From Red Sea to Horn of Africa: How Yemen exposed the Saudi-UAE divide

A quiet battle for regional influence between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates burst dramatically into the open last week when Saudi fighter jets bombed Yemen’s port city of Mukalla on Dec. 30, after Riyadh accused Abu Dhabi of sending weapons to separatist rebels in the war-torn country. In an unprecedented move, the kingdom publicly condemned its former ally, saying it was "disappointed" by the UAE’s actions, which it claimed threatened Saudi Arabia’s national security.

The UAE swiftly denied the shipments contained any arms. In an obviously deescalatory move, Abu Dhabi said it would adhere to the ultimatum issued a day earlier by Yemen’s internationally recognized government, which required the UAE to withdraw its forces from the country, where Abu Dhabi backs factions aligned with the Southern Transitional Council (STC) that have fought the Houthis and are now seeking an independent state in southern Yemen. Saudi Arabia opposes a separate state in southern Yemen and sees its potential as a direct challenge to its border security and to the political framework it has invested in since 2015. Yemen was divided into two states from 1967 until unification in 1990. 

Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, Prince Faisal bin Farhan, is expected to meet with Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Washington on Wednesday, where the situation in Yemen and the rift with the UAE are expected to top the discussion. The Trump administration has sought to maintain neutrality in the row between its key allies, praising both in a Dec. 27 statement for their diplomatic role in Yemen and urging them to exercise restraint and continue to engage in dialogue. Rubio has since held separate phone calls with Prince Faisal and Emirati Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed.

The immediate crisis appears to have been contained largely due to the UAE backing down and withdrawing its counterterror force from Yemen. Abu Dhabi officially withdrew from Yemen in 2019 but had a remaining counterterrorism force that it has now pulled out. But the differences that are pitting the Gulf's two most powerful countries against each other are likely only to grow, regional diplomats and analysts say. “The distrust is too deep. The problems are structural and won’t go away,” a senior diplomat serving in the region told Al-Monitor. “This is a fight over the entire Horn of Africa and the Red Sea corridor, a fight over who will be the dominant political and economic force and the main maritime logistics hub in the Middle East,” the diplomat, speaking on background, explained.

Sitting at the convergence of critical shipping lanes in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, Yemen is pivotal to those ambitions as both countries seek to secure their positions in a post-oil economy world. Control and influence in Yemen offer leverage over global trade routes linking Asia, Africa and Europe. Saudi Arabia wants to make sure that Yemen remains intact and that the Bab el Mandeb waterway remains under Yemeni government control. “If Saudi Arabia loses Bab el Mandeb or the Gulf of Aden, the next thing they lose will be the Red Sea,” the diplomat added.

Others argue that common interests will override any quarrels. “Allies clash now and then. This is a classic case. You can’t just walk away from 40 years of strategic economic bonds. Eventually, the commonalities will bring them back to the pre-clash period,” said Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, an associate professor of political science at the United Arab Emirates University in Al-Ain. On Tuesday the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council held joint military exercises in Saudi Arabia. “The UAE was there,” Abdulla noted.

But the disappointment and divide over Yemen are liable to remain. The bigger risk lies in the security vacuum, which Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) will likely fill. With Emirati forces “and all their logistics and expertise” out of the picture, AQAP will come back “in a very ferocious way,” Abdulla predicted. “From now on the government of Yemen, with the help of the Saudis, will have to address this massive challenge, and I am not sure they are up to it,” Abdulla told Al-Monitor. The group has a long track record of exploiting fractured and weak states to rebuild its networks and stage high-impact attacks. If the rift between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi persists, it will further complicate intelligence-sharing and counterterrorism coordination, both of which are big concerns for the United States.

From friends to frenemies

A decade ago the two countries were allied in Yemen against a constellation of common foes: the Iran-backed Houthis, the Muslim Brotherhood-linked al-Islah, and AQAP. All were deemed existential threats in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings that shook the Gulf monarchies. Even Qatar, which has close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, joined the US-supported Arab coalition until its ejection in 2017.

That same year, cracks in the coalition began to surface when Abu Dhabi helped establish, fund and actively promote the STC, which is led by the former governor of Aden, Aidarous al-Zubaidi. “The Emiratis basically created this thing,” said Elisabeth Kendall, the president of Girton College at Cambridge University, who has spent protracted periods in Yemen.

“The Saudis hoped that the STC could be contained to four of the six governorates [in south] Yemen that feel more strongly about nostalgia for the previous South Arabia,” Kendall told Al-Monitor. She was referring to the historical region mainly centered in what is now southern Yemen, which became the Soviet-backed Democratic Republic of South Yemen from 1967 until reunification in 1990.

In April 2018, the STC, together with Emirati forces, took over the idyllic Yemeni archipelago of Socotra, which has since become an elite tourist destination, with flights and visas arranged in the UAE. Despite some initial grumbling, the Saudis accepted this new fait accompli. Perhaps the UAE was betting on a similar outcome last month when its STC allies seized the provinces Hadramout and al-Mahra, which border Saudi Arabia and Oman, respectively. Riyadh insists that the secessionists did so at the UAE’s behest. Abu Dhabi denies the claims.

The Emirati Foreign Ministry denounced the allegations in a statement, saying that the UAE has “focused on containing the situation, supporting deescalation efforts and promoting understandings to contribute to preserving security and stability” since the start of the STC’s offensives. 

Red lines crossed

“It was a suicidal mistake that crossed all the red lines. It was a watershed moment,” said Hisham Al-Omeisy, a Yemeni scholar at the European Institute of Peace, in reference to the STC land grab. “The [Saudi-backed and internationally recognized] Yemeni government pretty much lost 95% of its presence on the ground,” with many of its leaders fleeing to Riyadh.

Adding fuel to the fire, Zubaidi declared plans on Jan. 2 to establish a "South Arabian state." He also suggested that if South Yemen were to become independent, it would establish formal ties with Israel, just as the UAE did in 2020 when it joined the Abraham Accords.

The UAE “badly miscalculated how strongly Saudi Arabia objects to this,” Kendall said. 

“Imagine Hadramout, with a 700-kilometer-long border with Saudi Arabia, and al-Mahra, with a 300-kilometer-long border with Oman, becoming part of the Abraham Accords. And look at the Red Sea,” she added, where Saudi Arabia is backing the internationally recognized government and the UAE yet another secessionist militia, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which is led by a rival general who is accused of war crimes. The RSF most recently seized the entirety of Darfur province and the country’s largest oil field. While the UAE denies its military alliance with the RSF, few doubt that it would like to see its alleged proxy gain a foothold in the Red Sea, which is among its stated aims.

Sudan’s 800-kilometer-long Red Sea coastline faces Saudi Arabia. “If you are Saudi Arabia, you don’t want a UAE-backed entity that becomes the dominant power there and then another rattling on your doorstep to the south in Hadramout,” Kendall said. “It all begins to look a bit threatening.”

Hadramout, where most of Yemen’s own modest oil reserves lie, is arguably the most commercially exploitable part of Yemen. More critically, though, it is deeply intertwined with the kingdom. Four of the richest non-royal families in the kingdom have roots in the province. They include the contracting giants, the bin Ladens, and the banking dynasty, the Al Mahfouz family. Saud al-Qahtani, a former key aide to the Saudi crown prince who US intelligence assessed was involved in the plot to murder Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018, also hails from Hadramout. Many in Hadramout have dual Yemeni and Saudi citizenship. 

“Historically, Hadramout has been Saudi Arabia’s backyard,” Omeisy, the Yemeni scholar, observed. Its fall was a tipping point. 

Israel in the mix

Others argue that an equally big trigger was Israel’s recognition last week of Somaliland, which is separated from southern Yemen by the Gulf of Aden. On Tuesday, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar made his first official trip to Somaliland.

While most Arab countries condemned Israel’s recognition of the breakaway state, Abu Dhabi remained silent. “That is why Saudi Arabia escalated and decided this has to stop,” the regional diplomat contended.

The UAE’s strong ties with Israel underpin its recent confidence, many analysts say. Saudi Arabia continues to resist establishing ties with the Jewish state, saying it will only do so if a credible pathway for Palestinian statehood is achieved. 

Abdulla dismisses the notion that his country’s assertiveness stems from its relations with Israel. Rather, he attributes its growing influence to what he calls the emergence of a “Gulf Moment” that is driven by “UAE momentum,” something now driven by good governance and pragmatism instead of oil. 

Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, has been left “frustrated” and “empty-handed” after a decade of conflict in Yemen. The north is in the hands of the Houthis, and “the south has more or less gone the UAE way, and there is nothing left for them,” Abdulla argued. At the same time, the Saudis have “grown unhappy — to put it mildly — with the rise of the UAE.” The UAE does not want to be looked at “as a junior partner,” and the Saudis “can’t get over their big brother syndrome,” he said.

Yet for a time, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was allegedly, with plenty of nudging from the United States, on the cusp of forging formal ties with Israel as well, seeing them as a ticket to US security guarantees against Iran. 

When in 2019 the UAE announced it was withdrawing its troops from Yemen amid the rising toll of Emirati casualties on the ground, it later emerged that the UAE maintained a military presence of some kind. It is likely to do so now as well, diplomatic sources say.

Still, Saudi Arabia’s effective ruler and crown prince saw the UAE’s 2019 pullout as “a personal betrayal,” the diplomat briefing Al-Monitor said. Even so, the crown prince did not allow such feelings to mar his relations with UAE President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, who then served as his mentor. The savvy UAE leader helped the far younger prince to overhaul the Saudi economy, offering a model drawn from the UAE’s own diversification and state-led investment strategies. He also backed the crown prince’s push to curb the power of hard-line religious institutions and later to mend fences with Washington. His standing plummeted globally after he was accused of sanctioning the 2018 murder of Khashoggi.

But as the Saudi ruler began to hit his stride internationally, his confidence grew along with his ambitions. Pouring billions into his Vision 2030 scheme, Prince Mohammed is said to have begun mimicking the Emirati leader in the hopes of supplanting the UAE as the Middle East’s main financial center and its dominant maritime and logistical hub. The Emirates had been at the game far longer, building its “port power” in the Red Sea, the Horn of Africa and, most recently, in Syria’s Tartous, where the Dubai-based logistics giant DP World began operations under a 30-year contract that it signed last year. “This is the only economic relevance the Emiratis bring to the global table. And now the Saudis want it," the diplomat said.

Some have already declared Saudi Arabia the “winner” in the first round of overt tensions in Yemen, if only by virtue of its size. Others say the UAE will not give up on its campaign for regional hegemony. “Saudi Arabia is backing up its red lines with military action and in the military fight Saudi is going to win. The UAE is very professional and capable but Saudi is just big. It would have been very ugly, so the Emiratis just backed down,” Kendall observed. But this doesn’t mean the UAE’s long-term plan has changed, she said.

Abdulla sees two possibilities: "deescalation” or more "escalation." 

“Deescalation is the Abu Dhabi way; escalation is the Riyadh way,” he concluded.