Name: How The UAE Just Got Wrecked In Yemen
Uploaded: 2026-01-15T17:35:56.000Z
Duration: 32 min 1 s
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For a couple of months, there was actually a brief, brief period of general stability and calm in the Middle East.

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In October of 2025, Israel and Hamas agreed to another ceasefire in and around Gaza that was brokered by America around the two year anniversary of the start of their war.

Which by extension also led to the Houthis in Yemen announcing a pause on their own attacks against Israel and international maritime shipping in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden theaters as well.

The Houthis announcement had also come on the heels of a separate Omani brokered ceasefire that they had agreed with the United States back in.

That followed nearly two months of relentless American airstrikes against them in which the Houthis had also agreed to stop their attacks against American and British linked maritime shipping around them as well.

So by October it seemed that the Houthis had entered into ceasefires with both the Israelis and the Americans, While a separate three and a half year long ceasefire that had begun back in 2022 between all of the various factions within Yemen's own internal civil war was also still holding steady between the Houthis and the country's internationally recognized government, or irg.

No major fighting between Yemen's various internal factions had taken place in years, while the front lines have remained remarkably stable the entire time.

And with the Houthis winding down their separate external fights against the Israelis and Americans, it appeared to a lot of people that Yemen was finally going to settle down again, most of all to the United States, who's been eager to refocus its attention away from the Middle east to more pressing concerns like Venezuela and the Western Pacific.

But unfortunately for everyone, the modern Middle east never remains peaceful or undramatic for very long.

In the end, it took fewer than two months after the October Houthi Israel ceasefire for the situation in Yemen to begin catastrophically unraveling again.

On 2 December, the Southern Transitional Council, or the STC, a separatist faction in Yemen that ultimately seeks the independence of the former state of South Yemen, but

which had been working together with the internationally recognized government or the irg, suddenly broke ranks with the IRG and launched a surprise offensive against them into the Hadhramat governorate, geographically the largest governorate or province within Yemen that tanks up roughly one third of the country's land, which had previously been split between STC control along the coast and IRG control across the interior.

Co Named by the STC as Operation Promising Future, the surprise offensive against the internationally recognized government rapidly developed into a decisive victory for them.

Within only a week, they managed to completely overrun the entire Hadhramat Governorate.

And then going even further, they overran the neighboring Al Mahra governorate as well on the border with Oman, representing hundreds of thousands of square kilometers worth of captured territory.

And even more importantly, by seizing control of all of these territories, the STC suddenly seized control over about 80% of Yemen's proven oil and gas reserves as well, which were seen as critical for achieving the STC's ultimate goal of secession and a functioning independent state.

With their rapid military advances, the STC was able to capture virtually all of the territory that used to make up the former independent state of South Yemen, which was uniquely the Arab world's only communist state that historically used to exist.

Between 1967 and 1990 before it unified with North Yemen.

And with their capture of all of the oil and gas fields, the STC put themselves in the position to credibly declare their full secession and independence from Yemen as well.

And what's even more incredible, the STC managed to accomplish all of this without any extensive fighting.

STC troops effectively managed to just march through the two governorates with little resistance from local IRG affiliated tribes and troops.

The STC reported that just a mere 16 of their own fighters were killed during the week long offensive, while the IRG reported that only 32 of their own personnel were killed.

A stunning figure for how enormous the gains made by the STC are and how categorically this shifted the balance of power within Yemen.

The STC likely launched their surprise offensive into Hadhramat and Al Makhra.

When they did, for multiple reasons, there had been talk of the Saudis and the Houthis renewing their peace negotiations again after years and years of delays.

And following the Houthis ceasefires with Israel and the United States still under unrelenting US financial sanctions, the Houthis were known to be demanding a large share of Yemen's oil wealth and a future negotiated settlement as a means of economic relief.

And so the STC's seizure of all of those oil fields in Hadhramat could have been a way to preempt those negotiations by securing the oil fields for themselves for their own long term secession project.

During a visit to Washington just two weeks before the offensive, Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince and de facto ruler, Mohammed Bin Salman, is also known to have directly asked President Trump to intervene in the other conflict in Sudan with expanded sanctions against the rapid support forces the UAE backed militia in Sudan that the US accuses of committing genocide in Darfur and which is fighting against the Saudi backed side in that country's separate civil war.

The UAE likely interpreted that Saudi request as a direct threat against their own interests in Sudan, which might have encouraged the UAE to give the STC and Yemen the green light for their offensive into Hadhramat to pull Saudi and American attention elsewhere off of Sudan and more immediately, in late November, Saudi backed tribal forces in the Hadhramaut region began blocking oil production, which sparked energy shortages across the region and particularly in STC controlled areas, which the SDC themselves had to have interpreted as a direct threat to their long term stability.

By launching the surprise offensive, the STC and the UAE likely gambled on resolving all of these issues and to secure the all important oil fields to safeguard their long term prospects at secession and independence.

Yemen itself has been a proxy war of competing outside powers for more than a decade now.

The UAE supports the STC in their bid for secession.

Saudi Arabia supports the internationally recognized government and Yemen's territorial integrity, while Iran supports the Houthis and their separate vision for Yemen's territorial integrity.

All three sides theoretically oppose each other in Yemen, but

for several years the UAE backed STC and the Saudi backed IRG had at least attempted to cooperate together against the Iran backed Houthis, whom they mutually came to view as the bigger threat.

Over the years after the Saudis launched a devastating full scale intervention in Yemen against the Houthis that began in 2015, the Houthis have fired hundreds of retaliatory missiles and drones at Saudi Arabia's cities all throughout the conflict, while they've also managed to strike the UAE from time to time as well, including a missile strike in Abu Dhabi in 2022 that killed three people.

Both the UAE and Saudi Arabia want a pacified Yemen that's free of Iranian influence that no longer shoots back at them.

But Yemen is also just further away from the UAE than it is from Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia prefers a united and calm Yemen like it was prior to 2014, while the UAE sees Yemen as just a component in their greater overall strategy to build a ring of influence across the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa to connect to their other allies in the region like the RSF in Sudan, the El Sisi regime in Egypt, Eritrea and the breakaway state of Somaliland.

The Saudis meanwhile, have backed factions in Yemen's internationally recognized government like Isla, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood whose ideology of political Islam horrifies the UAE and why the UAE steadily gained back the more secular STC and their secession project in South Yemen instead.

So despite their shared animosity toward the Houthis in Yemen, the rival royal families and power in Saudi Arabia and the UAE also came to bat different sides of the country with their own irreconcilable objectives.

By 2022 put the Saudis decided to remove the internationally recognized government's incompetent president and replaced him with an eight man presidential leadership council to govern the country instead.

The leader of the council was a Saudi backed politician who favored national unity in Yemen, while his chief deputy was the head of the STC who wanted to partition Yemen between South and north instead.

They were never going to work together for very long, but

they also entered into a ceasefire with the Houthis the same year in 2022 that was initially only supposed to last for six months, but

For now, since December, when the front lines in Yemen suddenly shifted the most dramatically they had in years between the STC and the internationally recognized government.

The immediate questions on everyone's minds were what would the STC do with their conquests and how would the internationally recognized government and the Saudis end up responding?

Taking the boldest option, the STC was conceivably capable of pursuing their ultimate objective of just unilaterally declaring their secession from Yemen and recreate the former state of South Yemen again, which they had already proposed calling South Arabia this time around instead.

In theory, doing this without any outside foreign support would be a very dangerous and risky move.

The world isn't kind to rebellious territories of UN recognized countries unilaterally breaking away without the consent of their parent country.

Other places that have done the same, like Somaliland, Abkhazia and Kosovo, have faced decades of imposed isolation and non recognition by large swaths of the international community.

Their leaders suggested that after they declared their independence, they would be willing to immediately accede to the Abraham Accords and recognize the State of Israel.

Their hope was that this offer would have given them the negotiating leverage they needed over the Trump administration to extend US recognition towards their own independence.

Especially because there's already a major precedent for Trump overlooking international law and territorial integrity before in exchange exchange for recognition of Israel.

Back in 2020, during Trump's first term in office, he agreed to extend US recognition of Morocco's sovereignty over Western Sahara in exchange for Morocco's recognition of Israel, making the US the first country to ever formally recognize Morocco's occupation of the territory.

Trump is well known to want to continue extending the Abraham Accords in the Muslim world during his second term to score more diplomatic victories that he can sell at home.

And so the STC's assumption that he would probably be willing to extend American recognition of their independence in exchange for them becoming the next ones to join wasn't really that unrealistic.

And by extension, joining the Abraham Accords would have easily secured Israel's recognition of their independence as well.

The STC also likely believed that their ability to position themselves as a regional bulwark against the Houthis and their control of nearly all of Yemen's oil and gas reserves would help seal the deal with the Americans and Israelis as well.

Joining the Abraham Accords and extending their recognition towards Israel would also further position the SDC with their primary backer, the uae, who themselves joined the Abraham Accords and recognized Israel in 2020 as well.

Late in December of 2025, Israel also notably became the first UN recognized country to extend their formal recognition towards Somaliland's independence.

Immediately across the Gulf of Aden from southern Yemen, Somaliland unilaterally declared their independence from Somalia more than 30 years ago, back in 1991.

And though they've maintained their independence from the rest of Somalia in a de facto sense ever since, nobody ever took the formal step of actually recognizing it until Israel did just a few weeks ago.

Somaliland is also closely aligned to the UAE.

Since 2017, the Emiratis have invested $442 million in developing and operating the port of Berbera and Somaliland, transforming it into a strategic competitor with the nearby port of Djibouti for trade moving through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, Somaliland allowed the UAE to construct a military base at Berbera as well.

And merely days after Israel's recognition of Somaliland, the UAE quietly announced that they would begin accepting Somaliland passports for travel, in essence recognizing Somaliland's sovereignty in everything but name.

If the STC was actually successful at declaring their secession from Yemen, then the UAE could have conceivably followed Israel by recognizing both South Yemen's and Somaliland's independence as well.

Doing so would have established closely UAE aligned states on either side of the south entrance to the Red Sea, with the closely UAE aligned Rapid Support Forces nearby in Sudan, which might still ultimately win the civil war there and grant the UAE another closely aligned state along the central Red Sea coastline, along with El Sisi's Egypt and Israel further to the north that are both already closely aligned with the UAE as well to the uae.

All of these pieces on the board, from South Yemen to Somaliland to the RSF in Sudan to El Sisi's Egypt and Israel are all part of a vast long term plan to dominate the Red Sea and its lucrative trade volume in order to secure a wealthy future after the end of oil.

A future that Saudi Arabia is also concerned about that is pushing both countries to increasingly compete against each other for alternative industries like tourism and AI technology.

But as Saudi Arabia, the UAE's Red Sea strategy cannot appear as anything else other than an Emirati attempt to encircle them.

For years, the Saudis have been attempting to do everything they can to make the Houthis accept a power sharing deal in a unified Yemen that would restrict their role in the government.

Part of how they planned to do that was by offering the Houthis a share in the unified country's oil and gas resources that mostly exist in the south.

So with the prospect of the south seceding and taking basically all of the oil and gas with them, the Saudis were facing their worst case scenario in Yemen.

Without the oil and gas reserves, the internationally recognized government that they support would almost certainly be too weak to impose any kind of a deal on sharing power with the Houthis in the north.

And realistically, the Houthis would probably just eliminate them and politically dominate the remaining North Yemen rump state.

Saudi Arabia would become trapped with a radical Iranian backed Houthi Shiite theocracy directly on their southern border that would be left chronically impoverished without any access to southern Yemen's oil and gas reserves, which is about as big of a nightmare scenario for the Saudis as imaginable.

Shortly after their offensive, the STC announced that they intended to hold a referendum on independence from the rest of Yemen within the next two years.

By 2028, while the Saudis were consistently and strongly reiterating that all of this was completely unacceptable to them.

Within days of the STC territorial takeovers, tens of thousands of Saudi backed troops loyal to the internationally recognized government began mobilizing on the new front lines.

While threatening a major counteroffensive, Saudi Arabia demanded that the STC withdraw from all of the territories in Yemen they seized and gave them a week long ultimatum to do so or else.

The STC consistently refused to withdraw.

The week long Saudi ultimatum passed by and the Orels phase began happening.

At the end of December, the Saudi Air Force launched airstrikes on the STC controlled port city of Mukalla, bombing what it alleged were weapons shipments arriving to the STC from the uae, which the UAE denied.

The very next day, the internationally recognized government demanded that all UAE troops needed to leave yemeni territory within 24 hours and declared a state of emergency.

And then on the 2nd of January 2026, the internationally recognized government declared that it was launching a so called peaceful operation to regain control of the key military sites that the STC had seized in the Hadhramat province.

Within minutes of the announcement, however, the Saudi air force already began launching airstrikes across southern Yemen against STC military targets with confirmed casualties, while a military spokesperson for the STC said afterward that they were now in a decisive and existential war against the Saudi backed forces in Yemen.

Over the 3rd and 4th of January, troops loyal to the internationally recognized government, with Saudi Arial support, managed to rapidly and successfully counterattack across all of the Hadramat and Al Makra provinces, not only reversing all of the territorial gains that had been made by the stc, but

also overrunning the coast of the Hadhramat province and capturing the strategic port city of Vakala that the STC had controlled for years before they launched their offensive on the 4th of January.

After these decisive takeovers, the internationally recognized government's information minister reported to the New York Times that their next objective could be the STC's capital city of Aden and demanded that the STC's forces in the area immediately surrender as the government reasserts its authority.

By 9 January, it had become obvious that the STC was essentially a paper tiger and their offensive to seize control over the eastern oil fields had all been a colossal miscalculation.

With Saudi backed troops breaking into the STC's capital of Aden, the STC's leader reportedly fled the country for exile in the UAE and hours later the STC's remaining leadership, under immense Saudi pressure, announced that it was completely dissolving altogether.

With the Saudi backed government troops overrunning all of the rest of the former STC held territory, all within the span of just a single month, the STC blitzed across Yemen in a nearly bloodless campaign and it seemed like it was inevitable that they were going to secede and recreate South Yemen again.

And then they just immediately collapsed and fell apart about as quickly under the weight of this massive Saudi backed counteroff, hundreds of fighters on both sides have reportedly been killed since the internationally recognized government's counteroffensive began.

While all of this has been greatly exacerbating the rising tensions between the UAE and Saudi Arabia which will constrain both of their abilities to actually contain their mutual foe in Yemen whom they had previously been cooperating against, the Houthis who are now being presented With a golden opportunity immediately after they reach their ceasefires with Israel and the United States to refocus their attention back inward, to expand their own control in Yemen during the chaos.

The Houthis have in fact never before been in a better geopolitical position than they are currently.

After two years of war with Israel, all of Iran's other proxies in the Middle east have been either crippled or outright destroyed.

Hamas is in tatters in the ruins of Gaza.