In Yemen, southern power push challenges Houthi stalemate

Recent territorial gains by Yemen's Southern Transitional Council, or STC, have shifted the fragile power balance in the south of war-torn Yemen.

As of Friday, the STC controlled almost all of Yemen's south and east, including most of the governorates of Hadramout and Mahra, local oil facilities and the city of Aden — home to the internationally recognized government.




Aidarous al-Zubaidi, the leader of the STC, has already announced that the "next goal must be Sanaa, peacefully or through war, until justice returns to its people and aggression is defeated." The STC has argued that its military advances are necessary to restore stability, fight the Houthi rebels, terror groups and drug smuggling.

However, Thomas Juneau, professor at the University of Ottawa and Middle East analyst, warns much is still unknown about what exactly is going on in south and southeastern Yemen.

"Until 10 days ago, the STC was barely able to govern their parts of the south," he told DW. "It was a weak and contested governance."

Since the beginning of Yemen's war in 2014, when the Iran-backed Houthis ousted the country's internationally recognized government from the capital, Sanaa, to Aden in the south, the Yemeni government — which is represented by the Presidential Leadership Council, or PLC — has not been able to politically unite Yemen's south.

The PLC, backed by Saudi Arabia, seeks to regain control over all of Yemen and defeat the Houthis. However, Riyadh has been increasingly willing to accept the Houthis as Yemeni rulers in order to end the conflict across its border.

The United Arab Emirates — which backs the Southern Transitional Council, part of the PLC — supports the idea of restoring South Yemen as an independent state, as it was between 1967 and 1990. Abu Dhabi aims to maintain close ties to Yemen's south, with its access to key shipping routes along the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea.

Is Yemen likely to split?

"What is happening in Yemen's south is not a new crisis but has been building up for many years," Hisham Al-Omeisy, a Washington-based Yemeni conflict analyst formerly with the US State Department, told DW.

In 1990, when North and South Yemen became the unified Republic of Yemen, people were optimistic, he recalled. However, over time, corruption, nepotism and marginalization of southerners accumulated until it got to a point where a massive popular movement is now calling for secession, he said. "I don't think the call is going to disappear," he predicted.

Notwithstanding this ambition, Al-Omeisy doesn't believe that full southern independence could be the next step.

"Even if you recognized the STC in the south and the Houthis in the north, it would not solve the problem in Yemen where many other parties are also involved in an increasingly fractured country," he said.

This view is echoed by Marieke Brandt, senior researcher at the Institute for Social Anthropology at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. "A formal declaration of independence in southern Yemen would implicitly legitimize the rule of the Houthis in Yemen's north and center," said Brandt.

However, the Houthis would reject any southern political project and denounce it as foreign-backed fragmentation, she added.

In the case of an informal split, Yemen would be left with two rival, unrecognized entities facing each other across unstable front lines, said Brandt.

"The war would not end, it would merely change shape," she told DW.

For the Houthi group — redesignated as a terror organization by the US in January 2024 — either development would likely mean that the rebels would be the winners of the weakened PLC in the south, Juneau said.

Fragmentation exacerbates humanitarian situation

The new power balance in the south also threatens to push Yemen back into an open conflict after three years of relative calm following a UN-brokered ceasefire in 2022.

"Honestly, the situation has been chaotic in the past few days in southern Yemen but we've heard specifically that people from the north have been kicked out of their homes by STC forces and their affiliated groups," Niku Jafarnia, Yemen researcher at Human Rights Watch, told DW. At the moment, it remains unclear what has happened to those individuals, she added.

"I assume, based on past actions, that in a context in which the STC is taking control of new areas, it is very likely we'll see an increase in human rights violations in the coming months," she warned.

The latest Human Rights Watch World Report warned that in 2024, all parties to the conflict, including the STC, had arbitrarily arrested, forcibly disappeared, tortured and ill-treated detainees at official and unofficial detention centers across the country.

None of this spells hope for improving the humanitarian situation in Yemen, which is widely considered to be one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.

According to UN reports, around 60% of the estimated 377,000 deaths in Yemen between 2015 and the beginning of 2022 were the result of indirect causes like food insecurity and lack of accessible health services. As of 2025, 5 million people remain at risk of famine.