Defeat in the desert: how ‘Little Sparta’ lost its might

They thought they were the new power in the Middle East. Nicknamed “Little Sparta” by General James Mattis, the former US defence secretary, the armed forces of the United Arab Emirates had a combat reputation stretching from Libya to Afghanistan.

Then they met the seven-fingered, one-legged hero of Shabwa, the youngest brigadier in the Yemeni army.

Brigadier Abd Rabbo Laa’kab had 300 men, in his telling of the story, and a handful of “technicals” — the pick-up trucks mounted with anti-aircraft guns that have become a staple of warfare in this part of the world.

The Emiratis had trained thousands of local troops into what they grandly termed “the Shabwa Elite Forces”, a Praetorian Guard for the UAE’s military and political strategy in southern Yemen.

“They came from all corners,” Brigadier Laa’kab, 32, said of the evening the Elite Forces descended on Ataq, the main town of Shabwa, a province in southern Yemen. “They were trying to take control. They were heavily equipped and ready to fight.”

Then something extraordinary happened. As the August night drew on, a group of his men managed to get in front of the enemy besieging the governor’s palace. As day broke, one of his technicals embarked on a near-suicide mission, seizing a checkpoint at a key crossroads, and the Elite Forces were suddenly on the defensive.

By the end of that day, they had been driven out of the city and over the next two the brigadier’s men, reinforced from front lines to the north, pushed the Emiratis and their local troops 120 miles back, all the way down the main road to the coast.

“Their men were calling me and asking where we were, so they could run away before we arrived,” Brigadier Laa’kab said. He shows no liking for false modesty.

The Emirati defeat at the hands of Laa’kaab — originally an ally in the war against the Iranian-backed Houthis — has come to symbolise the waning fortunes of the Gulf state’s overseas adventures: from grand designs for influence and power to humiliation and defeat in the desert.

The scrubby city of Ataq exists on a different planet to the hotels and Gucci-stacked malls of Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

The same could be said of the brigadier. Short, with boyish black curls and a puckish smile that switches between mirth and menace, he is a striking contrast to the UAE’s royal leaders, swishing through their palaces’ air-conditioned corridors in white kandouras.

Yet they were once allies. The UAE joined Saudi Arabia in Yemen’s civil war in 2015, supporting the government against the Houthi rebels who had seized half the country, and it was in this war that Brigadier Laa’kab earned his stripes.

How he came to be fighting his former friends is an object lesson in the miscalculations the Emiratis have made in their interventions in Yemen and, some argue, across the region. Once they were the Middle East’s coming power, their western ambassadors close to the US and UK establishments.

Their ambassador to Washington in particular, Yousef al-Otaiba, became a player in the circle around Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law.

Now they are on the back foot, losing wars they once appeared to be winning in Yemen and Libya, just as their biggest ally is pushed out of the White House.

The UAE’s military ventures, a clear break from the oil, tourism and business model the country pursued after independence from Britain in 1971, are geared to giving it sway in a Middle East from which the US is slowly withdrawing. In particular, it wants to ensure the US role is not supplanted by Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, jihadists, or any other form of political Islam.

It began modestly, with a contribution to Nato’s mission in Afghanistan. It was, western advisers say, a test of the willingness of the princes’ subjects, who have wealth but little say in government, to accept the risks attendant on military action.

In 2011, the Emirati air force joined western allies in bombing Libya and ousting the Gaddafi regime. By 2019, the military mission — linked firmly to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed of Abu Dhabi, the UAE’s effective leader — had spread across the Middle East.

His jets had taken part in bombing raids against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. In Libya, Abu Dhabi was arming and flying missions for Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, the anti-Islamist former Gaddafi general who had conquered three-quarters of the country.

And as the Yemen conflict dragged on, the UAE established a military base in Eritrea, on the other side of the Red Sea, and another in Somaliland, a breakaway province of Somalia.

DP World, a company based in Dubai, took over Somaliland’s main port, while in Somalia itself UAE forces were brought in to train the army.

The defeat of the Emiratis’ local allies in Ataq is just one of a string of setbacks that has changed all that in the past 18 months. It happened after the Emiratis had inadvertently split the government forces into two halves, fuelling a civil war within the civil war.

They had never fully trusted the government army, which contained Islamist units and not a few individuals who had also fought for al-Qaeda. They came to prefer a group of secular-minded provincial bosses whose primary loyalty was to a longstanding southern separatist movement.

Before long, that movement found itself revived with Emirati money and training. It began to operate outside the recognised government’s control, and finally against it — leading ultimately to the clash in Ataq.

The UAE and its allies still control most of Yemen’s main ports, including Aden, the second city, and its single most important industrial development, the liquefied natural gas plant at Balhaf to Ataq’s south. But Balhaf, built at a cost of $5 billion by the French company Total, is not functioning, and the brigadier’s advance has cut the Emirati zone of influence into two weakened halves.

It has also highlighted how regional powers risk the same dangers as western powers when they become embroiled in other people’s conflicts. “You see, they weren’t really doing something for which they were prepared to sacrifice their lives,” Brigadier Laa’kab said of the Emiratis’ local army, comparing it to his own.

In other parts of the Middle East, the UAE has made similar miscalculations. They drove Field Marshal Haftar so close to victory with an assault on the Libyan capital last year that they drew the Tripoli government’s main backer, Turkey, into a deeper engagement. Turkey’s drones and the Syrian mercenaries it recruited went on to rout Haftar’s forces.

At the same time, even Somalia found the UAE too overbearing, and kicked out its advisers.

The whole period has united disparate Yemenis, Libyans and east Africans against a country that many would once have seen as an economic model.

“I had an intuition right from the start that the Emiratis weren’t really coming to help us,” said Mohsen Omair al-Mehdar, 46, a Yemeni tribal figure whose son was one of six men killed in a midnight raid on the family village by the Emiratis and the Elite Forces. They claimed they were trying to arrest an al-Qaeda suspect, but he turned out not to be there. “What are they doing, supporting this militia that isn’t even part of the state? Why are they controlling our ports?”

It is a question some people back home in the UAE are also quietly asking. The UAE recently led other Arab states in signing a “normalisation deal” with Israel, but won few concessions in return, a sign of its weakening strength in the region.

It has acknowledged losing more than 100 of its own men in Yemen, and has begun withdrawing forces in what is a humiliating retreat. The Houthis continue to advance.

The one payoff it did get from the Israel deal was a promise it would be sold American F-35 jets. But these are implicitly for use against its first rival Iran, a return to square one of UAE foreign policy.

Meanwhile the question marks hanging over its adventures further afield grow ever more numerous.

First published on The Times