The Southern Transitional Council is Testing Riyadh's Red Lines in Yemen
The STC's declaration is a stress test of Saudi patience, and a gamble with Yemen’s last pockets of stability.
Today I read the most consequential announcement to come out of the Southern Transitional Council (STC) in years, and possibly the most fragile. Here is my quick reading about the situation:
I’ve been watching the Southern Transitional Council since its inception. They have been open about self-determination and a return to their 1990 borders even as they shared power through the Riyadh Agreement, but the STC leadership was never quite ready to announce it, and today falls in line with that pattern.
Today, January 2, 2026, STC leader and Presidential Leadership Council (PLC) member Aidarous al-Zubaidi announced in a televised address a timed, conditional pathway to statehood: a two-year transition, a referendum, an invitation to the international community, and a constitutional declaration set for implementation on January 2, 2028. He included a tripwire clause; that the Southern constitution takes effect immediately if Southern forces face military aggression. The structure is designed to project legitimacy and restraint. Whether it achieves either is another question.
The STC is executing the ritual sequence that’s supposed to produce recognition: transition, consultation, formalization. The problem isn’t that the sequence is wrong. The problem is that the sequence itself is assumed to generate legitimacy, even though legitimacy in this system still runs through regional actors with veto power.
It’s a calculated construction. Also a risky one.
This is the gambit embedded in the STC’s calculation: treating Saudi restraint as Saudi acceptance. Riyadh has watched the UAE expand influence through proxies across the region, often silently. That silence was broken in Yemen when it decided to intervene militarily in Mukalla.
Territory control, while an advantage for the STC, does not grant legitimacy by default, and timelines don’t substitute for buy-in. The STC can hold ground and administer space, but recognition (no matter how southerners want it) still runs through Riyadh, and Saudi Arabia is currently signaling red lines, not accommodation. That’s the tension embedded in this announcement: a movement with military weight, testing whether facts on the ground can force diplomatic recalibration.
To understand the Saudi Red lines better, context matters. The STC announcement lands three days after Saudi Arabia bombed the port of Mukalla, destroying weapons shipments that had arrived from the UAE’s Fujairah port. The Saudi Foreign Ministry called UAE actions “extremely dangerous” and a threat to national security. Yemen’s Presidential Leadership Council, through al-Alimi, gave the UAE 24 hours to leave and canceled their joint defense agreement. Abu Dhabi complied, but four of the PLC’s eight members, including STC leader Aidarous al-Zubaidi, Tariq Saleh, Faraj al-Bahsani, and Abu Zar’a al-Muharrami, rejected al-Alimi’s decrees as unconstitutional. Half the council declared the expulsion order void.
This is not a procedural dispute. The four members who rejected al-Alimi’s decrees represent the main military forces on the ground: the STC, the Giants Brigades, the Hadrami Elite, and the National Resistance Forces. The PLC president issued orders. The people with guns said no. That’s not a disagreement. That’s a governing structure that no longer functions.
For the STC, there is no plausible deniability left. The UAE link is now explicit. Whatever independence the STC desires, it is widely perceived that it arrives stamped with Emirati fingerprints regardless of withdrawal. And Riyadh is not treating this as an internal Yemeni matter; it’s treating it as a Gulf confrontation.
And there’s a wider, more important frame here. In September 2025, Zubaidi told UAE state media that an independent South Yemen would join the Abraham Accords, a statement designed to appeal to Washington and Tel Aviv, but one that risks alienating most Yemenis and the broader Arab public, given the war in Gaza. The STC has been signaling openness to Israel since 2020, when Vice President Hani Bin Braik welcomed the UAE-Israel normalization and this adds pressure on Saudi.
Now layer in what happened on December 26: Israel became the first country to formally recognize Somaliland. Saudi Arabia condemned the move, but the UAE did not. From Riyadh’s perspective, this is not a coincidence; it’s encirclement. The Horn of Africa, the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, southern Yemen: a single interconnected theater where the UAE and Israel are expanding presence while Saudi influence contracts.
There are also other calculations, including Hadramout and al-Mahra. And Hadramaut isn’t just oil. It borders Saudi Arabia directly, 425 miles of shared frontier and deep tribal ties that Riyadh considers integral to its national security. Saudi Arabia has long eyed the governorate for a potential oil pipeline to the Arabian Sea, bypassing both the Strait of Hormuz and Bab al-Mandab. The STC’s push into Hadramaut doesn’t just shift Yemen’s internal balance; it puts a UAE-aligned force on Saudi Arabia’s southern border, controlling resources Riyadh had plans for.
Amid this, the STC’s announcement doesn’t just add another variable to an already volatile equation, but it confirms a pattern Riyadh has been watching with alarm.
Here’s the thing: this could last two days, not two years. Riyadh sees Yemen’s fragmentation as a greater threat than any single faction, and the UAE remains the STC’s lifeline. Saudi pressure through Abu Dhabi could force a quiet retraction before the constitutional declaration is even translated.
In the meantime, the situation is complex. It’s difficult to imagine al-Alimi returning to govern from Mashiq Palace when half his council has declared his decrees void and the forces on the ground answer to them, not him. The Presidential Leadership Council has effectively dissolved, even if it persists on paper. That creates a problem for Riyadh. Saudi Arabia doesn’t want to host a Yemeni government-in-exile indefinitely, and the PLC’s collapse removes whatever fig leaf of legitimacy it offered. The STC’s move may force the Saudi hand - but not necessarily in the direction the STC hopes.
And if this political crisis doesn’t retract quietly, the consequences cascade. Military confrontation makes the South a battlefield again. This is the same South that, despite the instability and poor services, has been a refuge for Yemenis fleeing Houthi control in the North. But even short of that, the political instability this triggers undermines the administrative structures people have been relying on. Yemenis who fled the Northern areas and live under STC territorial control, Yemenis in the South who’ve been trying to build something functional…. All of it becomes precarious when the government itself is contested. The gambit isn’t just testing Riyadh’s red lines. It’s gambling with the only relatively stable ground left in Yemen (besides Marib and parts of Taiz), where people have been trying to breathe through a decade of war.
Finally, Iran and the Houthis are watching all of this. They now get to position themselves as the only faction defending “Yemeni unity,” a propaganda gift they did nothing to earn, handed to them by their enemies, tearing each other apart.
For now, the STC has made its move. Whether it sticks depends on a conversation happening somewhere other than Aden.
Excellent, timely and informative piece, as usual.