Tehran - A senior Iranian commander warned the United States that a "fire might start" over an aid ship bound for Yemen on Wednesday after the Pentagon urged it to change course.
Brigadier General Masoud Jazayeri said it was Iran's right to deliver relief supplies to Yemen as a humanitarian ceasefire takes hold and rejected Washington's request that aid be taken instead to a United Nations hub to allay worries the cargo might be military.
"I should say frankly that Iran's restraint has a limit," Jazayeri, a deputy chief of staff, told Iran's Arab-language Al-Alam television late on Tuesday.
"Saudi Arabia and its novice rulers and the Americans and others should know if they continue to create obstacles on Iran's aid delivery a fire might start that would definitely be out of their control.
"My strict recommendation is that they let Iran and other countries deliver their humanitarian aid to Yemen."
Sunni Saudi Arabia, which has called a temporary halt in the nearly seven week air war it has led against Shia rebels in neighbouring Yemen, has repeatedly accused Iran of arming its coreligionists.
Both Iran, whose supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei last month denounced the air strikes in Yemen as genocide, and the rebels deny the allegation.
The Pentagon said Tuesday it was tracking the aid ship, named Iran Shahed, after a naval commander told state media that Tehran would send warships to escort it to Yemen.
Spokesman Colonel Steven Warren called for the ship to divert to Djibouti, where the UN has set up an aid hub across the narrow strait that separates Yemen from the Horn of Africa, to prove that its cargo was humanitarian.
"The Iranians have stated that this is humanitarian aid," Warren told reporters in Washington.
AFP
