UAE, Saudi Arabia Turn Yemen Into Pawnboard for Exploitation

SANA’A (KI) -- In December, fighters aligned with the Southern Transitional Council (STC), a UAE-backed separatist force, raised their flags across southern Yemen, consolidating control over all eight southern provinces. 

The move marks a de facto partition of the country, squeezing the Saudi-backed fugitive regime of Presidential Leadership Council (PLC) between a UAE-backed southern proxy and the allied forces of Yemen’s army and Ansarullah resistance fighters in the north.
The STC has been presenting itself as the protector of southern identity while cementing a UAE-controlled power base across Yemen’s key cities, ports, and oil-producing regions.
The UAE’s ambitions are stark. Its alliance with the STC has transformed southern Yemen into a client state, with salaries, media, and military units flowing through Abu Dhabi. Key strategic points along the Red Sea, including Aden and the approaches to the Bab al-Mandeb strait, are now effectively under UAE-Israel coordination, giving the Persian Gulf monarchy and Tel Aviv direct influence over one of the world’s busiest maritime chokepoints.  
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, ostensibly the champion of a “united Yemen,” is left propping up the PLC with little leverage. Riyadh’s intervention against the northern Sana’a-administration has been hollow, as the real battlefield is not the north but the south, where UAE-backed forces have prioritized sidelining Saudi-backed rivals over confronting the insurgents. 
The kingdom appears trapped in a losing contest for influence, paying the costs of war while Abu Dhabi secures the spoils.
Sana’a remains nominally opposed to both Persian Gulf powers, but the UAE and Israel’s coordination in the south, coupled with Saudi Arabia’s weakened stance, has created a fractured Yemen: two heavily armed, ideologically rigid entities with the PLC’s territory slowly shrinking to irrelevance. 
UAE expansionism, backed by Israeli strategic interests, and Saudi overreach have transformed Yemen into a pawnboard, with ordinary Yemenis paying the price in war, economic collapse, and lost sovereignty.
What was once one nation is now two Yemens. The south functions as a client enclave, and the PLC clings to survival. Both Saudi Arabia and the UAE have shown that their intervention is not about protecting Yemen but about carving it up to advance their regional ambitions, exploiting its people and resources while turning its ports and strategic waterways into instruments of foreign power projection.