Close contacts between Yemen's Houthis and the Kremlin have developed in recent months.
Rebels are now being recruited to fight in Ukraine alongside Russian troops, according to a Swiss NGO.
A company involved in arms trafficking would make it possible to recruit them and then send them to the front.
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War in Ukraine: a thousand days since the Russian invasion
The Kremlin will stop at no frontiers to find soldiers reinforcing the Ukrainian front. After hiring North Korean soldiers, the Russian army is reportedly using Houthis from Yemen. According to Inpact (“Investigations with impact”), a Swiss investigative NGO, the latter are fighting through a company involved in arms trafficking.
According to Lou Osborn, a member of this NGO, the contracts between these often penniless mercenaries and the Russian army go through a company based in the Sultanate of Oman. The latter is believed to be linked to Abdul-Wali Abdo Hassan Al-Jabri, a Yemeni parliamentarian who sided with the Houthis. “He is involved in the arms trade between Russia and the Houthis“, she assured Wednesday, corroborating an investigation by Financial Times this weekend.
A few hundred men concerned
According to the NGO, “some fighters are recruited in Amman, Jordan while working in restaurants“and are devoid of real military experience.”They are promised $10,000 initially then $2,500 per month. But when they arrive, they are welcomed by the Russian army and are paid 260 dollars per month“, she says, referring to a few hundred people. The fighters transit through the Sultanate of Oman before being sent to Russia. Inpact did not have additional information on Tuesday on their possible training before being sent to front and on the management of linguistic translation.
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Asked by AFP this Tuesday to react, the Houthis did not respond. “We have no proof“, noted for his part a Ukrainian diplomat on condition of anonymity, believing that the Russians had “no limit“The only certainty: links between the Yemeni rebels and Moscow have strengthened in recent months.
Washington also accuses Moscow of wanting to supply weapons to the Houthis, rebels allied with Iran who have been disrupting international trade for a year by attacking ships in the Red Sea. They say they are acting in solidarity with the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. In January, an official Houthi delegation went to Moscow to discuss the “need to step up efforts to put pressure” on the United States and Israel in order to end the war in the Gaza Strip, according to a spokesperson for the rebels. The latter, Mohammed Abdelsalam, had specified on X that his delegation had been received by the deputy minister Russian Foreign Affairs, Mikhail Bogdanov.
