In a new hostile move against anti-terror and resistance groups across the West Asia region, Canada has listed Yemen’s popular resistance Ansarullah movement as a “terrorist entity,” finding fault with the group’s anti-Israeli operations among other things.
Canada’s Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc announced the development on Monday, saying the move “contributes to our efforts in fighting terrorism globally and aligning Canada with our allies.”
He accused Ansarullah of committing “acts of violent extremism and terrorism,” saying, “We will continue to take action to curtail the spread of these activities internationally and to counter threats to Canada, its citizens, and its interests around the world.”
The comments came despite the movement’s effective contribution to fighting back against Takfiri terrorist outfits across Yemen, namely Daesh and al-Qaeda.
The Canadian government, meanwhile, released a statement, claiming that Ansarullah was a “militant group” that had been involved in “acts of insurgency” since the early 2000s.
It alleged that the movement had tried to “unseat” Yemen’s former officials, including ex-president Abd Rabbuah Mansur Hadi, who resigned in 2014 amid a political conflict and fled to Saudi Arabia a year later, prompting Ansarullah to start running Yemen’s affairs in the absence of a functioning administration.
The statement also pointed to the movement’s anti-Israeli operations, which has featured its targeting Israeli ships and the vessels that take commodities, including military supplies, to the Israeli regime.
The operations have been seeking to pile up economic pressure on Tel Aviv to cease its October 2023-present war of genocide on the Gaza Strip that has so far claimed the lives of at least 44,466 Palestinians, mostly women and children.
Ottawa, meanwhile, accused Ansarullah of maintaining “close links” with Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) and Lebanon’s Hezbollah resistance movement.
Both the IRGC and regional resistance movements, including Hezbollah, have, however, asserted on numerous occasions that the region’s anti-terror and resistance organizations work independently of each other and are not subject to each other’s orders.
The Canadian government has already listed the IRGC and Hezbollah as “terrorist entities,” in spite of their indispensable contribution to quelling foreign-backed terrorism across the region.
Reacting to the move against the Corps in June, the Iranian Foreign Ministry’s former spokesman Nasser Kan’ani said, “This irresponsible step is in line with the mistaken path that Canadian lawmakers have been following over the past decade under the influence of the Zionist regime [of Israel] and certain groups that are outcasts and lack any status and value.”