Investigation by the British Times: Arms dealers linked to the Houthis in Yemen are selling guns and grenades online

The Times newspaper revealed that Iranian-backed arms dealers in Yemen are selling Kalashnikov rifles, pistols, and grenade launchers on the X (formerly Twitter) website in plain sight.

According to an investigation by the newspaper , the merchants, who operate from Sanaa, the country’s capital, as well as other areas controlled by the Houthi group, use the “X” website as a storefront for their store, and publish pictures of assault rifles they want to sell. Many of the pictures of the weapons sold bore the Houthi group’s logo.

“It is inconceivable that these [arms dealers] would not be working for the Houthis,” Edmund Fitton-Brown, the former British ambassador to Yemen, told the BBC. Brown now works for the Counter Extremism Project.

“The vendors were operating in Houthi-controlled territory, so they should have had a Houthi stamp of approval,” said Dr Elizabeth Kendall, a Yemen expert at the University of Cambridge.

“You can't do business in those territories unless you have some kind of sanctions from the Houthis,” Kendall added.

The Times found that many of the accounts had a blue checkmark, which distinguishes verified accounts from regular accounts and gives them greater exposure.

The ads, which were in Arabic, primarily targeted Yemeni customers. According to the 2017 Small Arms Survey, Yemen was the second most armed country after the United States, with 54.8 out of every 100 Yemenis owning a firearm, and there were an estimated 14.859 million firearms in civilian hands.

The BBC found several arms advertisements online, which included weapons listed in Yemeni and Saudi currency.

The accounts often encourage buyers to connect via Telegram or the monetization platform Patreon to complete sales using cryptocurrencies, the Times said.

Based on these findings, a UK-based NGO, Counter-Terrorism Technology, issued an “urgent call” to tech platforms to remove Houthi content from their sites.

Selling weapons on X violates the platform’s terms of service, and experts told The Times that the company’s failure to identify Houthi-linked trade could mean that Elon Musk’s company violated US law.

“We know that the Houthis are actively exploiting social media to raise funds, procure weapons, and facilitate the transfer of weapons,” said Tim Lenderking, the US special envoy for Yemen. “This is in addition to fundraising and recruitment through this platform.”

“X has a deplorable history of failing to properly police itself against extremists and this is a problem that has clearly worsened since Twitter became X,” Fitton-Brown told The Times. “The fact that they are selling blue checkmarks to terrorist groups such as the Houthis and the Taliban is clearly a breach of sanctions and a breach of the law.”

“If the transactions are going through X and its payment capabilities, it is likely a violation of sanctions on the Houthis,” said Jessica Davis, a terrorism finance expert and head of Insight Threat Intelligence.