A militia led by a former honey and herbs trader is “changing the Saudi-Houthi war”, said The Telegraph.
The Southern Giants, the “most feared militia” in Yemen, now represent the “most dangerous fault-line” in the alliance between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
The Southern Giants, known in Arabic as Alwiya al-Amaliqa, emerged in southern Yemen in 2015 during the country’s civil war. The group’s ideology is “rooted in Salafism, an austere, ultra-conservative strand of Sunni Islam” that regards Shia groups such as the Iran-backed Houthis as “heretics”, said The Telegraph.
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The group is led by Abdulrahman al-Mahrami, a former honey and herbs trader known to his fighters as Abu Zara’a. Until recently, they were thought to number between 20,000 and 30,000 but some now believe there could be as many as 70,000.
The Giants have become “one of Yemen’s most formidable military forces”, said Al Jazeera. Last week, the militia took a leading role in an operation to retake the strategically vital Red Sea port of Mocha, captured by the Houthis last month. The Yemeni government says Mocha and the coastal road along the crucial Bab el-Mandeb strait is now under their control again, “one of their first major military gains in years”.
So far, the militia “has largely stayed out of infighting between anti-Houthi forces” within the Yemeni government coalition, said Al Jazeera. However, some analysts believe that it “remains fundamentally a separatist force”, motivated by the liberation of southern Yemen from Houthi control rather than by national unity.
Levers of power
“Nominally” fighting under the internationally recognised Yemeni government, “in practice” the Southern Giants are the “creation and instrument of a different wealthy patron: the United Arab Emirates”, said The Telegraph. Trained in camps in Abu Dhabi, the Giants brigades are “lavishly supplied with tanks, artillery, modern armour, guided missiles” by their Emirati patrons, who also pay soldiers’ salaries.
The Red Sea ports of southern Yemen have long been a “focus of Emirati maritime ambition”, said the newspaper, and in the Giants the UAE has created a “loyal, capable force” who can act as a “lever over the future of southern Yemen”.
For now, the Giants represent the Saudi-led coalition’s “cutting edge” in the fight to roll back Houthi conquests that have given the rebel faction “leverage over global shipping”. But while Saudi and UAE interests may align for now, “their partnership is tactical” and time-limited. How Abu Dhabi’s Yemen proxy proceeds from here “will shape not only the battle for the Bab el-Mandeb Strait but the longer struggle for control of Yemen’s south”.
