'Teetering on the brink': Fears of Middle East conflict after Saudi strikes in Yemen
The UAE has denied shipping weapons to Yemeni separatists after Saudi-led forces said they had bombed arms at the port city of Mukalla.
The United Arab Emirates is pulling its personnel out of Yemen after Saudi Arabia's bombing of an alleged shipment of weapons and vehicles it claimed had been going to a separatist group.
The UAE Ministry of Defence said it would withdraw its remaining "counter-terrorism teams" from southern Yemen after Saudi Arabia issued a 24-hour deadline to the Emirates to leave and cease sending weapons and money to any group in the country.
The conflict between these two supposed allies, both major powers in the Gulf region, has raised fears about new instability in south-eastern Yemen, previously an area of relative safety during the country's long-running civil war.
Saudi Arabia had released drone footage of vehicles being unloaded at Yemen's Mukalla Port, alleging they were part of a shipment from the UAE intended for separatists from Yemen's Southern Transitional Council (STC), which has been conducting military operations along Saudi Arabia's lengthy border with Yemen.
The Saudi-led military coalition in Yemen then bombed the weapons and vehicles to prevent their delivery, the most recent of several strikes by Saudi-led forces on the STC over the past week.
"These actions are considered flagrant violations of pacification and efforts to reach a peaceful resolution, in addition to being in defiance of the UNSCR 2216 (2015)," Coalition spokesman Major General Turki Al-Malki, a Saudi Air Force officer, said in a statement.
The Saudi strike targeted what it said was foreign military support to separarists in Yemen. (Reuters/Aden al-Mustakillah TV)
Saudi Arabia also issued an unusually strong statement, demanding the UAE withdraw and accusing it of taking "highly dangerous" steps in pressuring the STC to conduct operations on the kingdom's southern border.
"We're seeing something really new here. This is about as risky as it gets," Elisabeth Kendall, a Yemen specialist and the president of Girton College at Cambridge University, told the ABC.
"We are teetering on the brink of open conflict between two major regional Middle Eastern powers, Saudi Arabia and UAE, which is about to boil over potentially in Yemen."
Both Saudi Arabia and the Emirates intervened in Yemen's civil war in 2015, as the major players in a coalition fighting the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in the north.