Saudi Arabia urged to reconcile with UAE to drive back Houthi separatists in Yemen

Saudi Arabia is being urged to reconcile with the United Arab Emirates over Yemen as the price Riyadh must pay to form a military alliance capable of driving the Houthis back.

Relations between the UAE and Saudi Arabia in Yemen, where both had backed anti-Houthi forces, plummeted in January this year when a force with which the UAE had been aligned – the separatist Southern Transitional Council (STC) – was attacked and defeated by Saudi Arabia in a move intended to squash its attempt to recreate a separate southern state. The UAE subsequently in effect quit Yemen.

But the unexpected success in mid September of the Iran-aligned Houthis’ drive to the narrow Bab al-Mandab strait against pro-government forces has transformed the geopolitics of the region again. The push south defeated the previously UAE-backed National Resistance Forces led by Tareq Saleh, whose front rapidly collapsed.

The future role of the UAE in Yemen was discussed at a meeting in Abu Dhabi on Sunday attended by the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, the UAE president, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, and a group of other Arab states, including representatives of Saudi Arabia.

Netanyahu reportedly offered to help Saudi Arabia defeat the Houthis , an offer that Riyadh would probably find near impossible to accept, even though Donald Trump has failed to answer the Saudi call for US help in Yemen.

A further meeting to discuss Yemen took place on Tuesday in Riyadh between Prince Khalid bin Salman Al Saud, the Saudi defence minister, and Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE vice-president.

It is part of a range of signs from the two sides suggesting they may want to find a path to reconciliation, even if only on energy.

Following the Houthis’ push to the Bab al-Mandab strait, a chokepoint on Saudi oil exports, their forces are now trying to consolidate their gains and take the south-western city of Taiz.

“The Houthi forces are mounting simultaneous waves of attacks on the city, trying to exhaust the Taiz Axis force defending the city,” said Baraa Shiban, a Gulf and Yemen specialist at the defence thinktank Rusi who has just spent a week in Taiz. “The Houthis are pushed back, but then the next day they come again on a different front.

“Efforts are being made to try to end the rift between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and there may be some confidence-building measures. But the UAE has left Yemen, and it is unlikely that Riyadh would let them back in since they are aligned with the STC, and that would spell trouble … the UAE and Saudi Arabia are fundamentally on opposite sides.”

The STC leader, Aidarous al-Zubaidi, fled into exile after the Saudi attack on its forces and the movement became marginalised as a political force.

The former Yemen foreign minister and STC supporter Khaled Alyemany told the Guardian that Saudi Arabia may have to reconsider its political approach to the southern issue since the Giant Brigades, the UAE-trained southern forces once associated with the STC, provided some of the most reliable, well-equipped forces on the ground to stem the Houthi advance.

The STC has urged the Giant Brigades to resist merging with Yemen government forces, arguing to do so will set back the separatist cause.

“We cannot fight and wage wars in the north against the Houthis if we do not have a horizon for our independence,” Alyemany said.

“The UN-recognised government … operating from exile in Riyadh, insists that southerners fight to retake the capital, Sana’a, on its behalf, but without any promise of the south’s right to self-determination,” he said. “The problem is, so long as the Yemen government derives its legitimacy from its Saudi funders rather than its people, the outcome is not Saudi Arabia’s stated goal of security along its southern borders.”

The White House has been privately urging the UAE and the Saudi to bury their differences and allow a unified military command including the Southern Giants Brigades to challenge the Houthi advance. An additional proposal is to use Israeli intelligence and hire Israeli private security firms, something the UAE has done in the past in Yemen, sometimes to brutal effect.

Saudi Arabia, reluctant to be seen cooperating with Israel, has always resisted helping the southern separatists since division of the country might entrench Houthi rule in the north along its border. The Houthis have used drones and missiles to attack Saudi energy installations.

Despite Saudi air cover and support, the current battle to prevent the Houthis consolidating their gains is such that the parliament of the UN-recognised government has sanctioned a general mobilisation of the Yemeni people to fight the Houthis.

The World Health Organization said 838 people had been killed and 3,643 others injured due to the escalation in Yemen from 6 August last year until 26 September this year.

The Houthis insist they are not seeking to block general commercial shipping in the strait but only that linked to Saudi Arabia. On Monday they published figures showing commercial shipping was flowing as normal.

The Houthis claim Saudi Arabia is in effect a colonial power and the UN-recognised government based in Aden is a creature of Riyadh with no independent ability to govern the country.

April Longley Alley, a senior fellow at Washington Institute, told an International Crisis Group seminar that the war was existential for the Saudis, but the Houthis were not going to compromise. “We will have to see if they hold these territories, but what the Houthis learned from the Iran war is that Saudi under pressure and attack will seek de-escalation,” she said. “The Houthis are demanding a victor’s peace.”

Copyright for this text belongs to The Guardian.