Yemen's South Between the Gulf Rift and the Southern Cause
The STC gambit collapsed in five days. The question now is what survives it.
I wrote about this five days ago, the day Zubaidi announced “statehood” for the South of Yemen, in which he envisaged a two-year transition to negotiate a path to secession. At the time, I said his plan could last two days, not two years. I was off by three.
Here’s what I’m watching now: the speed of this collapse tells us something. Not just about the STC’s miscalculation, but about how little room actually existed for what they were attempting. The space they thought they saw, between Saudi frustration and Saudi action, was never there. They walked into a door that was already closing.
This is what happens when movements mistake process for power. The STC executed the ritual sequence that’s supposed to produce legitimacy, transition, consultation, and constitutional declaration, as if the sequence itself generates recognition. It doesn’t. Legitimacy in this system runs through actors with veto power. In other words, the STC had territory, but it didn’t have permission.
What Happened
Here are the facts, briefly: Saudi airstrikes on Hadramout, al-Dali’, Seiyun, Mukalla. Five civilians dead in al-Dali’, including two teachers. Homes destroyed. Saudi-aligned forces (i.e Yemeni government there are no Saudis on the ground) retook Hadramout and al-Mahra in days. The Giants Brigades now control the presidential palace in Aden (pro government). The PLC stripped Zubaidi of his seat and referred him for high treason.
And then there’s the delegation. The STC sent senior members to Riyadh for a scheduled conference/meeting based on Riyadh’s invitation. Now the STC says it cannot confirm where they are or whether they’re safe.
That part matters.
Why Zubaidi Didn’t Get on the Plane
The coalition says Zubaidi was supposed to fly to Riyadh on Tuesday night. He didn’t board. They say he fled. The STC says he stayed in Aden to manage the situation. Neither version is the point. The point is not what happened, but what Zubaidi reasonably believed could happen. He looked at that plane and saw the Ritz-Carlton. He saw Saad Hariri’s 2017 “resignation” from Saudi Arabia. detained, interrogated, and reportedly beaten. He saw what happens when troublesome allies accept invitations to Riyadh and don’t come home on their own terms.
Riyadh has a template for this. Invite, isolate, extract compliance. The form is dialogue; the substance is processing. Refusal confirms guilt; acceptance removes agency. Zubaidi understood that calculus. He refused. So Riyadh demonstrated the cost of refusal instead.
Meanwhile, the 4am airstrikes came hours later. The coalition called them “preemptive.” A more honest word would be “consequential.”
The Treason Charges
Charging Zubaidi with high treason while he’s still a sitting PLC member is not a legal process. It’s a severing. And it was the main expected move from the PLC chairman, al-Alimi.
What this tells us is that Riyadh has stopped thinking about how to manage the STC and started thinking about how to replace it. The Riyadh Agreement is dead, not because anyone declared it dead, but because you cannot charge your partners with treason and pretend the partnership survives.
The question now is who Riyadh tries to cultivate instead. There are other southern voices, figures who might carry the cause without the UAE entanglement, without the Abraham Accords signaling, without Zubaidi’s specific baggage. Whether any of them command real legitimacy is unclear. But Saudi Arabia has decided it would rather find out than continue with what it has.
Saudi Patience Was Not Inexhaustible
Here’s what gets lost in the fog of escalation: Saudi Arabia gave the STC more latitude than it gives most partners, and far more than it was obligated. Riyadh brokered the agreement that folded the STC into governance. It gave them seats on the PLC. It recognized the Southern Cause as legitimate and de-escalated a major conflict in 2018. The kingdom didn’t oppose southern ambitions in principle; it opposed chaos on its border and alignment with ambiguous outcomes in a volatile space.
The STC’s bold moves were threatening to Saudi security, and Saudi told us so. STC had seized Hadramout and al-Mahra, governorates that border Saudi Arabia directly. It received UAE weapons shipments, Riyadh called “extremely dangerous.” It rejected PLC authority when convenient. And Zubaidi told international media that an independent South Yemen would join the Abraham Accords at the exact moment MBS was making categorical commitments against normalization.
Trust didn’t erode. It was squandered.
However, the reality now is that this is no longer a Yemeni problem. It's a Gulf confrontation, and that's what makes it dangerous.
This is no longer about Yemen. Maybe it never was.
Meanwhile, the Iran-backed Houthis are not merely amplifying this rupture; they are openly savoring it. Houthi media has framed the collapse as confirmation of a long-standing claim: that the coalition confronting them was never a coherent front, but a temporary alignment destined to fracture. For the Houthis, this moment is vindication.
What Comes Next
The STC cannot back down without losing its base. Saudi Arabia cannot relent without looking weak. The UAE cannot abandon its proxy without losing credibility everywhere else it operates. Everyone is locked in. It is not so clear whether further military escalation will take place. Recent years have proved that southern resistance often preferred quiet demonstrations, civil unrest, and isolation to expansion and confrontation.
While the Saudi Kingdom has acted decisively, the UAE is not without options. Many of them are quiet, indirect, and deniable, working through alternative southern figures, parallel security relationships, economic levers, and political cultivation efforts rather than overt confrontation. That flexibility gives Abu Dhabi room to preserve influence even as Riyadh moves decisively. But it also means this confrontation is unlikely to resolve cleanly or quickly.
And underneath all of it, underneath the Gulf rivalry, the treason charges, the airstrikes, the delegations that can’t be reached, there are people. Millions of them. Yemenis in the South who had nothing to do with any of this will live with all of it.
The South was the last place in Yemen where ordinary life was still possible. Not good, not great, just possible. Saudi and UAE support in different areas, despite their massive flaws, was fundamental and life-sustaining for millions amid aid cuts and conflict. That’s what’s being spent now. That’s the currency this confrontation is being paid in.
But for now, Riyadh has spoken.
excellent