Yemen's president clears out ministers and generals as Houthis close in

The head of Yemen's UN-recognised government, President Rashad al-Alimi, has cleared out ministers and commanders in a bid to stop the rot. Long-serving information minister Muammar al-Eryani is out, replaced by Prof Salem al-Awlaki, who ran the civil service ministry and spent 2017 to 2019 as a spokesperson for the Southern Transitional Council. Alimi also handed two more southerners the local administration and civil service portfolios, and installed fresh leadership at the civil aviation authority, the ports of Aden and the transport ministry.

On the battlefield side, the knives landed on the men blamed for losing ground. Yusuf al-Sharaji, who ran the Taiz front, and Brig Abu Bakr al-Jabouli, responsible for the Tor al-Baha axis, were both sacked after widespread accusations that al-Sharaji mishandled operations and let districts fall to the Houthis. The job of breaking the four-week siege of Taiz and pulling the government's squabbling forces into line now belongs to Maj Gen Rashad al-Yousfi, a career officer.

The reshuffle follows a counteroffensive launched on 5 October that was supposed to liberate the whole country and instead collapsed, leaving thousands dead on both sides. Saudi air superiority — the government's main advantage, even as the kingdom fends off near-daily Houthi strikes on its airports and military bases — has not turned into gains on the ground. Reuters reported on Monday that Houthi forces were only about 60km from Aden, the government's nominal seat.

Alimi's tilt toward southerners is no accident. Between 1967 and 1990 Yemen was two countries, and the banned Southern Transitional Council still pushes for a return to partition or a looser federation. The government leans on southern troops to blunt Houthi advances, but those fighters say they will only defend land inside the old South Yemen. Fresh claims this week said STC leaders were coerced by the Saudis into dissolving the organisation against their will, and the rising volume of STC criticism of Riyadh in the media suggests the group expects the Saudis to have little choice but to let it operate openly if the north falls.

The presidential leadership council met in Riyadh earlier this week for the first time in months, confronting the loss of swathes of the west coast. Much of the government's senior ranks live out of Riyadh hotels rather than inside Yemen, and salaries depend on Saudi money — critics mock it as a hotel government. Not all southern separatists back the STC, which overreached in January and made it easier for Saudi leaders to keep deferring decisions on the south.

Even the government's own allies are at each other's throats. Abu Zara'a, leader of the Southern Giants, is said to have fallen out with the Saudi-funded Homeland Shield Forces and its affiliate Abdulrahman al-Lahji, whose outfit took heavy losses. Al-Lahji filed an official report accusing Abu Zara'a of treason and warned the situation in Dhubab, near the strategic Bab al-Mandab strait, had turned extremely dangerous for the government — a pointed rebuttal to repeated claims the strait had been wrested back from the Houthis.