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Victory or burden? Saudi faces challenges after quelling Yemen offensive
Victory or burden? Saudi faces challenges after quelling Yemen offensive
Saudi Arabia will need to unify south Yemen's rival factions and shoulder its financial burdens as it moves to purge UAE influence after a failed separatist offensive, analysts say.
The oil-rich neighbours ended up backing competing forces in Yemen's south after initially combining forces to fight the Iran-backed Houthi rebels, who drove the government from the capital Sanaa in 2014 and now control much of the north.
Fissures in the government-run south came to a head when UAE-backed separatists took over two provinces in December, triggering air strikes by Saudi warplanes and a counter-offensive by pro-Saudi militias.
Now, experts say Saudi Arabia must unify the southern factions and make progress in slow-moving peace negotiations with the Houthis.
- What's happening on the ground? -
From afar, Saudi Arabia's offensive in Yemen last week appears decisive: its allies now control the south, and Saudi officials say separatist leader Aidarous al-Zubaidi has fled to the UAE.
The southern government, previously split between UAE and Saudi-backed figures, has dismissed UAE-aligned ministers and declared that all southern factions would unite under Saudi command.
Riyadh is also planning talks between the factions to reshape the political landscape.
"It's obvious that Saudi achieved quick tactical success," Hesham Alghannam, a Saudi analyst at the Carnegie Institute, told AFP.
But after the UAE's exit, Riyadh will be the lone power managing disparate groups within the government and overseeing a state hollowed out by more than a decade of war. Its challenges include the costs of rebuilding, and paying forces under its command.
"This will all become the burden of Saudi Arabia," said Farea al-Muslimi, a Yemen expert at Chatham House.
Riyadh's defence minister said Wednesday that it would invest more than $500 million in development projects in Yemen.
Some members of Zubaidi's Southern Transitional Council, a separatist movement backed by the UAE, previously announced its dissolution during a meeting in Riyadh, but other officials dismissed the announcement as having been made under duress, and the group retains strong support.
On Saturday, thousands of people defied a protest ban in the city of Aden, the base of the southern government, holding photos of Zubaidi and chanting slogans against Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
"The Saudis are reasonable enough to accept that perfect unification is impossible," Alghannam said of Yemen's competing factions.
"The goal is to create enough functional coherence that southern Yemen doesn't become either an Emirati sphere of influence or a power vacuum exploited by the Houthis and AQ," he said, referring to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the militant network's Yemeni branch.
- What now for the UAE? -
The UAE withdrawing its troops "means that they have handed over the Yemeni file to Saudi Arabia", a top Yemeni official told AFP, requesting anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.
The STC had for years built its power base along Yemen's strategic southern coast and the Gulf of Aden with UAE support.
But Yemen is not the only zone of interest for Abu Dhabi, an Emirati analyst, Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, said.
As the Yemen crisis unfolded, Israel became the world's first country to recognise the breakaway region of Somaliland in the Horn of Africa, a move that has lent legitimacy to the UAE-aligned region that faces Yemen across the Gulf of Aden.
"Yemen was just one piece in a huge network of friends that we have. The UAE is a rising regional power. And that's not going to change just because we pulled out of Yemen," Abdulla said.
- When will the Gulf row end? -
Diplomatic relations appear fraught between Saudi Arabia and the UAE after the conflict in Yemen brought their rivalry to the fore.
The oil-rich Gulf neighbours entered Yemen's civil war in 2015 as key coalition partners sharing the same goal: to quash the Houthis.
Once united on every front, they now support opposing sides in disputes across the Middle East and Africa, from Yemen to Somalia and beyond.
Yemen has lit the fuse on the Gulf's biggest diplomatic crisis since the UAE and Saudi Arabia led a boycott of Qatar over its ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran in 2017.
Saudi media have embarked on a smear campaign targeting the UAE and Zubaidi, while influencers and commentators from both sides are sparring on social media.
"I don't believe the crisis can be overcome anytime soon... for the simple reason that it has become a very public, personalised crisis that drew ordinary people and media figures," Muslimi said.
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This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text.
