Between February and March 2016, Australian and French sailors in the Arabian Sea seized small ships — or dhows — smuggling weapons, most likely to militants in Somalia and Yemen. These caches aboard the dhows included examples of one particularly rare firearm, the North Korean Type 73 machine gun. In November 2016, independent monitoring group Conflict Armament Research released a report detailing the captured weapons and their likely points of origins and destinations. According to the analysis, the shipments showed links between Iran and armed groups Tehran supports in the Gulf of Aden region.