The Giants Answer to Whoever Pays

The call that had to be made

In January, the United Arab Emirates walked out of Yemen. It suspended funding to the southern forces it had spent a decade arming and training, and for a while the split with Saudi Arabia was open enough that Saudi jets bombed Emirati arms shipments bound for separatist units. Riyadh’s own government said it would seek to try the southern leader for treason.

This month, the Emiratis agreed to start paying again. In return, Saudi Arabia will provide air cover for the forces the money revives. That exchange (cash from one capital, protection from another, for a militia that swears loyalty to neither) is the most useful thing to understand about the war in Yemen right now. When a state calls back the country whose planes it once targeted, it is not reconciling. It is admitting it cannot do the job without them.

Who the Giants actually are

The force at the centre of this is the Southern Giants Brigades, known in Arabic as Alwiya al-Amaliqa. Estimates of its size run from twenty to thirty thousand fighters, with some assessments as high as seventy thousand. It has its own training camps, its own intelligence arm, its own media centre and its own website: the infrastructure of a state’s army, built outside the state.

It was created in 2015, in the months after the Houthis were pushed out of Aden, when the Emiratis took charge of southern Yemen within the coalition and set about building something of their own. They gathered Salafi fighters, many of them hardened by an earlier confrontation with the Houthis at a seminary in Dammaj, in the northern province of Saada, from which they had been expelled. Abu Dhabi trained them, armed them and unveiled them in 2016.

The commander is Abdulrahman al-Mahrami, known to his men as Abu Zara’a. Before the war he was a trader in honey and herbs with no military background; he surfaced as a battlefield commander in 2016, was removed by the Emiratis in 2019, and reinstated by them in 2020. He now sits on Yemen’s eight-member Presidential Leadership Council and serves as a deputy head of the Southern Transitional Council, the political body pressing for the south’s secession. Both roles, at once, paid for by a foreign government.

The name was borrowed from an elite brigade of the 1970s, and the reputation was built on the coast. In early 2017 the Giants led an operation called Golden Spear that captured Mokha (the port that gave mocha coffee its name) and swept up the shoreline through Dhubab toward the Bab al-Mandab strait. Only the United Nations-brokered Stockholm Agreement of December 2018 stopped them short of Hodeidah.

A force that answers to a salary

A fighter in the Giants earns at least a thousand Saudi riyals a month, roughly two hundred pounds. Emirati money pays the wages; Emirati weapons fill the arsenals, some of them Chinese arms routed through Abu Dhabi. Several commanders live in the Emirates, and some have been granted Emirati citizenship.

In exchange, Abu Dhabi gets a disciplined force guarding the approaches to one of the world’s most important shipping straits, and a lever over the future of southern Yemen and its ports. That is the deal, and it is not dressed up as anything else.

The consequence was on display in the streets of Aden long before it was on display at the front. In August 2023, Giants fighters stormed the presidential palace in the city and manhandled the sitting prime minister to force through appointments. The following year they raided a presidential office. Early this year, as the separatists’ units collapsed during a crisis in the east, they moved into the palace and the central bank. Along the way they took control of revenue: the airport company and the free zone in Aden, oil and gas facilities in Shabwa. Their commanders have built business empires. This is a militia that pays for itself.

The January rupture

The break came at the start of this year, and it is worth recalling precisely because it explains why the current arrangement is fragile. The Southern Transitional Council tried to take charge across the south and announced a roadmap to a referendum on independence within two years. Riyadh-backed government forces defeated it. Its leader, Aidarous al-Zubaidi, fled to Abu Dhabi and has not appeared publicly since. The government said it would try him for treason. The Emiratis announced they were quitting Yemen entirely.

Nine months later, the Houthis had taken Mokha, Dhubab and Perim Island, and were sitting within reach of the strait. That is what changed the calculation. Neither Riyadh nor Abu Dhabi reconciled because the dispute was resolved. They reconciled because the alternative was losing the waterway.

What October has actually delivered

On 5 October, forces including the Giants and units of the internationally recognised government launched an offensive near Bab al-Mandab and cut the main road linking Mokha to the strait. They retook Mokha and Dhubab. It is the coalition’s first significant gain in years, and it came from a force that was, until a fortnight earlier, unfunded.

It is also incomplete. The shore is not the strait. To hold Bab al-Mandab, the coalition needs the mountains overlooking it, and the Houthis have so far denied them those. Clashes have broken out around two towns on the outskirts of Taiz. The result for now is a grinding contest over hills, roads and supply lines.

And the war is not staying in one place. On Friday, two Houthi missiles struck Aden’s airport while a Yemenia Airways passenger aircraft was preparing to take off. According to Yemen’s information minister, they landed about five hundred metres from the plane and roughly a hundred metres from the midpoint of the runway. A day earlier, at least five people were killed and sixteen wounded in an attack on a presidential palace in the city.

The pact that does not fight

The Makkah Joint Defence Agreement (Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey, signed in August, any attack on one treated as an attack on all) has now been invoked. What it has produced is surveillance, air defence and logistics. Turkey has limited itself to defensive and technical support. Pakistan’s military spokesman said its forces have been in the kingdom “for decades”; its defence minister was more precise, saying only Saudi troops are in combat while the Turkish and Pakistani armies play a supportive role, with Pakistan doing reconnaissance.

There is nothing dishonourable in that, and it is close to what the text can actually deliver. But it means the ground war is being fought by Yemenis, paid for by Emiratis, protected by Saudis and watched by Pakistanis. Four countries are involved and none of them owns the outcome.

The honest part

Two things can be true at once, and both matter here. The Houthis are genuinely formidable: a United Nations panel estimated their ranks at up to 350,000 fighters by 2024, against roughly 30,000 when Saudi Arabia intervened in 2015, and they have spent a decade learning to manufacture their own projectiles. They are not a rabble that can be swept aside by a better funded militia.

The Giants are also not simply mercenaries, whatever the payment structure suggests. Their fighters raised the flag of the pre-1990 southern state on the beach at Dhubab, and the separatist leadership has been careful to say their participation is about securing “the south’s borders”, Bab al-Mandab being, in their reading, part of the territory of the former People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen. They are fighting for a country that does not currently exist. That is a motive, not a paycheck, and dismissing it as the latter is how outsiders misread this war.

The sceptical case is narrower and, I think, correct. Whoever secures the strait will be the force that defines what comes next in the south, and both Riyadh and Abu Dhabi know it. The question the coalition will not answer is what happens after the fighting. An independent southern state and a unified Yemen cannot both be the prize. Until that is settled, every victory on the coast is a claim staked by two governments that want opposite things, and the flag that went up on the beach was not the flag of the country they say they are restoring.

Opinion pieces reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily an institutional position of PIVRA.