Three sailors have been killed and four seriously wounded after the Houthis attacked the True Confidence merchant ship in the Gulf of Aden this week. According to US forces in the region, the 183-metre long ship was hit by a missile launched from Houthi-controlled Yemen.

It’s clear already that the fingerprints of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – the Iranian regime’s paramilitary force – are all over this attack.

For starters, the Islamic Republic of Iran had a clear motive. Until a few days ago, the True Confidence was owned by Oaktree Capital Management, a US based asset-management firm – and also the previous owner of the Suez Rajan tanker, which was seized by the US last year after being caught carrying Iranian oil. This latest attack was intended to send a message to the US after the Suez Rajan was confiscated.

There are other clues, too, that Iran’s regime was involved in this strike. In the Gulf of Aden at the same time as the Houthi attack was the spy ship of the IRGC, the Behshad, which has been providing the Houthis with intelligence.

Washington will no doubt find it politically convenient to deny Tehran’s role in this latest escalation. In the past few months, the Biden administration has been unable to decide whether or not the Iranian regime has control over its own proxies. After the Islamic Resistance in Iraq killed three American soldiers in January, unnamed administration officials told the press that Iran’s regime did not have total power over its proxies. But after America launched retaliatory strikes against 85 targets linked to the IRGC, it suddenly argued that Iran had enough power over them to force a reduction in attacks against US forces in Iraq and Syria.

In reality, these attacks have barely made the Iranian regime flinch. Ahead of the strikes, the US provided a running commentary of its plans. This gave the IRGC days to prepare and enough time to withdraw Iranian commanders from its facilities in the region. Washington even tipped off the IRGC that the strikes would focus on its regional infrastructure in Iraq and Syria. There are reports suggesting the IRGC has ordered its proxies to stop targeting US forces since the February strikes, but this isn’t what it seems either. Local reporting in Syria, for example, suggests the IRGC is simply using the current ‘pause’ to upgrade the capabilities of its proxies. And, of course, the strikes haven’t prevented the Houthis from escalating their attacks either.

Meanwhile, the UK has publicly ruled out military action against the Behshad spy ship beyond cyberattacks and the US appears reluctant to target IRGC assets in Yemen. Tehran has taken notice of this hesitancy.

There is plenty of ignorance about the IRGC and its network of terrorist militias in the Middle East – the so-called ‘Axis of Resistance’ – in Washington and Westminster. The accepted narrative is that IRGC Quds Force Commander Esmail Ghaani has to run around the region keeping his proxies in line. This gives the Iranian regime the plausible deniability it wants after any attack.

In reality, the IRGC’s Quds Force has at least 5,000 members stationed around the Middle East. ‘Department 2000’ of the Quds Force, headed by Mohammad Reza Zahedi, oversees operations in the Levant. Abdolreza Mesgarian leads the Ramadan Headquarters which oversees Iraqi militias. Saeed Izadi manages the Quds Force’s Palestinian Office in Lebanon. And Abdolreza Shahlaei controls IRGC activities in Yemen. The IRGC also has representatives on the Houthis’ Jihad Council and in the Hezbollah brigades. There are even Quds Force personnel inside state institutions, such as embassies and charities, across the region.

There are also a number of groups in Iraq and Syria that are ‘IRGC-manufactured militias.’  These proxies were specifically created by the IRGC’s Quds Force, which retains command and control over their major strategic actions. The militias that make-up the so-called ‘Islamic Resistance in Iraq’ umbrella, responsible for the deaths of three US soldiers in January, is one of these groups.

IRGC manufactured militias are the Iranian regime’s deadliest and most valuable assets. This is not just because the IRGC has armed, trained, and financed them. Tehran has spent time radicalising their fighters to ensure their absolute ideological compliance to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his objectives. Chief among these are his anti-Americanism, and his commitment to eradicating the world’s only Jewish state, Israel.

The Houthis – while not manufactured by the IRGC – still have deep ties with Iran’s regime. The founder of the Houthi movement, Hossein al-Houthi, and his brother, the current leader of the Houthis, lived in Iran for a year in the 1980s to receive ideological training and security briefings. Iranian sources also reveal that their father, Badreddin al-Houthi, and Hossein lived in Iran from 1994 to 2002 and underwent ideological training.

If Tehran really wanted the Houthi attacks against ships in the Gulf of Aden to stop, the IRGC’s Unit 6000, which leads operations in the Arabian Peninsula, could make this happen. But the lethal campaign continues because the Islamic Republic wants it that way.

One of the core weaknesses in the way western governments have approached Iran is that they have played by the Islamic Republic’s own rules. Since 1979, they have never launched military strikes on IRGC targets on Iranian soil. This is why attacks like those against the True Confidence will continue.

The United States and its allies need to flip the script. After this week’s lethal attack, this should start with targeting the IRGC’s spy ship in the Persian Gulf, the Behshad.