Fighters aligned with the Southern Transitional Council (STC), a separatist group in southern Yemen, raised their flags in the provinces of Hadramout and Marah in early December. The seizures mean the STC now controls all eight of the provinces that make up the south of the country.

The new status quo looks like a fait accompli for the creation of a separate southern state. It has left Yemen’s internationally recognised government, the Presidential Leadership Council (PLC), squeezed between a pole in the south and a state run by the Iran-backed Houthi militia in the north.

The STC taps into memories of the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen which, until 1990, gave southerners their own state. Yemen’s 1990 unification produced one flag, but many people in the south never felt they joined a shared political project.

These grievances led to a brief civil war in 1994. This war ended with northern victory, purges of southern officers and civil servants, and what many in the south still describe as an occupation rather than integration.

On December 30, 2025, the Saudi Arabia-led coalition forces attacked the southern Yemeni port of Mukalla, targeting what Riyadh said was a UAE-linked weapons shipment destined for separatists in Yemen. This was the biggest flare-up between the two Gulf partners over the issue of Yemen, leading to UAE announcing the withdrawal of its forces from the war-torn country. The following piece, written three weeks earlier, provides background to the rising tensions…

By the mid-2000s, retired officers and dismissed civil servants in the south were marching for pensions and basic rights. Those protests........

© Dawn (Magazines)