US Refuses to Hand Over Seized Iranian Weapons to Yemen, Transferring Them to Ukraine (Video)

Negotiations with the United States of America regarding arms shipments seized in the waters of the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Aden, which were sent from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps to the Houthi group in Yemen, were limited to light weapons, a senior Yemeni official told Sheba Intelligence on Thursday. 

The Americans refused to hand over all the seized weapons to the Yemeni army and the internationally recognized government, under the pretext that the government has an internal division, according to the Yemeni official.

He said the US promised to study the possibility of providing light weapons to the Yemeni Coast Guard and security authorities. But he was surprised by the US Central Command’s announcement of transferring the seized weapons to the Ukrainian army.

The Yemeni official added, "We were waiting for our country to benefit from weapons that were to be directed against our people and which the Iranian Revolutionary Guard sent to the Houthis."

The US Central Command said in a statement yesterday, Wednesday, that it had already transferred more than a million rounds of seized Iranian ammunition to the Ukrainian Armed Forces, adding, “The government obtained ownership of these munitions on July 20, 2023, through the Department of Justice’s civil forfeiture claims against Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)."

The Department of Justice announced in March that it was seeking to confiscate a weapons shipment consisting of one million rounds of ammunition, thousands of rocket-propelled grenades, and fuel used to launch rockets that had been seized by the US Navy on December 9, 2022 while the IRGC was sending them to the Houthis in Yemen.