Saudi Arabia bombs Yemeni port over alleged UAE weapons
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Explore what the Charterholder advantage looks like at cfainstitute.org. This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. Hi, I'm Ankur Desai and at 16 hours GMT on Tuesday the 30th of December, these are our main stories. The United Arab Emirates has agreed to end its military activities in Yemen after being given a 24-hour deadline by Saudi Arabia to pull out. Protests are spreading in Iran over rising prices and the plummeting value of the currency. Also in this podcast, Mount Everest and the challenge of removing rubbish and waste from the mountains is proving almost as tough as climbing it.
And... It's got this neck collar which has spikes that are about a metre in length. So it's sort of the length of golf clubs sticking out in various directions. And we've never seen anything like that in any other animal.
We'll have the story of the dinosaur hunters and their 10-year investigation which led to the discovery of a spiky punk rock dinosaur. We start with escalating tensions between two of the biggest powers in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Riyadh has declared a UAE-backed separatist advance in Yemen as a threat to its national security and has told the United Arab Emirates to withdraw all its forces from Yemen within 24 hours. Saudi Arabia said it had carried out an attack on the port of Mughala in southern Yemen, where it said large quantities of weapons had been sent from the UAE intended for the separatists. The UAE has now agreed to end its operations in Yemen, but denied it had sent arms to the separatists, saying it was disappointed by the Saudi claims.
Iona Craig is a journalist who has lived in and reported from Yemen for 15 years. She told Krupa Padi about the situation there. There had already been a large convoy of UAE vehicles that had already military hardware that had arrived the previous day. And there's been video released by Saudi Arabia and by the Saudi press agency of Saudi Arabia tracking those convoys through eastern Yemen. giving a clear indication to the UAE and their back forces in the area that they are tracking them and they're watching what they're doing. And it seems to be a very strong message added to by the extremely strong statement that Saudi Arabia put out following those strikes, which I think is probably more concerning in many respects than the airstrikes themselves.
The UAE continue to maintain that any shipment has not been intended to offer support to southern separatist forces. But how serious could this get? There were clear indications very early on that the UAE had its own goals in Yemen, particularly in southern Yemen. It very quickly, after getting involved, backed the southern separatist cause and then helped establish the Southern Transitional Council, which has been leading this military move into eastern Yemen over the last few weeks. And that was strategic for the UAE. They've taken control of large parts of the southern coast and ports, as well as islands off the coast of Yemen, been building air bases on those islands. Whereas the priority for Saudi Arabia, particularly more recently, has been about trying to negotiate a political settlement with the Houthis in order to maintain security within the kingdom to prevent the Houthis carrying out attacks with ballistic missiles that we saw earlier on the conflict.
Whereas the UAE's goals have been something quite different. And this doesn't just play out in Yemen, of course. I think we can't see this in isolation from what's been happening in Sudan in the war there as well. The UAE, we know, is backing the RSF forces there.
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