After US strikes in Yemen, Iran issues warning about suspected spy ships in Mideast

Iran issues a warning to the US over potentially targeting two cargo ships in the Mideast long suspected of serving as forwarding operating bases for Iranian commandos. The warning came just after the US and the United Kingdom launched a massive airstrike campaign against Yemen’s Houthi rebels.

The statement from Iran on the Behshad and Saviz ships appear to signal Tehran’s growing unease over US strikes in recent days in Iraq, Syria and Yemen targeting militias backed by the Islamic Republic.

Those strikes were in retaliation for the killing of three US soldiers and wounding of dozens of others in Jordan.

The Behshad and Saviz are registered as commercial cargo ships with a Tehran-based company the US Treasury has sanctioned as a front for the state-run Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines. The Saviz, then later the Behshad, have loitered for years in the Red Sea off Yemen, suspected of serving as spy positions for Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard.

In the video statement by Iran’s regular army, a narrator for the first time describes the vessels as “floating armories.” The narrator describes the Behshad as aiding an Iranian mission to “counteract piracy in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.” However, Iran is not publicly known to have taken part in any of the recent campaigns against rising Somali piracy in the region off the back of the Houthi attacks.