Iran admits to arming Houthis with missiles

Fars news agency, which is affiliated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, said Friday that Houthi missile units pounded the Yemeni forces’ military positions in the capital city of Sanaa on Friday with the ballistic “Zalzal-2” missile.

It added that forces’ gathering in the center of the Malah region of Sanaa came under attack by the ballistic Zalzal-2 missile, according to the news agency’s army source.

“It was a precision missile strike and [it] hit the target,” the source said without expanding on the damage and toll inflicted.

The agency quoted “a prominent analyst” Seyed Sadeq al-Sharafi as saying that militias “are developing their missile power to target Riyadh and Dubai in the future, after they increased their missile and military capabilities and expanded the range of their military operations against the enemies.”

The Zelzal-2 is an Iranian developed long-range unguided rocket in use by the Iranian military, Hezbollah and the Houthis.

Previously, Iran’s foreign minister repeatedly rejected the reports confirming that his country supplied the Shiite militias in Yemen with missiles.

The official IRNA news agency quoted Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif as saying these are “baseless accusations.”

The latest news comes a few weeks after news that warships from the US Navy and allied nations intercepted four weapons shipments from Iran to war-ravaged Yemen since April 2015, according to a US admiral.