The offensive in early December by the Southern Transitional Council (STC) to seize large parts of the Hadramawt, an oil-producing region bordering Saudi Arabia, and Mahra, a province bordering Oman, marks a seismic shift in Yemen’s balance of power, wrote April Longley Alley in foreignaffairs.com
Alley, a Senior Fellow at the Washington Institute and served as Senior Political Adviser to the UN Special Envoy to Yemen from 2020 to 2024, added “For one thing, the STC is backed by the United Arab Emirates, and its bold expansion has set off new tensions with Saudi Arabia, which supports competing factions within the government and views the takeover as a potential threat to its national security.
“Still more concerning, the STC offensive is likely to provide a pretext for larger actions by the Houthis”, ALLEY wrote.
Even as the STC campaign has unfolded, the Houthis have vowed to extend their own control over the oil- and gas-producing regions in the country’s east. With the help of Iran and other countries, the Houthis have also worked tirelessly to expand their arsenal of advanced conventional weapons; they have also scaled up domestic weapons production, with the capacity to assemble ballistic missiles as well as to independently manufacture short range drones.
ALLEY concluded: “without a broader U.S. strategy, financial pressure on the Houthis may well backfire. Before the STC’s move in December, the Houthi leadership suggested it might seek to seize more territory or extort financial concessions from Saudi Arabia to gain more resources. Now the upheaval in the south has made the country more combustible, threatening to reignite a conflict that has until now played to the Houthis’ advantage. Any return to full-blown war would have reverberations across the Gulf and the Red Sea region.