Escalation in Yemen threatens to reignite civil war and create wider tensions
Yemen has been mired in a civil war that involves a complex interplay of sectarian grievances and the involvement of regional powers.
Saudi Arabia has bombed Yemen’s port city of Mukalla, targeting a shipment of weapons from the United Arab Emirates for separatist forces — a significant move in a country located along a key international trade route that threatens to bring new risks to the Persian Gulf region.
The UAE later said it would withdraw its forces from Yemen.
The secessionist Southern Transitional Council (STC), a group backed by the United Arab Emirates (UAE), this month seized most of the provinces of Hadramout and Mahra, including oil facilities.
Yemen has been mired for more than a decade in a civil war that involves a complex interplay of sectarian grievances and the involvement of regional powers.
The Iran-aligned Houthis control the most populous regions of the country, including the capital Sanaa.
Meanwhile, a loose regional coalition of powers — including Saudi Arabia and the UAE — has backed the internationally recognised government in the south.
The war has created a humanitarian crisis and shattered the economy. But since 2022, violence gradually declined as the sides reached something of a stalemate in the war.
The move by the UAE-backed separatists upends the political arrangement among the anti-Houthi partners.
The war in Yemen began in 2014, when the Houthis marched from their northern stronghold of Saada. They took the capital, Sanaa, and forced the internationally recognised government into exile. Saudi Arabia and the UAE entered the war the following year in an attempt to restore the government.
The new fighting pits the STC against the forces of the internationally recognised government and its allied tribes, even as they are both members of the camp fighting against the Houthi rebels in the country’s broader civil war.
The STC is the most powerful group in southern Yemen, with crucial financial and military support from the UAE.
It was established in April 2017 as an umbrella organisation for groups that seek to restore South Yemen as an independent state, as it was between 1967 and 1990.
The latest moves reinforced the STC positions across southern Yemen, which could give them leverage in any future talks to settle the Yemen conflict.
The STC has long demanded that any settlement should give southern Yemen the right of self-determination.
On Friday, Saudi Arabia targeted the Hadramout region in airstrikes that analysts described as a warning for the separatists to halt their advance and leave the governorates of Hadramout and Mahra.
The escalation shattered the relative quiet in Yemen’s war, which has been stalemated in recent years after the Houthis reached a deal with Saudi Arabia that stopped their attacks on the kingdom in return for ceasing the Saudi-led strikes on their territories.
The escalation highlights strained ties between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, which had been backing competing sides in Yemen’s decade-long war against the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels amid a moment of unease across the wider Red Sea region.
The two nations, while closely aligned on many issues in the wider Middle East, have increasingly competed with each other over economic issues and the region’s politics.
The United Arab Emirates said earlier this month that Yemen’s governance and territorial integrity was “an issue that must be determined by the Yemeni parties themselves”.
