A small instrument inside the drones that targeted the heart of Saudi Arabia's oil industry and those in the arsenal of the Iran-backed Houthi militias in Yemen match components recovered in downed Iranian drones in Afghanistan and Iraq, two reports say.
These gyroscopes have only been found inside drones manufactured by Iran, Conflict Armament Research said in a report released on Wednesday. That follows a recently released report from the United Nations, saying its experts saw a similar gyroscope from an Iranian drone obtained by the US military in Afghanistan, as well as in a shipment of cruise missiles seized in the Arabian Sea bound for Yemen.
The discovery further ties Iran to an attack that briefly halved Saudi Arabia's oil output and saw energy prices spike by a level unseen since the 1991 Gulf War. Saudi Arabia and the US have held Iran responsible for the attack.
The discovery also ties Iran to the arming of the Houthis in Yemen's war.
“This gyroscope ... we've seen it now enough times in Iranian-manufactured material to be able to confidently say that the presence of it in a Houthi-produced item suggests that the material was supplied from Iran,” Jonah Leff of Conflict Armament Research told The Associated Press.
Iran's mission to the UN declined to immediately respond to queries from the AP.
A UN Security Council resolution prohibits arms transfers to the Houthis.
A gyroscope is a device that helps orient and guide a drone or missile to its target. The gyroscopes in question bear no manufacturer's name and come in at least two versions labeled as V9 and V10, according to the reports. Their four-digit serial numbers also appear sequential, suggesting the same manufacturer had built all of those found.
The Houthi's Qasef-1 drone carries the V10 gyroscope, which is “identical" to one found in an Iranian-made Ababil-3 drone, which ISIS group fighters reportedly recovered in Iraq, Conflict Armament Research said. Weapons experts found the V9 version of the gyroscope in drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles, used in the September attack on Abqaiq, home of a crucial oil processing facility for Saudi Arabia, the UN report said.
“According to UAV experts familiar with this technology, such vertical gyroscopes have not been observed in any UAVs other than those manufactured by Iran,” Conflict Armament Research said in its report.
The UN report simply said that “the manufacturer of the gyroscope remains unknown.” However, it noted finding similar V10 gyroscopes “among the debris of both Samad and Qasef UAVs, which have been used by the Houthi forces."
The UN also said its experts saw a V9 gyroscope on display in Washington at a military display showing an Iranian Shahed-123 that American officials say they recovered in Afghanistan in October 2016, after it crash-landed.
Images of the gyroscopes match those in the Conflict Armament Research report. A similar gyroscope could be seen inside a cruise missile seized by the US Navy in a November raid on a traditional dhow shipping boat in the Arabian Sea. A computer terminal also seized with the missiles, likely used with the weapons, bore Farsi characters on its keyboard.
The US and the Saudi-led coalition have long said that Iran supplies weapons to the Houthis, ranging from assault rifles to the ballistic missiles fired into the Kingdom. The US Navy announced a new weapons cache find aboard a dhow this month, but it wasn't clear if the same gyroscopes were inside missiles recovered in this find.
