US Navy Seals special forces troops seized allegedly Iranian-made missile parts and other weaponry from a ship bound for Yemen in a raid last week that left two commandos missing, the US military said today.
Meanwhile, another ship came under fire in the Red Sea and sustained some damage, though no-one was wounded, officials said. The forces of Yemen’s Houthi-led government were suspected of carrying out the attack.
In a separate development, Iraq said it had recalled its ambassador from Tehran for consultations about Iranian air strikes on northern Iraq.
The raid by the Navy Seals was the latest seizure by the US and its allies of weapon shipments bound for Yemen’s Houthis, who have launched a series of attacks in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden in response to Israel’s brutal assault on the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
The attacks, which have disrupted commercial shipping, British retaliatory strikes, the Navy Seal raid plus various missile attacks in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon have raised tensions across the Middle East to a critical level.
The US raid happened last Thursday in the Arabian Sea, with the commandos launching from the USS Lewis B Puller, backed by drones and helicopters.
In a statement, US Central Command said: “Initial analysis indicates these same weapons have been employed by the Houthis to threaten and attack innocent mariners on international merchant ships transiting in the Red Sea.”
The report of the weapons seizure follows Iraqi authorities saying that they had recalled the country’s ambassador from Tehran for consultations and summoned Iran’s charge d’affaires in Baghdad today in protest at Iranian air strikes on northern Iraq that killed several civilians overnight.
The Iraqi Foreign Ministry said the Iranian attack was “a blatant violation of the sovereignty of the Republic of Iraq,” adding that it “strongly contradicts the principles of good neighbourliness and international law and threatens the security of the region.”
Iran fired missiles on Monday night at what it said were Israeli “spy headquarters” in an upmarket district near the sprawling compound of the US consulate in the northern city of Erbil, the seat of Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region, and at targets linked to the jihadist Islamic State (Isis) group in northern Syria.
Iran's Revolutionary Guard said in a statement today that it had carried out an attack on Isis positions in the Syrian city of Idlib and fired 11 precision ballistic missiles at the Kurdish region in northern Iraq, where it claimed to have hit a centre of Israeli intelligence agency Mossad.
Iraqi officials denied that the building was linked to Mossad.
