Iranian-made parts found in explosives that Houthis use to fight the war in Yemen

Yemen’s president called on the world to stop Iran from fueling his country’s devastating civil war, the same day British experts said they had evidence that Tehran has helped rebels there to deploy mass-produced landmines and improvised explosive devices.

On Wednesday at the U.N. General Assembly in New York, Yemeni President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi said Iran and Lebanon’s militant Hezbollah group have supported Yemen’s Shiite rebels, known as Houthis, by “blatantly” with money, “weapons, missiles and experts.” Tehran has repeatedly denied such accusations.

“We are not advocates of war,” said Mr. Hadi, who is supported by a Saudi-led coalition seeking to roll back Houthi forces that control large parts of the country. “We support peace, harmony and stability in Yemen, but this will not happen by cajoling these gangsters.”

Fighting in Yemen, complicated by the presence of al Qaeda and other jihadi groups, has intensified in recent months, in what rights groups and the U.N. have called the world’s largest humanitarian crisis. Mr. Hadi also blamed the rebels for the failure of the U.N.-led peace talks aimed at ending the civil war, a conflict that has raged since March 2015.

Mr. Hadi, who thanked Saudi Arabia for “offering relief and the reconstruction of our country, met with Deputy Secretary of State John J. Sullivan on the sidelines of the annual U.N. General Assembly gathering.

State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert said the two men discussed “the importance of all parties supporting U.N. Special Envoy Martin Griffiths” efforts to find a political agreement to end the conflict.

The British-based Conflict Armament Research (CAR) organization released a report on Wednesday blaming much of the slaughter and havoc in Yemen on Iran.

After conducting multiple missions to Yemen over the past two years, CAR concluded that the Houthis have standardized and mass-produced landmines and improvised explosive devices with Iranian-made components “on a scale only previously achieved by Islamic State forces in Iraq and Syria.”

“The use of landmines and IEDs is a growing threat in Yemen and one that will persist long after the current phase of the conflict concludes,” CAR’s report said.

CAR experts noted that conventional mines from Belgian, Italian, Chinese and German manufacturers were used in the conflict — but deadly IEDs often supplied upon electronic components from Iran, many times in clandestine ways.

“The most recent seizures of IED electronics reveal attempts to conceal their provenance” from Iran, the report said.

In March, CAR found explosives camouflaged to resemble rocks that were similar to devices U.S. and Israeli investigators have recovered from Hezbollah and in Iraq. In both cases, experts suspected the weapons originated in Iran.

The report also found that Houthis were using weapons that relied upon electronic components connected to an Iranian cargo ship, the Jihan 1, which Yemeni authorities seized in 2013.

United Nations experts, CAR noted, concluded that Iran was “at the center” of the Jihan 1 operation.

On Tuesday, international watchdog Human Rights Watch added that some Houthi officials “are exploiting their power to turn a profit through detention, torture, and murder”against people they hold in detention.

Human Rights Watch reported that it documented 16 cases in which Houthi authorities “held people unlawfully, in large part to extort money from relatives or to exchange them for people held by opposing forces.”