UAE counter-terrorism forces have concluded their long mission in Yemen. But it is worth looking back over the past 10 years of service and sacrifice, as well as peering into the future of the relationship, too.
I have a special connection to this story, having watched with my own eyes as UAE and Yemeni soldiers fought terrorist armies in Yemen, shoulder to shoulder. Some of the stories of that partnership are told in the first two books of my Yemen war trilogy, 25 Days to Aden and The Race for Mukalla, and in the third volume, which is being written, The Battle for the Red Sea.
There is a select cadre of Emiratis who spent years of their life throughout the past decade defending Yemen. Some did back-to-back military rotations there, year after year, often between tours in Afghanistan alongside Nato forces. More than 100 Emiratis never returned from their Yemen deployments.
I watched amazing things done by and built by Emiratis in Yemen, from Hodeidah in the west to the southern city of Aden, and in the eastern provinces of Shabwa, Hadhramaut and Marib. Many of the lessons learnt at steep cost by Emiratis will be important to Yemen’s future stabilisation.
The anti-Houthi factions in Yemen need to be merged into a unified national army. In my experience of watching four Arab nations advising and assisting the Yemeni forces, no one did it better than the UAE. Today, it is UAE-trained and equipped forces who hold the Red Sea coast against the Houthis, and who just took over the garrisoning of the Yemeni capital of Aden.
The lesson here is that foreign trainers must embed deeply and for a sustained period with Yemeni forces to build trust and impart a professionalism that lasts. The numerous UAE deployments in battlefield missions alongside the US and other Nato militaries meant that the Emiratis had a lot of real-world experience to share with Yemeni soldiers.
It was by combining this modern training with an Arab sense of brotherhood that the UAE liberated Mukalla from Al Qaeda without causing a single civilian death. By contrast, US-led coalition forces fighting ISIS in Syria and Iraq razed Raqqa and Mosul in the process of liberating them.
It was the experience of 14 task force deployments to Afghanistan that helped make the UAE so effective at counter-terrorism in Yemen’s mountains, where Al Qaeda was driven back into the remote part of Abyan province. It was the UAE special forces who became the connecting tissue between the high-tech US and the on-the-ground Yemeni forces. Without capable Arab forces to provide this vital middle layer, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula will likely regain in strength.
The UAE’s experience in supporting Yemeni communities will also be hard to replace fully. I saw Emirati troops and humanitarians go to extraordinary lengths to make sure aid got to the people it was meant to reach.
This meant checking and double-checking that rural hospital managers were dispensing aid, not just selling it for export. It meant taking the extra effort to draw together food baskets using local Yemeni food, so that the benefit went not just to the recipient but to the local farmer as well.
Emiratis watched what Yemenis needed, by covertly visiting pharmacies to see what drugs were in short supply and by learning how industries worked, providing ice to preserve the fisherman’s catch or rural roads to get the farmer’s food to market. When the World Health Organisation needed a mass of saline solution to treat dehydration in Yemen, the UAE donated all of its own national reserves and then bought every litre of saline off the shelves of pharmacies in the Emirates, too.
For these reasons and more, I think history will judge the UAE effort in Yemen a lot kindlier than some might sense today. The UAE came to the Yemen war in 2015 to stand by its Saudi brothers, and the Emirates continued standing right alongside Saudi Arabia.
Going forward, unity and friendship must be the basis for the Gulf partnership in Yemen. Only by being united can Yemen receive the support it needs from its Gulf Co-operation Council partners to survive and one day regain its vigour. Everyone can agree that there must not be a failed state on the Arabian Peninsula.
As I learnt while visiting the Zayed Dam in Marib, the UAE was in Yemen long before 2015. I am sure the Emirates will have a deep bond with Yemen that extends far beyond these difficult war years, based on a shared history, commercial partnership and humanitarian support that will always come through in times of need.
