The Southern Transitional Council’s bid for southern self-determination is not a sudden break from the past. Its leader, Aidarous al-Zubaidi, has in 2025 repeatedly framed southern independence as a realistic and imminent political goal, arguing that a restored southern state would be ready to conduct its own foreign policy — even to enter regional pacts such as the Abraham Accords if conditions permitted.
That rhetoric sits on a longer operational relationship with Abu Dhabi. The UAE’s backing of southern factions has deep roots in the Yemen war, manifesting in support for Security Belt and Elite formations, training, and patronage that accelerated after the coalition intervention of 2015 and the Aden confrontations of 2019. Abu Dhabi’s engagement has been transactional: security, bases and maritime access in return for political leverage with southern actors. Those dynamics help explain why secessionist language from STC leaders carries a credible threat vector beyond mere words.
Formally the STC has been folded into national institutions even as it pursued separatist goals. The council joined the Presidential Leadership Council in April 2022, giving its leadership seats inside the internationally recognised executive while simultaneously deepening its local governance and force structures in the south. That dual existence — integration at the national level and separatist consolidation on the ground — is the structural condition enabling an independence push that can be staged with both political cover and coercive capacity.
Throughout 2025 the STC has signalled both political modernization and continued assertiveness. Its leadership announced organizational changes, and senior figures travelled between Abu Dhabi, Riyadh and other capitals to mobilise support and calibrate posture. Those moves are evidence that the STC is pursuing a two-track approach: domestic consolidation of authority and an external outreach campaign aimed at securing patronage, recognition or at minimum acquiescence.
From Abu Dhabi’s vantage point the STC is useful in delivering several strategic goods. Control over southern ports, influence in the Bab al-Mandeb approaches and leverage over maritime security enable the UAE to protect trade and energy corridors and to project power in the Red Sea and Horn of Africa. That instrumental value has persistently pulled the UAE toward backing southern formations even when Riyadh has sought to reintegrate or discipline them. But patronage has political costs: it creates a potent client whose ambitions can outgrow sponsor control.
If the STC moves from rhetorical insistence to a structured independence process — for example a staged transition, institution building and a referendum modelled as legitimate — the immediate consequences will be regional. Saudi Arabia will treat large-scale southern secession as a strategic red line, especially if secessionist control extends to Hadramawt and the borderlands that abut the kingdom. That raises the prospect of intra-Gulf friction turning military or diplomatic, and it would reshape coalition alignments that have since 2015 been premised on a common anti-Houthi objective.
Longer term, formal partition would force external actors and international organisations to confront questions of recognition, resource governance and maritime rights in the Red Sea corridor. Yemen’s humanitarian crisis, already severe, would become further complicated by competing claims over ports, oil revenues and jurisdiction. The durability of any southern polity would depend on international willingness to underwrite its institutions and to mediate credible arrangements with the north. Without international legitimisation and economic lifelines, de facto control risks ossifying into chronic instability.
Policymakers should recognise three practical realities. First, external patrons can amplify secessionist success but cannot indefinitely substitute for domestic legitimacy and administrative capacity. Second, the STC’s dual role inside national structures and as a separatist project creates unpredictable bargaining dynamics that are exploitable by both sponsors and rivals. Third, the most stabilising outcome, from a regional security perspective, is a negotiated solution that secures southern political accommodation while preserving cross-border arrangements over energy and maritime routes. Achieving that will require a credible mediation architecture, meaningful economic guarantees and calibrated external incentives and restraints toward both Abu Dhabi and Riyadh.
For the UAE the calculation is strategic but narrow: leverage in the south serves maritime and counterterrorism priorities and advances Abu Dhabi’s regional profile. For Riyadh the calculation is existential: loss of influence in the frontier provinces would create security vulnerabilities on its southern flank. For Washington and European capitals the calculation is reputational and operational: supporting a sustainable, accountable outcome in southern Yemen is essential to limit a spillover that would affect shipping, counterterrorism cooperation and humanitarian access. Absent a coordinated multilateral response, the patron-client dynamic that enabled the STC’s rise risks converting a localized secessionist program into a durable rupture with regional consequences.