British journalist David Hearst said that Saudi Arabia may be able to reshape the Middle East by confronting Emirati projects that have long worked alongside Israel, with support from the United States, to sow the seeds of civil war and confrontation across the region.
Hearst, editor in chief of Middle East Eye, noted in an article that the Israeli Emirati plan is based on fragmenting Arab states that were once formidable, controlling key trade routes such as the Bab al Mandab Strait between Yemen and the Horn of Africa, and planting military bases throughout the region. Through this, they seek to secure military and commercial dominance for a century to come.
A profound transformation is underway in the Arab world. It has nothing to do with passing and repairable rivalries between princes, nor with imperial spoils, nor with proxy alliances pushing against one another.
It also has nothing whatsoever to do with the traditional sources of fear and anxiety among Sunni Arab rulers, namely Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood.
This transformation was not ignited by a street vendor setting himself on fire after officials in Sidi Bouzid in Tunisia, confiscated the food cart that sustained him. Nor did massive marches erupt in Cairo demanding the fall of a dictator.
Yet this transformation may have repercussions as wide-ranging as those produced by the Arab Spring fifteen years ago.
What are commonly referred to in the Middle East as the real Arab states, meaning those with large populations, have awakened from their slumber to observe what is unfolding around them.
Saudi Arabia and Algeria, in particular, and Egypt to a lesser extent, realised that the plan to control vital maritime choke points in the region by Israel openly and by the United Arab Emirates implicitly poses a threat to their national interests.
The Israeli Emirati plan is simple. It is to fragment Arab states that were once formidable, control major trade routes such as the Bab al Mandab Strait between Yemen and the Horn of Africa, and plant military bases across the region, thereby ensuring military and commercial dominance for a century to come.
A Policy of Fragmentation
In Israel, this plan has been explicit. It is the formula Tel Aviv seeks to implement in Syria by establishing a protected Druze entity in the south and attempting to do the same in the Kurdish region in the north. It is an overt and declared strategy.
Israel does not want to see a unified Syria. Fragmentation is also the underlying policy behind Tel Aviv’s recognition of Somaliland, which grants the Israeli military a foothold in the Horn of Africa.
For Abu Dhabi, fragmentation has long been its guiding principle across the Arab world.
It has other objectives, foremost among them political Islam. Yet fragmentation is a policy it practices in Libya, where the United Arab Emirates supports General Khalifa Haftar against the Government of National Accord in Tripoli.
The same policy was followed in Sudan, where Emiratis finance and arm the Rapid Support Forces and their leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemeti, who is under US Treasury sanctions. Emirati officials deny this, of course, but the Sudanese civil war would not have occurred without massive Emirati involvement.
This has also been their policy in Yemen for at least two decades. The plan to divide Yemen was born out of Emirati fear that the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Islah party might gain control of the Yemeni government.
Soon enough, however, Emirati ambitions extended beyond merely crushing Islah, which has only a limited presence in small parts of the north.
Today, Abu Dhabi’s grand plan has little to do with the ceasefire Saudi Arabia reached with the Houthis, even though both are partners in the campaign against Islah, a campaign for which the Houthis provided cover.
The plan involved financing, arming, and establishing a secessionist state in southern Yemen under the umbrella of the Southern Transitional Council in Aden.
Imperial Intrigues
Although a secessionist state in southern Yemen is nothing new, the ruler of the United Arab Emirates, Mohammed bin Zayed, injected it with force and nearly escaped accountability.
Yemen has long suffered from divisions and fragmentation and has long been a field for British and American intrigue.
When the Houthis seized the capital Sanaa in 2014, the national government was forced into exile. Even after its return, much of its authority on the ground remained nominal.
The head of Yemen’s Presidential Council was based in the same city, Aden, as the Southern Transitional Council. Until recently, the Presidential Council was an uneasy coalition of Yemeni factions excluding the Houthis, with a slim majority supported by Riyadh.
Abu Dhabi’s policy nearly succeeded. Its goal was to empower the Southern Transitional Council to the point where it could declare itself an independent state that would recognise Israel.
All the council needed was to seize two sparsely populated but geographically vast eastern regions, Al Mahra and Hadramawt, which together account for nearly half of Yemen’s territory.
Hadramawt shares a border with Saudi Arabia, and therefore, the appearance of the Southern Transitional Council in the provincial capital Mukalla served as a wake-up call Riyadh badly needed.
At the tactical level, and in everything the former student of the Scottish school Mohammed bin Zayed forgot to account for in his plans to turn the United Arab Emirates into a small Sparta, the capture of Mukalla was little more than a blip on his radar screen.
In terms of its impact on his neighbour, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the move was deeply provocative and its expansionist implications extremely serious.
Searching for the Rifle
I had predicted that the two princes, who planned and worked together to fund and arm the counterrevolution against the Arab Spring in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, and Syria, would eventually fall out. I never imagined it would be over a relatively modest port such as Mukalla.
At last, the blindfold fell from Saudi eyes. They felt encircled on all sides and concluded that if they did not act now, the kingdom itself might become the next target of the fragmentation policy unfolding around them.
The country that had long practised foreign policy slowly and from behind a curtain of beads began searching for the rifle.
Saudi Arabia supported a counterattack by Yemeni forces loyal to the internationally recognised government to retake Hadramawt and Al Mahra. Mukalla was bombarded, soldiers of the Southern Transitional Council were killed, and its forces were forced to withdraw.
Three days later, when Israel became the first country to officially recognise Somaliland as a sovereign independent state, Saudi fears were confirmed.
This was not merely noise in the dead of night. What was happening in Yemen on one side of the Bab al Mandab Strait, the Gate of Tears at the mouth of the Red Sea, and on the other side in the Horn of Africa, was all part of the same scheme.
Domestically, Israel promoted its recognition of Somaliland as an opportunity to establish a base from which it could strike the Houthis. But the matter was far bigger than that.
While Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, flew to Somaliland to shake hands with its leader, Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi, Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan landed in Cairo with a grim expression to ensure that Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi was reading from the same script. Sisi, the fickle weather vane, needed no persuasion.
A statement from the Egyptian presidency declared that their positions were identical regarding Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, and Gaza, all of which were exposed to the Israeli Emirati fragmentation plan, and that the solution in each of these conflict zones lay in preserving the cohesion, sovereignty, and territorial unity of states.
Arms shipments were still arriving from the United Arab Emirates for fighters backed by the Southern Transitional Council. When Saudi Arabia bombed a shipment of weapons and vehicles in Mukalla port, it directly announced the Emirati role in arming southern separatists.
Hours later, Abu Dhabi announced it had withdrawn its forces from Yemen and also relinquished Socotra Island. Thus, within hours, all the work, planning, and funding of the past decade was undone.
A Silent Collapse
This is how the Middle East changes.
Not through carefully staged photo opportunities inside the Oval Office, nor through US President Donald Trump’s claim that he changed three thousand years of history, a statement met with ridicule the moment it was uttered, nor through seemingly grand but in reality farcical pledges such as the Abraham Accords.
But through sudden and silent collapses.
Another collapse occurred on Wednesday, when the Southern Transitional Council itself came close to disintegration. Its leader, Aidarous al Zubaid,i disappeared at a time when he was supposed to join a delegation in Riyadh.
Rumours spread online that he had fled through the mountains of Al Dali, his home region. Zubaidi was stripped of his membership in the Presidential Council and charged with treason.
Then on Thursday, Colonel Turki al Maliki, spokesperson for the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, said intelligence indicated that Zubaidi had left Aden late on 7 January by sea heading to Somaliland.
Meanwhile, the Southern Transitional Council lost contact with its delegation in Riyadh, consisting of fifty men.
It was the worst day in the history of the small Sparta dream that aspired to dominate the region.
Saudi social media erupted, known as the kingdom’s licensed and tightly controlled voice. One of the most widely shared posts showed a Saudi F-16 fighter jet flying overhead, accompanied by an English song whose lyrics declared: Anyone who threatens us is black in the den of lions. We stormed the den and found no one there. The second Muazzi, the title once given to the kingdom’s founder, King Abdulazi,z and now applied to Mohammed bin Salman, has no forty look-alikes. He resembles only his grandfather and his father, Abu Fahd. And the strife ignited by the accursed devil was extinguished in its cradle by the hand of Muazzi.
The words required no explanation. The message was perfectly clear. The devil was now the label used by Mohammed bin Zayed’s neighbour and former ally.
The first two lines of this war chant were recited in person before Mohammed bin Salman by Colonel Mishal bin Mahmas al Harithi, described as the Saudi army’s war poet. I never imagined they had a war poet or needed one. Yet there is no doubt that what was stated above has now become the kingdom’s official vision.
Columbus
Many of the tweets attacking the Emirati strategy are published by an account known as Columbus, widely believed and confirmed by reliable sources to be Saud al Qahtani, the same man who planned and oversaw the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
On Sunday, he tweeted: Saudi Arabia has stated that there will be no normalisation without the establishment of a Palestinian state. You can therefore see Israel’s frenzy in accelerating its secret project and its desperation to tear the Arab world into more small states to apply pressure on the normalisation file.
The Saudi project is the Arab project that stands with Arab countries and their peoples and stands against projects of destruction, division, and displacement. The Saudi project is the one Arabs should fight for.
This was underscored by the fact that amid Saudi Arabia’s decisive action in Yemen, the king and crown prince on Monday called for a national Saudi donation campaign for Palestinians. So far, 700 million riyals, nearly 200 million US dollars, have been collected, and the campaign continues.
The people running the kingdom have not changed. What has changed is this. They have at least realised that the regional projects pursued by their neighbour pose a threat to their own kingdom. For any Saudi ruling elite, that is a red line.
The Price of Oil
Although most Emirati methods involve using proxies or parties whose links can be publicly denied, Mohammed bin Zayed knows he cannot play with his neighbour. Saudi Arabia’s population stands at 35 million, while the UAE’s population is 10 million, of whom only one million are Emirati citizens. That is the end of the story.
Dawood al Sharyan, a prominent Saudi journalist and political analyst, wrote on X: Attempts to divide Yemen, Somalia, and Sudan are not isolated events. They are a single trend aimed at reshaping the region by creating unstable pockets surrounding Saudi Arabia from every direction.
This simultaneity reflects a project that goes beyond passing political disputes and targets the kingdom’s role as a pillar of stability and regional balance. Understanding the nature of this trend is essential to protect stability and comprehend what is happening with awareness and deep vision.
While Trump preens after abducting the president of Venezuela and speaks shamelessly about seizing the largest oil reserves in the world, different thoughts occupy the mind of his other Middle East ally.
It will take years, perhaps decades, before Venezuela’s oil production, once monopolised by American oil companies, begins to compete with Saudi oil output. But the direction is now clear.
Trump’s actions will inevitably lead to lower oil prices, a result that does not serve Saudi national interests. The current price of Brent crude is already far too low to suit the kingdom’s national budget.
Trump errs when he equates mobile military power with the influence that comes from governing other countries and dictating terms to them from far beyond their shores. These are entirely different matters.
Exiting the Circle of Destruction
The United States under Trump can indeed depose neighbouring leaders, bomb Iran for a second time, and destroy the economies of other countries around the world if they refuse to play by its rules and conditions. No one disputes this. Trump commands the greatest military force ever assembled, and the dollar remains the world’s reserve currency. He can threaten whomever he pleases across the globe.
Nothing prevents him from parachuting a special forces unit onto Greenland, planting a flag in the ice, and claiming it as sovereign American territory.
What he cannot do is manage the consequences of his actions, even if he fares better than his predecessors did with the aftermath of invading Iraq and Afghanistan. Venezuela is twice the size of Iraq, and its population is well armed.
Saudi Arabia does not need to respond systematically to Israel’s clear and declared plans for regional dominance, nor will it need to. But it can begin taking steps that would turn the lives of the two small Sparta entities into hell, entities that persistently sow the seeds of civil war and conflict across the Middle East.
The wake-up call to which Saudi Arabia has responded is a welcome development, not because it helps the growing list of people living under permanent occupation, including Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese, but because it may be the first sign of a Saudi state that does not merely claim leadership but acts as an independent leader.
This could bring two Arab states, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, closer to another regional military power, Turkey. Nor would such Saudi actions be unwelcome in Iran, which has long argued that regional stability can only be achieved through a self-reliant regional alliance independent of Washington and Israel.
Algeria could also join such an alliance, having formed an early conviction about the toxic alliance between the United Arab Emirates and Israel.
This may be very early speculation about the future, but it is precisely what millions of Arabs and Iranians need. It is the only exit from the circle of destruction, the circle of endless failure, continuous interventions, and ongoing occupations supported by the West.
By winning every battle yet losing every war, the United States and Israel have overextended themselves. Both believe they can do whatever they want, whenever they want. Perhaps the time has come for an Arab leader to stand up and tell them that they cannot.
Sunna Files has no billionaire owner or shareholders demanding profit.
We are fiercely independent, and every dollar we receive is reinvested directly into our journalism
Click here to donate & fund your Islamic Independent Platform
