Cutting Off the Bab el-Mandeb Supply Line: UAE-Backed Southern Giants Brigade Leads Yemen's Anti-Houthi Offensive

On October 5, an anti-Houthi offensive around the Bab el-Mandeb Strait was launched near the strategic chokehold. Jointly initiated by forces formerly affiliated with the Southern Transitional Council (STC) and units of Yemen's internationally recognized government, the operation was spearheaded by the Southern Giants Brigade, which is armed, trained, and funded by the UAE. According to Al Jazeera, the coalition announced on the Monday of the week the offensive began that it had severed the main road linking the Red Sea port city of Mocha with the Bab el-Mandeb Strait — one of the first major gains by anti-Houthi forces in recent years. The Bab el-Mandeb is a critical waterway for global energy transport, and its coastal areas were seized in September by the Iran-linked Houthis (also known as "Ansar Allah"). Rashad al-Alimi, chairman of Yemen's Presidential Leadership Council, promptly announced a nationwide military operation, vowing to drive the Houthis out of the territory they control, and the Southern Giants-led offensive is widely seen as the spearhead of that campaign.

The political complexion of the Southern Giants Brigade is highly contested. The force is led by Salafist commander Abdul Rahman Abu Zara al-Muharrami, who in his early years studied at the Damaj religious school in Sa'ada province in northern Yemen. After the collapse of the Yemeni army in 2015, the brigade was formed by Salafist fighters during the battle to resist the Houthis in Aden, and has since been regarded as one of the most powerful military forces inside Yemen. Citing observers, Al Jazeera reports that the brigade is believed to be armed, trained, and funded by the UAE, and in 2017 it launched a large-scale offensive along Yemen's western coast, pushing all the way to the outskirts of the port city of Hodeidah before being forced to halt following the UN-brokered Stockholm Agreement at the end of 2018. In January 2022, the brigade seized three districts in Shabwa province and pushed deep into Marib, with the offensive only subsiding after the Houthis attacked Abu Dhabi.

Muharrami joined the eight-member Presidential Leadership Council in April 2022, and around the same period his forces adopted the name "Southern Giants Brigade," marking a sharp rise in his southern political identification. The formation subsequently joined the Southern Transitional Council, deepening its ties with the southern separatist movement — a fact that determines the complex identity with which it goes into battle today. More notably, this cooperation is itself the product of intense jockeying between Saudi Arabia and the UAE, the two Gulf allies, in Yemen's proxy battlefield. According to Al Jazeera, in January this year Saudi-backed Yemeni government forces defeated UAE-backed STC units, producing a relative centralization of anti-Houthi command and compelling armed factions previously belonging to different Gulf camps to temporarily band together against a shared threat. After his defeat, Muharrami flew to Riyadh and publicly endorsed the Saudi-led initiative to unify southern forces — seen as a microcosm of the recalibration of power between the two Gulf patrons.

Opinions clearly diverge on whether this force is a separatist militia or a state force flying the banner of national unity. Fathi bin Raziq, editor of the Aden-based Al-Ghad newspaper and a long-time critic of southern separatists, told Al Jazeera: "These forces have been engaged in the fight against the Houthis since 2015 and were formed inside Yemen after the Yemeni army collapsed. They confront the Houthis from military, political, civil, and religious positions." He stressed that the brigade does not fight under the name of a "southern force," but rather as part of the legitimate government forces backed by the Saudi-led coalition — although they operate under the banner of southern forces, they do not claim to be separatists, having fought hard battles in Hodeidah and Marib.

Skeptics, however, have grounds of their own. Anwar al-Tamimi, a spokesman for the Southern Transitional Council, told Al Jazeera that the focus of the southern forces' participation in this battle is to seize and defend the Bab el-Mandeb and its surrounding areas — which, in separatist eyes, constitute the territory of the "former People's Democratic Republic of Yemen." He stated bluntly in the interview: "The southern forces' participation is aimed at protecting and defending the southern borders, a principle deeply embedded in southern military doctrine and at the heart of the southern cause. The Bab el-Mandeb belongs to the territory of the former People's Democratic Republic of Yemen." Al-Tamimi even characterized the fighting ethos of the Southern Giants Brigade as "a southern brigade driven by the southern fighting temperament and elements of Salafist thought," and called it "a reinforcement rather than a bypass of the southern national agenda." Footage recorded by Al Jazeera's reporters accompanying the troops shows some of the participating soldiers near the Bab el-Mandeb raising flags of the former South Yemen, with pronounced separatist overtones.

Beneath this tension lies the political deformity produced by the two Gulf patrons' long-running backing of rival proxies in Yemen — on one side, the southern separatist forces in which the UAE is deeply involved; on the other, the internationally recognized government camp dominated by Saudi Arabia. The same force receives UAE weapons, funding, and training while pledging loyalty at critical moments to the Saudi-led command; it flies the "southern" banner while styling itself part of the "legitimate government." The layered proxy structure in Yemen itself — ranging from northern Shia-armed groups to southern separatist movements — is the product of this tiered embedding of external funding.

Aidarus al-Zubaidi, chairman of the STC, has not appeared in public since his forces' defeat in January, but continues to speak out on social media. He wrote on X: "The south will not allow the achievements of its armed forces to be stolen by slogans that do not reflect southern reality." Al Jazeera analyses this as both a covert warning to the political narrative of the forces currently fighting and a continuation of the Gulf rivalry within Yemen's domestic politics.

Al-Tamimi did not rule out the possibility of the southern forces pressing further north after consolidating their gains. From the 2017 western coast offensive to the Shabwa–Marib push in early 2022, the Southern Giants Brigade's operational reach has long exceeded the traditional notion of the "south." The next step is to drive this force — UAE-armed, mobilized under a separatist banner, yet deployed by the legitimate government and backed by the Saudi-led coalition — into the core territory held by the Houthis. The ultimate direction of this contest, however, still hinges on whether the fragile compromise between the two Gulf patrons can hold.