of northern Mozambique. Instead, some of the weapons supplied to the Cabo Delgado jihadists date back to the civil war between militias loyal to Renamo (Mozambican National Resistance Movement) and those of the ruling party Frelimo (Mozambique Liberation Front), which between 1976 and 1992 devastated the country.
While Kalashnikovs were illegally brought into northern Mozambique from the Great Lakes region, specifically from Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, according to the Italian newspaper.
