Forces loyal to the Islah Party of Yemen continued their crackdown on separatist dissent in southern Yemen, raiding the homes of high-ranking STC officials in the historic southern capital of Aden, and also raiding the homes of people believed to be activists supporting the separatist movement.
This comes a day after reports that the Islah Party’s forces had captured 24 people living in Yemen’s Hadramaut Governorate for participating in pro-STC rallies. The Islah Party is part of the self-described “government” of Yemen, though in practice the “government” itself is in exile and has been for well over a decade.
The “government,” such as it is, just held a swearing-in ceremony for its new cabinet, which as usual was held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where they continue to be housed. The goals of the new cabinet include tackling corruption within their operations, though there is still no plan to actually relocate any of the leadership to Yemeni territory, though they claim control of the presidential palace in Aden.
Saudi Arabia has been trying to argue that the STC doesn’t even exist anymore for the past month, after an incident in which they kidnapped an STC delegation that they brought to Riyadh for “talks” and then announced they’d agreed to disband outright.
The STC, of course, rejects the idea that they’ve disbanded, and with massive pro-STC rallies across South Yemen for weeks since then and Islah Party attempts to capture STC figures don’t speak to a group whose operations are entirely past tense.
These fights over control of South Yemen have been ongoing for years, but the most recent bid to reclaim control of the territory from the STC seems timed to try to grant the “government” a measure of recognition that makes little sense for a faction that fled Yemen long ago and has been swapped for various other bureaucrats in exile in Riyadh for years, while their armed factions struggle to control anything but the southwestern coast in practice.
What long-term control they do have is in the Lahj and Taiz Governorates, where they control a lot of prisons full of people detained for resisting them. The UN was attempting to investigate those prisons amid reports of them disappearing scores of civilians into detention, some of them held for years on end, but has reported that the Islah Party blocked them from doing so.
The “government” forces, backed by Saudi Arabia, initially took Taiz with intentions of pushing north toward the capital of Sanaa. That consistently failed, and at this point there is no pretense they are anywhere near reclaiming north Yemen from the Houthis, which is why what focus they have on territory in Yemen is on the south, fighting the STC and scrambling for legitimacy that the Saudis insist they have, but which is invisible to almost everybody in Yemen.
