Hezbollah’s Footprints in the Heart of Sanaa: Ṣarif Explosion Exposes Iran’s Missile Network

Senior Yemeni security sources said that a senior military expert from Lebanon’s Hezbollah and several commanders of the Houthi militias were killed in a massive explosion that rocked a missile warehouse in the Ṣarif area, northeast of Sanaa, last Thursday morning.

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The sources confirmed that the Lebanese national, known by the alias “Haj Abu Ridwan,” was assigned high-level military tasks related to assembling and upgrading Iranian missiles for the benefit of the Houthi militias. He was part of a group linked to Mohammad Sarour, known as “Haj Abu Saleh,” who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in southern Lebanon in September 2024.

How Was Abu Ridwan Killed?

The sources said that “the Hezbollah military expert was on assignment with Houthi experts in the missile storage facility when it exploded during their operation.”
They confirmed that “the Hezbollah missile expert was killed instantly, along with two commanders of the Houthi missile unit.”

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The sources noted that “the Lebanese expert, known as Haj Abu Ridwan, worked within the group of Mohammad Sarour (Haj Abu Saleh), who had previously operated in Yemen and was killed in an Israeli strike in September 2024.”

According to the sources, “Abu Ridwan was one of the key experts involved in assembling Iranian missiles smuggled to the Houthi militias.”
He had reportedly not left Yemen in the past seven years, with his primary role being to prepare and adapt Iranian missiles for Houthi use.

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Houthi Censorship

Despite the magnitude of the explosion and the human toll, the Houthi militias have imposed a complete media blackout on the incident, prohibiting the dissemination of any information regarding the presence of foreign experts or the nature of the destroyed weaponry.

The militias abducted several civilians in Sanaa, accusing them of filming the explosion site, in an attempt to hide the details of the incident and prevent images of the destruction from reaching local or international media.

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The death of “Abu Ridwan” is a significant blow to the network of Iranian-linked military experts in Yemen and underscores the Houthis’ continued reliance on foreign support to enhance their missile capabilities, despite their claims of self-sufficiency.

The explosion also reopens the debate on the dangers of turning urban areas into military warehouses, and the catastrophic consequences of such practices on civilians—particularly amid growing international condemnation of using populations as human shields.

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