Yemen’s tribes in Saudi, UAE-controlled areas have choice of confronting foreign projects or vanishing
SANAA, Dec. 26 (YPA) – Yemen’s tribes in the southern and eastern provinces are currently going through the most dangerous phase in their recent history, where the tribe is facing a conspiracy to dismantle its social fabric and subordinate its decision in favor of foreign projects.
The core issue stems from the policies pursued by the coalition countries, led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which have systematically weakened the role of tribes and stripped them of their independence and national standing. After ten years of war on Yemen, the objective is no longer merely to secure tribal loyalties, but to undermine and erase the national identity of Yemen’s ancient tribes, transforming them into pliable instruments for the execution of foreign agendas.
Accordingly, the danger of the current phase lies in the loss of many tribes in the coalition-controlled areas of southern and eastern Yemen of their national compass, as their decision-making has become dependent on external actors. This has stripped them of their historical role as guardians of sovereignty and transformed those regions into open arenas for proxy conflicts and the settling of regional power rivalries, at the expense of the lives and blood of their local populations.
This has led to systematic fragmentation and the complete absence of a unified tribal voice, which is supposed to be at the forefront of the political scene to demand the rights of plundered citizens and protect their destinies, instead of engaging in rupture projects that serve foreign powers.
Moreover, the seriousness of the foreign scheme is emerged in many testimonies against tribal sheikhs with tragic stories of repression and abuse that cannot be ignored, but must be denounced and rejected by the southern tribes because of what the sheikhs are opposed to the contradictory Emirati-Saudi projects have been subjected to, reaching the liquidation of some of them in prisons under torture, including Anis Sheikh Saleh al-Qumaishi and Ali Ashal Al-Jaadani, who has been forcibly hidden in UAE prisons in Aden since June 2024. Those whom tribe could not win for the dignity of its sheikhs and sons in those areas.
It did not stop there, but it came to tearing apart one tribe and working on cloning similar components, as a tool to hit each other, which was evident among the sons of the tribes of Socotra at the hands of the authorities loyal to the UAE, which moved to restructure the tribal sheikhs in accordance with the project of its ally “Israel” in the archipelago, as well as the reproduction of the component of the “alliance of the Shabwa tribes loyal to Riyadh, in order to split the row and adapt the tribe to implement its destructive projects.
In addition, an attempt was made to dismantle one of the largest tribal components in Hadramout, the Hadramout Tribal Alliance, during this December, to find parallel entities loyal to Abu Dhabi, in order to achieve its projects in the Wadi Hadramout, according to the project described by Israeli experts Avi Avidan, in early December, with a “pincer strategy” to outwit the Sanaa forces, which extends from the Socotra archipelago, through the city of Aden, to control Yemen’s oil reserves in Hadramout with a large area.
The support of tribesmen with weapons and money by regional parties led to a deepening of the rift between tribesmen to create enmities and revolts that tore the social fabric, until some popular markets turned into a theater to settle accounts among themselves, in addition to flooding civil society with hashish and drugs, so that the groups of society no longer cohesive together, besides using the policy of systematic starvation the destruction of the southern and eastern regions of Yemen by the hands of its sons who being put in the barrel of a cannon to defend foreign interests.
Despite all this, natural wealth is being plundered in front of their eyes through the ports to the Emirati and foreign ports without any deterrent role for the tribe, what activists see as something that forces the people of the southern and eastern tribes of Yemen, during the current stage, to take serious and decisive steps by rejecting external dependence based on awareness and guided by societal and religious values in March 2015.
It is also imperative for the tribe to be a support for the oppressed and not be a tool for volunteering its children to implement foreign projects that have brought them into conflicts to drain the best of their sons.
This puts the sheikhs and the leadership of the tribes in southern and eastern Yemen in front of the reality of the foreign danger, which seeks to tear Yemen into small cantons with artificial identities administered from abroad, to adhere to their tribal references that put the sovereignty of Yemen and the rights of its sons above all consideration, and work to end the control of forces loyal to a true defense of pride and dignity, leading to the restoration of community dignity, which remains it depends on the ability of tribes in southern and eastern Yemen to break the chains of dependence and unite behind a national inclusive project to cut off the way for wealth thieves and ancient and fresh foreign agents.
AA