This is crucial for Emirati officials, who perceive jihadists such as AQAP and Islamists such as the Muslim Brotherhood as existential threats. There, its leadership has supported the Southern Transitional Council (STC), a governing entity that seeks an autonomous South Yemen along pre-1990 borders and whose leadership shares the UAE’s worldview of apolitical Islam. The UAE has largely diverged from the Saudi-led coalition’s anti-Houthi war in northern Yemen and is “ in it to win it” to secure southern Yemen. What do these regional powers want in Yemen? These countries’ loyalties and aims have shifted over time, depending on their evolving security and political interests. Today, a complex web of “ proxy relationships” fuel Yemen’s war-from the UAE’s support of separatists in the south, to Saudi Arabia’s support for Hadi’s faltering ground forces, and Iran’s covert assistance to the Houthis, who made recent gains in central Yemen as UN-brokered negotiations falter. Proxy wars can backfire if ideological and strategic disconnects arise between patrons and clients, but they remain a tool of statecraft for their relatively low cost and because patrons can deny involvement. In proxy wars, states arm and support actors in another country to achieve their broader geopolitical goals, while only engaging in a small portion of on-the-ground fighting themselves. The international dimension in Yemen mirrors other civil wars-about 60 percent of which experience third-party interventions that often worsen the fighting. The conflict has led to a humanitarian disaster, the persistence of jihadist groups like al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), and over 100,000 casualties. Hadi remains in Saudi Arabia, and a coalition including Saudi and the UAE have failed to defeat the Houthis. Hadi, who took over the presidency after longtime authoritarian leader Ali Abdullah Saleh was forced out during the Arab Spring, had fled to Saudi Arabia in late March 2015 following a months-long takeover of the Yemeni capital of Sana’a by Ansar Allah, a Shia militia supported by Iran and known widely as the Houthis. Five years ago today, Yemen became a new front in the “ Middle East Cold War” when a Saudi-led coalition intervened to restore President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi to power.
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