The UAE and Israel, backed by the US, have long sown the seeds of civil war and conflict across the region. Will they finally be held accountable?
David Hearst
Nor has it any relevance to the two traditional bugbears of the Sunni Arab ruler: Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood.
It has not been triggered by a trader immolating himself after having his food carts confiscated by officials in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia. No mass demonstrations have taken place in Cairo calling for the downfall of a dictator.
And yet, this shift could have as wide repercussions as the Arab Spring once had, 15 years ago.
What is commonly referred to in the Middle East as the "real" nations of the Arab world - meaning those countries with significant populations - have woken up to what has been happening all around them.
Saudi Arabia and Algeria, principally, and Egypt potentially have realised that a plan to dominate and control the key chokepoints of the region by Israel (explicitly) and the United Arab Emirates (implicitly) is a threat to their national interests.
The Israeli-Emirati plan is simple: fragment once-formidable Arab states, control key trade routes like the Bab al-Mandeb Strait between Yemen and the Horn of Africa, plant military bases all around the region, and you will ensure lucrative military and financial control for the rest of the century.
Policy of fragmentation
In Israel, this plan was explicit. It’s the formula Tel Aviv is trying in Syria, with their creation of a protectorate of the Druze in southern Syria, and attempts to do the same to Kurdish areas in the north. This strategy is open and declared.
Israel doesn’t want a united Syria. But fragmentation is also the policy inherent in Tel Aviv’s recognition of Somaliland, which offers the Israeli military a foothold in the Horn of Africa.
For Abu Dhabi, fragmentation had long been been set in motion all over the Arab world.
It had other targets, principally political Islam. But fragmentation was its policy in Libya, where the UAE supported General Khalifa Haftar against the Government of National Accord in Tripoli.
The blinkers had fallen from Saudi eyes. They felt that they were being surrounded, and if they did not act now, the kingdom itself could be the next target
It was the same policy in Sudan, where the Emiratis funded and armed the Rapid Support Forces and their commander, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemedti), who is under US Treasury sanctions. Of course they deny it, but the Sudanese civil war would not be happening without massive Emirati involvement.
And it’s been their policy for at least a decade in southern Yemen. The fragmentation plan for Yemen grew out of the UAE’s fear of the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Islah) taking control of what passed for a Yemeni government.
But the Emiratis have set their sights on bigger goals than crushing al-Islah, who have a limited presence in small parts of the north.
Today, Abu Dhabi’s grand plan has little to do with Saudi Arabia’s ceasefire with the Houthis - even though each campaign against al-Islah and the Houthis provided convenient cover.
The plan all along was to finance, arm and install a separatist state in southern Yemen, under the umbrella of the Southern Transitional Council (STC) in Aden.
Imperial designs
A separatist southern Yemeni state is nothing new, but the plan was turbocharged by Mohammed bin Zayed, the president of the UAE. He almost got away with it.
Yemen has long been fractious and fragmented, the playground of imperial designs of the British and Americans.
When the Houthis took control of the capital Sanaa in 2014, the national government was forced into exile. Even after its return, its writ on the ground often looked notional.
The leader of Yemen’s Presidential Leadership Council (PLC) shared the same city, Aden, as the STC. The PLC itself was until recently an uneasy coalition of factions - excluding the Houthis - a thin majority of whom backed Riyadh.
Abu Dhabi’s policy of making the STC so militarily strong, to the point that it could declare itself to be an independent state that recognised Israel, was on the point of becoming a reality.
All the STC needed was to take over two sparsely populated but geographically large provinces in the east of the country: al-Mahra and Hadhramaut, which account for nearly half the territory of Yemen.
Hadhramaut shares a border with Saudi Arabia, and the appearance of the STC in the capital Mukalla marked the wakeup call that Riyadh needed.
In terms of scale - and of every other jolly good wheeze that former Scottish public school boy Mohammed bin Zayed dreamed up in his plans to turn the UAE into “Little Sparta” - the takeover of Mukalla was a mere blip on his radar screen.
But in terms of the effect it had on his neighbour, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the move was electric. This single act of Emirati overreach had a dramatic effect.
Reaching for the gun
I had forecast that the two princes - who had jointly masterminded, financed and armed the counter-revolution against the Arab Spring in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen and Syria - would eventually fall out, but I never imagined it would be over a port as relatively minor as Mukalla.
The blinkers had fallen from Saudi eyes. They felt that they were being surrounded, and if they did not act now, the kingdom itself could be the next target of the fragmentation policy being enacted all around them.
A country that had for so long conducted foreign policy slowly and behind beaded curtains, reached for the gun.
The Saudis backed a counteroffensive by Yemeni forces loyal to the internationally recognised government, to recapture Hadramaut and al-Mahra. Mukalla was bombed. STC fighters were killed and forced to withdraw.
When three days later Israel became the first country to officially recognise Somaliland as a sovereign state, Saudi fears were confirmed.
These were not accidental noises in the night. What was taking place in Yemen on one side of the Bab al-Mandeb Strait (the Strait of Tears), which stands at the mouth of the Red Sea, and on the other side in the Horn of Africa, were part of the same plan.
Israel sold its decision to recognise Somaliland at home as an opportunity to establish a base, through which it could attack the Houthis. But it was much more than that.
As Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar flew to shake hands with Somaliland’s leader, Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan was in Cairo with a much grimmer face, making sure Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi was reading from the same script. Sisi, the ultimate weather vane, did not need any prompting.
A statement issued by the Egyptian presidency said their positions were identical on Somalia, Sudan, Yemen and Gaza - all subject to the Israeli-Emirati fragmentation plan - and that solutions to each conflict zone had to “preserve the unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity of states”.
Arms shipments from the UAE had kept on arriving, for use by STC-backed fighters. When Saudi Arabia bombed a shipment of weapons and vehicles in the port of Mukalla, it directly called out the UAE’s role in arming the southern separatists.
Hours later, Abu Dhabi announced it was withdrawing its forces from Yemen. It even abandoned the island of Socotra. In a matter of hours, all the work, planning and financing of the last decade had been undone.
Silent collapse
This is the way the Middle East changes.
Not by photo ops choreographed in the Oval Office. Not by US President Donald Trump’s assertion that he had changed 3,000 years of history, a statement dismissed as ludicrous almost before he had gotten the words out of his mouth. Not by grand sounding - but in reality, deeply cynical - pacts like the Abraham Accords.
But by sudden and silent collapses.
Another occurred on Wednesday. The STC itself was on the verge of collapse. Its leader, Aidarous al-Zubaidi, disappeared as he was due to join a delegation in Riyadh.
Rumours circulated online that he had fled to the mountains of al-Dhale, his hometown. Zubaidi had just been stripped of his membership in the PLC and charged with treason.
Then on Thursday, Major General Turki al-Maliki, the spokesperson for the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, said intelligence showed that Zubaidi left Aden late on 7 January by sea to Somaliland.
It was the single worst day in living memory for Little Sparta's dreams to dominate the region
Meanwhile, the STC lost contact with its 50-man delegation in Riyadh.
It was the single worst day in living memory for Little Sparta’s dreams to dominate the region.
Saudi social media, the licensed and highly controlled voice of kingdom, went wild. One post that went viral featured a Saudi F16 whizzing through the sky, to the tune of a song in English.
The lyrics ran: “Whoever threatened us with lions in the lions’ den, we stormed the den and found no one there. Maazi the Second [the nickname of the founder of the kingdom, King Abdulaziz, now applied to Mohammed bin Salman] has no 40 lookalikes; he resembles only his grandfather and his father, Abu Fahd. And the sedition kindled by the accursed devil, was extinguished in its infancy by Maazi.”
These words do not need parsing. The message is all too clear. The devil is how Mohammed bin Zayed is now being described by its neighbour and former ally.
The first two lines of this war cry were recited to Mohammed bin Salman in person by Colonel Mishal bin Mahmas al-Harthi, a “military poet” in the Saudi army. I never even guessed they had or needed one. But there is no doubt that this is now the view of the kingdom.
Secret meetings
It’s a massive sea change. Mohammed bin Zayed alighted on the young unknown prince when relations between the two nations were at their lowest.
Mohammed bin Zayed introduced Mohammed bin Salman to Washington, the Trump clan and ultimately the White House.
Mohammed bin Salman owes his entire ascendance up the greasy pole of the Saudi royal family to his Emirati neighbour, who put his well-connected lobbying machine in DC at his disposal.
Mohammed bin Zayed was the brains behind the strategy of making the new prince Israel-friendly. He staged secret meetings between the pretender to the Saudi throne and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
But ultimately, the fallout between mentor and pupil was only a matter of time.
Neither Mohammed bin Salman nor his entourage have changed. They are still the same people. They have no second thoughts about making Saudi dissidents disappear. Human rights do not keep them awake at night.
Many of the tweets attacking the Emirati strategy are being posted by “Columbuos”, who is reliably thought to be Saud al-Qahtani, the man who oversaw and masterminded the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
On Sunday, he tweeted: "Saudi Arabia stated "No to normalisation except with the establishment of a Palestinian state." Therefore, you can see Israel's madness in accelerating the steps of its secret project and its desperation to tear apart the Arab world into more and more small states to pressure the normalisation file...
"The Saudi project is the Arab project that stood with the Arab countries and their peoples and stands against the projects of destruction, division, and displacement. The Saudi project is the one that the Arabs must fight for."
It is also telling that in the midst of Saudi Arabia's decisive action in Yemen, on Monday, the king and crown prince called for public Saudi national campaign to donate for Palestinians. It collected 700 million riyals (close to $200million) and still going.
The people who run the kingdom have not changed. What has changed is this: they have at last realised that their neighbour’s regional projects are a threat to their own kingdom - and that, for any Saudi ruling elite, is a red line.
The price of oil
While so much of the Emirati way of operating has involved proxies and deniable coups, Mohammed bin Zayed knows he cannot mess with this neighbour. Saudi Arabia has a population of 35 million. The UAE has a population of 10 million, but only one million of those are citizens. End of story.
As senior Saudi journalist and analyst Daud al-Sharian wrote on X: “Attempts to divide #Yemen and #Somalia and #Sudan are not isolated events, but rather a single trajectory targeting the reshaping of the region through the creation of pockets of instability surrounding Saudi Arabia.
“This concurrence reflects a project that transcends transient political disputes, and targets the Kingdom’s role as a pillar of regional security and balance. Awareness of the nature of this trajectory is essential for protecting stability and understanding what is happening with profound consciousness and insight.”
As Trump preens after having kidnapped the president of Venezuela, and talks with no restraint about seizing control of the biggest oil reserves in the world, his other ally in the Middle East is having different thoughts.
It will be years, possibly decades, before Venezuela’s oil output - once grabbed by US oil companies - begins to match that of Saudi Arabia’s, but the direction of travel is clear.
Trump’s actions will inevitably lower the price of oil, an outcome that is not in Saudi Arabia’s national interest, while the current price of Brent crude is already too low for the Saudi national budget.
Trump mistakes military kinetic power for the power to govern and dictate the rules to foreign countries far from his shores. These are two different things.
Exiting the doom loop
The US under Trump can indeed unseat neighbouring leaders, bomb Iran for a second time, and ruin the economies of nations around the world if they don’t play ball. No one is disputing this. Trump has the most powerful military, and the dollar remains the world’s reserve currency; he can credibly threaten anyone he likes around the globe.
There is nothing to stop him from parachuting a company of special forces over Greenland, sticking a flag in the ice and claiming it as American sovereign territory.
But what he cannot do is deal with the consequences of his actions, any more that his predecessors could handle the blowback from Iraq and Afghanistan. Venezuela is twice the land mass of Iraq, and its population is well armed.
Both leaders think they can do what they want, when they want. It is long past time for an Arab leader to tell them they can't
The Saudi kingdom does not need to respond symmetrically to Israel’s clear and overt plans for regional domination - nor will it. But it can start to make life very difficult for the two Little Spartas, who are sowing the seeds of civil war and conflict at will around the Middle East.
The wakeup call that Saudi Arabia has had is a welcome development - not because it helps the growing list of peoples who are under permanent occupation, including the Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese, but because it could be the first sign of a Sunni Arab state not just claiming leadership, but acting as an independent leader.
It brings two Arab states, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, closer to the other regional military power, Turkey. Riyadh’s actions will not be unwelcome in Iran either. It has been saying for years that regional stability can only be created by a regional alliance that is autonomous and independent of the machinations of Washington and Israel.
Algeria, which came to its own conclusions about the toxic alliance between the UAE and Israel much earlier on, could also join such an alliance.
This may be thinking too far ahead, but it’s what millions of Arabs and Iranians actually need. It is the only exit from a doom loop of endlessly failing, western-backed interventions and occupations that never end.
In winning every battle that they started, but in losing every war, the US and Israel have overreached. Both leaders think they can do what they want, when they want. It is long past time for an Arab leader to tell them they can’t.
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