From a distance, the Commonwealth military cemetery in Aden resembles an abandoned construction site.
You have to drive a little way out of the town to find it, and most of the area is empty, dusty ground because the British left before they, or their enemies, could fill it. When you get closer, you see the small cluster of gravestones in the corner. And when you’re still closer, you can make out the names.
Sturdy, Anglo-Saxon surnames, for the most part: Armstrong, Moffatt, Bartley, Bell. And the symbols of their units. Special Air Service, Parachute Regiment, of course. But also the Service Corps and the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. All dated from 1965 to 1967.
Those were the years that the British call the “Aden Emergency,” which ended with London quitting this last outpost of the empire. The Commonwealth Graves Commission doesn’t look after the cemetery, but the local authority keeps it in good, if humble, shape.
As we were leaving the area, a lone bearded young man approached us. “Why are they still here?” he asked our guide in Arabic. The guide, an officer in the Presidential Guard of the local ruling authority’s army, shrugged neutrally. “They’re part of our history,” he replied, dismissing the question. The young man said nothing and watched us as we departed.
THE BRITISH came to Aden in 1839. After they left in 1967, there was a period of confusion; then a Soviet client state, the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY), was set up. The Soviets, like the previous imperial masters, left their mementos here and there.
At retooled government ministries, or occasionally at intersections, there are faded murals depicting heroic South Yemeni workers and soldiers, joyful and victorious. Engraved red-star banners are covered with a thick layer of Aden dust. The PDRY lasted until 1990, when Yemen was briefly “reunited.” Now it is once again divided, with new powers fighting for control.
All this might once have seemed very remote from Israel and the Levant. No longer. Since November 2023, the Iran-backed Ansar Allah (Houthis) movement has been engaged in a missile war with Israel.
Their ability to cause damage is far inferior to their Iranian patrons. Yet they have proved durable. They have remained unwilling, in contrast to both Iran and Hezbollah, to unilaterally conclude a ceasefire with Jerusalem. Even Israel’s recent killing of the Houthis’s prime minister and most of his cabinet has not yet proved sufficient to cause them to abandon the fight.
Bab el-Mandeb Strait: The fight for control
The old imperial powers didn’t come to the southern tip of Yemen for reasons of altruism, nor for concern about local political arrangements. They were here because this is prime strategic real estate.
South Yemen’s coastline sits along a vital waterway, the Bab el-Mandeb (Gate of Tears) Strait. The strait leads from the Indian Ocean via the Gulf of Aden, the Red Sea, then up to the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean Sea.
Thirty kilometers wide at its narrowest point, Bab el-Mandeb transits between 10% to 12% of global maritime trade in a normal year. Control of it brings leverage and power. If your interest is in stability, holding the strait can ensure the safe passage of your trading vessels. If, by contrast, your concern is to use disruption and violence to achieve political objectives, domination of the strait can form a crucial pressure point.
That’s why the old empires came and went, and left their fading remnants here and there. And that’s why the new powers are currently engaged in an ongoing fight, conducted partly through proxies, for control of this area.
As of today, the fight for control of the Gulf of Aden-Red Sea route is between the Islamic Republic of Iran on the one hand, with its proxy Houthi militia as its instrument, and a variety of opposing states, including, with various degrees of commitment and a number of local clients, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, the United States, and Israel.
The rise of the Houthis, and their enemies
How did the situation get to its current point? In 2011, against the background of the Arab Spring, popular action brought down the dictatorship of the military officer Ali Abdullah Saleh, who had ruled since 1978. As elsewhere in the Middle East, the downfall of the dictator didn’t lead, alas, to peace and representative government. Rather, local forces clashed, and neighboring powers sought to fill the void.
The Houthis, an Iran-supported Shi’ite Islamist organization, swooped down in 2014 from their mountain strongholds in the northern Sa’adeh province, to take the capital, Sanaa. From there, they tried to push down to Bab el-Mandeb.
They were stopped in 2015 after heavy fighting by a Saudi-led coalition, but not before conquering a large stretch of Yemen’s Red Sea coastline, including the vital ports of Hodeidah and Salif, and the oil terminal at Ras Issa.
The disaster of de facto Iranian control of Bab el-Mandeb was thus prevented, but Yemen was divided once more. Today, the Houthis are using the stretch of coastline they conquered to conduct their war on international shipping, in line with Iranian desires, and nominally in support of the Palestinians of Gaza.
The ground fighting in Yemen, officially, ended with the 2018 Stockholm Agreement. Nothing, however, has been resolved. Today, the Houthis and their enemies face one another along a series of frontlines from east to west.
More than 350,000 people have died in the fighting during 10 years of civil war in Yemen. The Houthis, on their side, exercise dictatorial control. Facing them, however, are several different military and political organizations with contradictory aims.
Most significant on the frontlines against the Houthis are forces associated with the separatist Southern Transitional Council (STC). This body, headed by Aidarus al-Zubeidi and established in 2017, seeks to reestablish a separate southern Yemeni state.
STC-associated forces are the main presence on the frontlines of Abiran/Shabwa, Lehj, and Daleh. These account for the greater part of the lines facing the Houthis. Other areas are covered by a variety of forces, including elements associated with the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Islah party, to which the STC is opposed.
The situation is fluid and volatile. As Ali al-Kathiri, president of the STC’s National Assembly, put it when we met at his office in Aden, “There is a ceasefire, but it’s not a reality on the ground. On three different fronts, they launched attacks in recent days – on the ground and using drones and mortars. And every day there are Houthi drones over Aden.”
Visiting the frontline
At the frontlines in Daleh province, the tense tactical situation became immediately apparent, as did the steep superiority of the Houthis’s equipment. Guided by Gen. Abdallah, the 72-year-old commander of the STC in the area, we made our way to a mountain overlooking the frontlines.
The general is a veteran of the PDRY armed forces. He has been in military service, he told us, since the age of 16, when he joined the PDRY’s Popular Guards in 1968. He moved across the rocky countryside like a man half his age, with our STC security detail struggling to keep up.
The Daleh landscape is unexpectedly green, lush, and beautiful. As we headed for Daleh, I remembered that it’s located quite close to the Yemeni village from where the parents of one of my friends in Israel hailed. All the people of the village, Gades it was called, left in 1949 and settled in Moshav Givat Ye’arim, outside of Jerusalem.
I sent my friend’s husband some pictures of the mountains in Daleh. A few hours later, I received a message saying that the pictures were making the rounds of their family WhatsApp group. In the intervening 70 years, none of them, of course, has been able to visit the village, which had an exclusively Jewish population. Now it is under the control of the Houthis. The STC’s frontlines were as close as I could get.
“No war and no peace here,” the general confirmed as he laid out the situation below, the lines of control of his own STC forces and those of the Houthis.
“We’re holding a defensive line here. Sometimes the enemy does raids. But our forces repel them. Skirmishes. Sniper fire. Drones. Mortars,” he said.
Abdallah, who, in addition to his military role heads the STC in Daleh, later expanded on the situation. “We and the US are in the same boat, against Iran. The Houthis are an arm of Iran. So we’re hopeful to get support and modern weapons from the US, to break the arc of the Iranian project.”
Back in Aden, Maj. Gen. Saleh Salam, commander of the STC’s joint forces, gave us a more detailed list of needed military equipment. “Light and heavy machine guns, air defenses, drones for reconnaissance, anti-aircraft capacity to target low-flying drones, night-vision equipment.” Even this list was not exhaustive.
The track record suggests that the STC’s fighters are capable and well organized. The deficit in their equipment, when compared with that of the Houthis, is nevertheless clearly considerable and daunting.
Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula
There is a second, connected but under-reported fight happening in Yemen. This is the battle against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the most powerful franchise of the global jihadi network.
Until 2022, AQAP controlled territory in Yemen’s Abyan province, in the largest area of control for the franchise globally. STC fighters reconquered the area. AQAP made its last stand in the mountains of Wadi Omran. Their area of control may have gone, but Abyan remains a center for the organization
Representatives of both the STC and the internationally recognized government of Yemen maintain that there are clear and identifiable links between the Houthis and AQAP, based on common enemies. This is not as far-fetched as it sounds.
Despite the Sunni-Shi’ite divide, al-Qaeda leader Saif al-Adel has been resident in Tehran for over a decade. According to Yemeni Defense Minister Mohsen Daeri, speaking in his office in Aden, “When the Houthis took control of Sanaa, they inherited a load of AQAP prisoners. So they worked with them and convinced them to cooperate.
“They had a common enemy, and AQAP are guns for hire. So they came to an agreement. And they’ve released them back into government-controlled areas, where they recruited people and began attacks,” he said.
“AQAP is based in Marib Province [in the Houthi area of control], and al-Qaeda central is in Tehran,” confirmed Abu Nasr, the STC’s intelligence chief. “Marib currently is the safe haven for AQAP, and the Houthis and AQAP use it as a launch pad for attacks. In the south, though, they have no safe haven.
“Both have the same strategic goal of making sure that the STC fails so that they can control the strategic area from al-Mahra in the east to Bab el-Mandeb in the west, [as well as] the Arabian Sea, Socotra, the Perim Islands, and Bab el-Mandeb. So if STC falls, they’ll take control.”
We traveled through AQAP’s heartland in Abyan Province, on the way up to Shabwa, where the STC has another frontline facing the Houthis. Abyan reminded me slightly of Deir al-Zor province in Syria, another tribal heartland of the Sunni jihadis.
In Abyan, though, the poverty was more extreme. Women were absent from public areas; there were just the men riding cheap motorcycles, many armed with old AK-47s. Khat chewing is ubiquitous in Yemen. [The leaves of the khat plant have a stimulating effect.] Sheep wandered around freely, and garbage was piled everywhere. Between the towns, sometimes small groups of Africans made their way eastward, on foot in the blazing sun.
“They come in small boats,” our guide told us. “They’re trying to head toward Saudi Arabia.”
We watched them walk along the roadside in the shimmering, blinding heat, not saying a word. I silently wished them luck at getting through this lawless, remote province, where AQAP fighters are positioned in the mountains around Wadi Omran.
Shabwa is a desert and tribal area, but not as poor, and is more well ordered than Abyan. The Shabwa Defense Forces there are aligned with STC. The United Arab Emirates is directly investing in a number of projects here. There is oil, though currently there is no way to export it.
The way ahead
With the Houthis now recommencing their campaign against global shipping, the issue of a solution to the crisis in Yemen is no mere local concern. The STC, and the official government, profess a willingness to form the ground element in a campaign to drive the Shi’ite Islamists back from the Red Sea coast.
“We just need a green light, and we’ll drive back the Houthis,” Maj. Gen. Saleh al-Hassan told us in Aden. His forces kept the Houthis out of Aden and cleared AQAP from Abyan.
To stand a chance against the Houthis in Hodeidah Province, however, it’s clear that they will need a sharp increase in international supply in preparation, and almost certainly external air support in carrying out their offensive. This may well prove the only way, ultimately, to drive Iran’s proxies back inland. The struggle for primacy in this remote, long-fought-over corner of the Middle East is far from completed.
Published originally on September 12, 2025.
