Local Military Forces in Taiz 2015-Present

The military forces battling the Houthis in Taiz illustrate the complexity of the Yemen war and the difficulty of encapsulating its dynamics within a grand proxy war framework that views sponsors as exerting substantial control over their proxies and views the conflict as defined by the aims of external sponsors.

Many of the armed groups active in Taiz initially emerged as irregular Popular Resistance forces operating outside of the government. External funding facilitated their activity, but often struggled to catch up with the actions of locally motivated groups.

Over the course of the war these forces have increasingly been brought, at least nominally, into the chain of command of the Yemeni government. The hierarchy of the military decision-making in the Yemeni government is as follows. Forces under the Yemeni army ostensibly fall under the leadership of Yemeni President Abdo Rabbu Hadi, then, Minister of Defense Mohamed al-Maqdashi, and finally, Armed Forces Chief of Staff Taher al-Aqill. Those in Taiz fall under the de jure leadership of the Fourth Military Region (one of four military regions in Yemen designated since 2013), which includes both Aden and Taiz. According to interviews with military figures, the process of absorbing these forces into the government military brigades began in July 2015.

However, the formalization of the Popular Resistance groups has not turned the Yemen war into a clash between unified military forces under the sway of foreign sponsors that can be understood primarily through a framework of proxy warfare. Despite formalization, the conflict remains locally rooted, and sponsors must contend with local loyalties and political competition.

Forces within the Yemeni army in Taiz have witnessed leadership changes as the central government, the Yemeni armed forces chain of command, various Yemeni political factions, and the coalition have sought to bolster their favored figures within Yemen’s military structure. External backers, including Saudi Arabia and the UAE, have played a role in this dynamic. However, this has often seen a degree of back and forth, with partnerships evolving due to differing internal and external dynamics.

Though the Yemeni government is often reduced to a proxy for the Gulf States, it actually has discretion over how Gulf support is distributed on the ground. Hadi’s government provides the salaries for soldiers in the Axis. Hadi’s government in turn receives financial support from the coalition countries, which it distributes to its military and political leaders on the ground, demonstrating the multi-level nature of its alliance with its Saudi backers.

While forces in Taiz have increasingly been brought nominally under the official chain of command, military leaders in Taiz have substantial autonomy from both their military superiors and coalition sponsors, owing in equal parts to the dispersed status of the Yemeni armed forces and the besieged nature of the city of Taiz. Both media reports and Taizis themselves frequently refer to brigades by their pre-reorganization name, continuing to view Popular Resistance groups that were ostensibly subsumed into the national army as still-discrete entities.

This dynamic is compounded by the interaction of internal party politics with foreign power sponsorship, particularly in the case of divides between Islah and its rivals. There are two broad military groupings in Taiz. The first, the Taiz Military Axis, is generally viewed by international observers as being aligned with Islah, and incorporates the bulk of the Popular Resistance groups. The second grouping, also aligned against the Houthis, consists of the Thirty-Fifth Brigade and the Abu al-Abbas Brigades.

The Thirty-Fifth Brigade and Abu al-Abbas have received UAE support in part to counter the strength of Islah, whose ties to the Muslim Brotherhood worry the Emiratis. In turn, this has pushed the traditional backers of Islah to increase support to their preferred agents. Both the Thirty-Fifth Brigade and the Abu Abbas Brigades—in contrast to the majority of the groups within the Taiz Military Axis—are seen by Taizis as primarily UAE-, rather than Saudi-, backed.

However, these alignments are often more ephemeral than they are represented as under the grand proxy war narrative. In reality, both groupings have benefitted from coalition funding, composed mostly of support from both the UAE and Saudi Arabia, at different points in time, underlining the dynamic nature of proxy-sponsor relationships in Yemen.

The military groupings are fluid in structure and the outlines of the groups are constantly mutable and evolving, with individuals and battalions merging with other battalions and brigades. On the ground, personal relationships, geography, and familial ties often have as much, if not more, to do with allegiance and alliance than ideology and geopolitics.

For example, on December 2, 2019, Adnan Al-Hammadi, the commander of Thirty-Fifth Brigade was killed in Taiz. As Afrah Nasser, a Human Rights Watch Yemen researcher, put it, the assassination "reflects the deepening fragmentation of power in [Taiz]."¹ Two years prior to his death, Al-Hammadi told the journalist Abu Bakr Al-Shamahi that financial and military support intended to strengthen the military was diverted to other pro-government factions. According to Al-Shamahi, "Off camera [Al-Hammadi] said that the UAE had agreed to supply him with heavy weapons for a military offensive against the Houthis, but that [Islah] had prevented this from happening."² In the wake of his assassination, attribution for which remains unclear, some have pointed the finger at Islah, illustrating the role of local political rivalries in the conflict and the Taizi understanding of it.

In addition to the two major military groupings, al-Qaida also maintains a latent presence in Taiz. Although its presence has diminished due to counterterrorism operations, it has not disappeared and has in the past demonstrated an ability to use the chaos of the war and the propaganda framings of proxy war to its advantage.

A detailed examination of these three military groupings, their local roots, and the complex interaction between local interests and external sponsors can be found in Appendix One.