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Saudi Coalition Says Separatist Leader Fled Yemen With UAE Help, Advances to Aden
Soldiers gather outside the headquarters of the Southern Transitional Council in Aden, Yemen, Jan. 8, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Fawaz Salman
The Saudi-led coalition in Yemen said on Thursday that the United Arab Emirates had spirited a separatist leader out of the country by boat in a dramatic twist to a rift between the Gulf powers, as Saudi-backed forces advanced to the port of Aden after losing ground there.
The escape of Aidarous al-Zubaidi, head of a UAE-backed southern separatist group, could exacerbate tensions between Saudi Arabia and the UAE, global oil heavyweights and both close allies of the United States.
The Saudi assertion that the UAE helped him escape raises the stakes in a crisis that erupted last month when the separatists swept through southern Yemen, including Aden, advancing within reach of the border with Saudi Arabia. Riyadh declared the move a threat to its national security.
The Saudi-led coalition said Zubaidi had left Yemen for Somaliland, before boarding an aircraft to Mogadishu that was later tracked to a military airport in Abu Dhabi.
Somalia said it had launched an investigation to determine whether its airports were used to transport a “political fugitive,” referring to Zubaidi. The country’s Immigration and Citizenship Agency said that if this proved to be true, it would constitute a “serious violation” of national sovereignty.
Zubaidi had failed to show up in Riyadh for crisis talks over turmoil in southern Yemen on Wednesday. Zubaidi’s Southern Transitional Council (STC) said he had been asked to go to Saudi Arabia under threat.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE previously worked together in a coalition battling the Iran-backed Houthis, an internationally designated terrorist group, in Yemen‘s civil war, which caused one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
But the two most powerful countries in the Gulf have sharp differences over a wide range of volatile issues across the Middle East – from geopolitics to oil output – and those burst into the open with the STC advance.
BRAZEN ESCAPE
After Zubaidi’s unexplained absence from the Riyadh talks, his group said he was overseeing military and security operations in Aden to prevent a security vacuum there.
Aden had been the main seat of power in Yemen outside Houthi-controlled areas since 2015, but leaders of the Saudi-backed government left the city for Saudi Arabia when the STC took control last month.
On Thursday, a Reuters witness said the situation in Aden appeared stable with Saudi-backed Yemeni government forces patrolling the streets, and no sign of STC forces. Authorities have imposed a nighttime curfew.
The Saudi-backed forces have also been retaking ground in other areas in recent days, after Saudi Arabia pressured the UAE to rein in the separatists.
In a sign that a split may be emerging among the separatists, an STC delegation said it had held fruitful talks in Riyadh with the Saudi ambassador to Yemen, according to comments by Mohammed Al Ghaith, a senior official of the group.
Any such fracture could complicate efforts to stabilize Yemen‘s south.
Any confirmation of Zubaidi’s presence in Abu Dhabi could anger Saudi Arabia. In a statement, the Saudi-led coalition said Zubaidi and others accompanying him on the plane to Mogadishu from Somaliland were under the supervision of UAE officers and waited an hour before flying to a military airport in the UAE capital.
The coalition statement also mentioned by name the UAE officer whose help Zubaidi had sought.
The aircraft was of a type similar to those frequently used in conflict zones on the routes of countries such as Ethiopia, Libya and Somalia, the coalition added.
The plane turned off its identification system over the Gulf of Oman, before turning it back on 10 minutes prior to arrival at Al Reef military airport in Abu Dhabi, the coalition said.
The coalition did not clearly say if Zubaidi was still aboard en route to the UAE capital.
There was no immediate comment from the UAE or Zubaidi’s STC.
UAE‘S ASSERTIVE FOREIGN POLICY
The UAE has pursued an assertive foreign policy and carved out its own sphere of influence across the Middle East and Africa, a strategy thrown into the spotlight after the rare military escalation with Saudi Arabia in Yemen.
It withdrew its remaining forces from Yemen and has called for de-escalation in the country, which is reeling from one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises caused by the civil war.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE first intervened in Yemen after the Houthis seized the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, in 2014.
The UAE joined the Saudi-backed coalition the following year in support of the internationally recognized government.
The STC was set up in 2017 with UAE backing and eventually joined the government coalition.
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Nick Fuentes says his problem with Trump ‘is that he is not Hitler’
(JTA) — In the fall, a video of Nick Fuentes criticizing Donald Trump drew the praise of progressive ex-Congressman Jamaal Bowman.
“Finally getting it Nick,” Bowman commented, apparently recognizing some common ground between himself on the left and Fuentes, on the far right, who said in the video that Trump was “better than the Democrats for Israel, for the oil and gas industry, for Silicon Valley, for Wall Street,” but said he wasn’t “better for us.”
Now, Fuentes says there is actually no common ground between him and those on the left.
“My problem with Trump isn’t that he’s Hitler — my problem with Trump is that he is not Hitler,” Fuentes said during his streaming show on Tuesday, which focused mostly on the potential for an American attack on Iran.
He continued, “You have all these left-wing people saying, ‘Why do I agree with Nick Fuentes?’ It’s like, I’m criticizing Trump because there’s not enough deportations, there’s not enough ICE brutality, there’s not enough National Guard. Sort of a big difference!”
Fuentes, the streamer and avowed antisemite who has previously said Hitler was “very f–king cool,” has been gaining more traction as a voice on the right. His interview with Tucker Carlson in October plunged Republicans into an ongoing debate over antisemitism within their ranks, inflaming the divide between a pro-Israel wing of the party and an emerging, isolationist “America First” wing that’s against U.S. military assistance to Israel.
Once a pro-Trump MAGA Republican, Fuentes has become the leader of the “groyper” movement advocating for farther-right positions. The set of Fuentes’ show includes both a hat and a mug with the words “America First” on his desk.
In a New York Times interview, Trump recently weighed in on rising tensions within the Republican Party, saying Republican leaders should “absolutely” condemn figures who promote antisemitism, and that he does not approve of antisemites in the party.
“No, I don’t. I think we don’t need them. I think we don’t like them,” replied Trump when asked by a reporter whether there was room within the Republican coalition for antisemitic figures.
Asked if he would condemn Fuentes, Trump initially claimed that he didn’t know the antisemitic streamer, before acknowledging that he had had dinner with him alongside Kanye West in 2022.
“I had dinner with him, one time, where he came as a guest of Kanye West. I didn’t know who he was bringing,” Trump said. “He said, ‘Do you mind if I bring a friend?’ I said, ‘I don’t care.’ And it was Nick Fuentes? I don’t know Nick Fuentes.”
Trump flaunted his pro-Israel bona fides in the interview, mentioning the recent announcement that he was nominated for Israel’s top civilian honor and calling himself the “best president of the United States in the history of this country toward Israel.”
Fuentes, meanwhile, spent the bulk of his show on Tuesday speculating that Trump will order the U.S. to attack Iran, and concluded that “Israel is holding our hand walking us down the road toward an inevitable war.”
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Larry Ellison once renamed a superyacht because its name spelled backwards was ‘I’m a Nazi’
(JTA) — Larry Ellison, the Jewish founder of Oracle and a major pro-Israel donor, has recently been in the headlines for his media acquisition ventures with his son.
The new scrutiny on the family has surfaced a decades-old detail about Ellison: that he once rechristened a superyacht after realizing that its original name carried an antisemitic tinge.
In 1999, Ellison — then No. 23 on Forbes’ billionaires list, well on his way to his No. 4 ranking today — purchased a boat called Izanami.
Originally built for a Japanese businessman, the 191-foot superyacht was named for a Shinto deity. But Ellison soon realized what the name read backwards: “I’m a Nazi.”
“Izanami and Izanagi are the names of the two Shinto deities that gave birth to the Japanese islands, or so legend has it,” Ellison said in “Softwar,” a 2013 biography. “When the local newspapers started pointing out that Izanami was ‘I’m a Nazi’ spelled backward, I had the choice of explaining Shintoism to the reporters at the San Francisco Chronicle or changing the name of the boat.” He renamed the boat Ronin and later sold it.
The decades-old factoid resurfaced this week because of a New York Magazine profile of Ellison’s son, David Ellison, the chair and CEO of Paramount-Skydance Corporation.
Skydance Corporation, which David Ellison founded in 2006, completed an $8 billion merger last year with Paramount Global. Larry Ellison, meanwhile, joined an investor consortium that signed a deal to purchase TikTok, the social media juggernaut accused of spreading antisemitism. Together, father and son also staged a hostile bid to purchase Warner Bros. but were outmatched by Netflix.
After acquiring Paramount, David Ellison appointed The Free Press founder Bari Weiss as the editor-in-chief of CBS News, in an endorsement of Weiss’ contrarian and pro-Israel outlook that has been challenged as overly friendly to the Trump administration.
Larry Ellison, who was raised in a Reform Jewish home by his adoptive Jewish parents, has long been a donor to pro-Israel and Jewish causes, including to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces. In September, he briefly topped the Bloomberg Billionaires Index as the world’s richest man.
In December, Oracle struck a deal to provide cloud services for TikTok, with some advocates hoping for tougher safeguards against antisemitism on the social media platform
The post Larry Ellison once renamed a superyacht because its name spelled backwards was ‘I’m a Nazi’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Alex Bregman, who drew a Jewish star on his cap after Oct. 7, inks $175M deal with the Cubs
(JTA) — For the second year in a row, Jewish star third baseman Alex Bregman has signed a lucrative free-agent contract with a team that is run by a Jewish executive and plays in a historic ballpark in a city with a significant Jewish community.
Last year, it was the Boston Red Sox. Now, Bregman is headed to the Chicago Cubs — a team whose Jewish fans possess almost religious devotion.
Bregman, who had opted out of a three-year, $120 million deal with Boston, has signed a five-year, $175 million pact with the Cubs. It is the second-largest contract ever signed by a Jewish ballplayer, behind Max Fried’s $218 million contract in 2024. Bregman previously signed a five-year, $100 million extension with the Houston Astros in 2019.
Bregman, who played the first nine years of his career in Houston, has been one of baseball’s premier third basemen over the past decade, with three All-Star selections, a Gold Glove, a Silver Slugger and two World Series rings. He’s also heralded for his leadership on and off the field.
Bregman grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he played baseball in high school and also, according to his mother, was once teased while leaving school for a bar mitzvah lesson. His grandfather, the onetime attorney for the Washington Senators whom she said Bregman called “zeyde,” gave him a collection of baseball cards featuring Jewish players.
His great-grandfather fled antisemitism in Belarus and fell in love with sports in the United States, The Athletic reported in 2017, as Bregman hurtled toward his World Series win.
“It’s the fulfillment of four generations of short Jewish Bregmans who dreamed of playing in the major leagues,” his father Sam, now the district attorney in Albuquerque’s county as well as a Democratic candidate for New Mexico governor, said at the time. “The big leagues and the World Series. One hundred twenty years in America fulfilled by Alex in this World Series.”
Bregman has also been vocal about his Jewish pride. He celebrated Hanukkah with a local synagogue in Houston, and following the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that launched the Gaza War, Bregman drew a Star of David on his hat during a playoff game and participated in a video of Jewish players calling on fans to support Israel.
Some Jewish fans hoped Bregman’s shows of solidarity with Israel would lead him to suit up for another new squad this spring, Team Israel at the upcoming World Baseball Classic. But Bregman announced this week that he will play for Team USA again. Another Jewish ballplayer, Rowdy Tellez, will rejoin team Mexico, taking two big names off the recruitment board for Israel.
Back in 2018, as Bregman was first emerging as a major star, he said he regretted taking a pass on Team Israel the previous year, when it made it to the second round of play. Suiting up for the U.S. team, Bregman had just four at-bats as a backup player.
Now, he has selected a jersey number for his Cubs era that reflects his aspirations.
“I wore No. 3 because I want a third championship,” Bregman said during his first press conference with his new club on Thursday.
The post Alex Bregman, who drew a Jewish star on his cap after Oct. 7, inks $175M deal with the Cubs appeared first on The Forward.