TEHRAN – An Iranian aid ship bound for Yemen in defiance of U.S. warnings has passed Oman, entered the Gulf of Aden, and is expected to reach the Yemeni port of Hodeida on Thursday.

The vessel, the Iran Shahed, is carrying 2,500 tons of aid including flour, rice, canned food, medical supplies, and bottled water, all urgently needed in the conflict-wracked and impoverished Yemen, the AFP reported.

Passengers on the Iran Shahed include doctors, anti-war activists from the United States, France and Germany, and other journalists, according to the Tasnim news agency.

The vessel’s captain, Masoud Qazi Mir-Saeed, said that if weather remained fair it should dock in rebel-controlled Hodeida on Thursday. The aid ship left the Iranian port city of Bandar Abbas on May 11.

The Pentagon had urged the ship to divert to Djibouti - where the UN has an aid hub across the narrow strait that separates Yemen from the Horn of Africa.

A Pentagon spokesman had also said on Tuesday that the United States was tracking the Iran Shahed. The dispute raised concerns of a potential confrontation between the U.S. and Iran in the vital sea-lane, which links the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean with the Mediterranean through the Suez Canal.

But Iran said on Thursday that it had made all the appropriate arrangements for the aid shipment.

“The required coordination has been done with relevant authorities in the UN for docking of the ship carrying Iran’s humanitarian aid for Yemen,” Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said on May 14.

Earlier Riyadh had blocked Iranian aid deliveries to Yemen. Last month, it prevented two Iranian civilian planes from delivering medical aid and foodstuff to the war-stricken people, Press TV reported.

In a bid to undermine the Houthi Ansarullah movement and restore power to Yemen’s fugitive President Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi, Saudi Arabia started a military aggression against Yemen on March 26 without a UN mandate.

Hadi is a staunch ally of Riyadh.

On Thursday, the United Nations lifted its Yemen death-toll estimate for the two-months of conflict to 1,500, according to the Bloomberg. However, Yemen’s Freedom House Foundation says nearly seven weeks of Saudi airstrikes have claimed the lives of 3,979 people so far while more than 6,887 others have been wounded.

The foundation further said that most of the victims of the deadly campaign are civilians, including a large number of women and children.

Earlier on Friday, the spokesman for the Iranian Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee underlined that no other country is allowed to inspect Iran’s aid cargo ship heading towards Yemen.

“We send Iran’s relief aid ship to Yemen and will not allow any foreign power to inspect or stop it,” Seyed Hossein Naqavi Hosseini said, while rejecting allegations that Iran interferes in Yemen’s internal affairs.

“The enemies know that if we had intended to interfere in Yemen the Al Saud regime would have vanished in the first week [of their aggression against Yemen].”


MD/PA