Adding to questions about the situation in southern Yemen, STC President Aidarous Zubaidi has reportedly fled the country and arrived in the United Arab Emirates. The Saudi military accused the UAE of smuggling him out of the country by way of Somaliland.
The separatist STC movement has been seeking to reassert South Yemen as an independent country for years, and Saudi-backed forces attacked them over the weekend, reclaiming territory in the country’s southeast, leading the Saudis to offer to host negotiations between the two sides in Riyadh. Talks were agreed to, and an STC delegation departed for Riyadh early morning Wednesday.
That’s where things get strange, as after a flight delay, the STC negotiating team went to Riyadh, was loaded into a bus by Saudi officials, and promptly disappeared. The STC officials who remained in Yemen said they had lost all contact with them, though by Thursday morning, some media were reporting the Saudis were holding talks with the delegation.
While this was going on, Saudi forces attacked the Dhale Governorate and the city of Aden, and the Saudi-backed government expelled STC from their coalition government while Saudi warplanes were pounding the country.
Zubaidi apparently made his way out of the country, to Somaliland and later to Mogadishu, where he was flown to Abu Dhabi. The Saudis are now calling him a “fugitive” and claiming he committed “high treason” against the government which the Saudis have been propping up for 15 years, but which until the weekend didn’t control much of any territory.
The government now claims to control Aden, after the fighting, though the STC has claimed to retake the al-Mahra Governorate from them, and the odds of anything being resolved by the Riyadh talks that may or may not be happening seems uncertain, at best. Southern Yemen seems, as ever, in a state of uncertainty, with multiple rival factions vying for control.
