Saudi Arabian media steps up attacks on UAE as Gulf rift deepens

Saudi Arabia’s state-controlled media are escalating their attacks on the United Arab Emirates, as the rift between the two Gulf powerhouses continues to deepen including over the conflict in Yemen.

Reports on Saudi channel al-Ekhbariya in recent days have accused Abu Dhabi of committing human rights abuses and paying Yemeni separatists to campaign against the kingdom. Some pro-government social media accounts floated closing Saudi airspace and the land border with the UAE.

The UAE’s forced withdrawal from Yemen earlier this month, where it backed a separatist movement that clashed with forces aligned to the country’s Saudi-backed government, had appeared to de-escalate tensions. But the renewed media attacks suggest that both sides remain at odds.

Al-Ekhbariya on Tuesday showed what it described as UAE-run secret prisons in the Yemeni province of Hadhramaut, with scenes showing narrow cells behind metal doors painted in black. The reports came a day after Hadhramaut governor Salem al-Khanbashi accused the UAE of being behind detention sites.

The UAE denied running secret prisons. Its defence ministry said the facilities were ‘‘military accommodation, operations rooms and fortified shelters’’.

The sharp war of words is unusual among Gulf states, where ruling families follow Arab norms of honour and propriety even in disagreement. Such tactics are reminiscent of the Gulf crisis in 2017, when Saudi Arabia and the UAE imposed an embargo against Qatar, which they accused of supporting the Islamist groups. Qatar has always denied the allegations.

The divergence between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi has widened since then, with the two sides also disagreeing over foreign policy in Sudan and east Africa as well as Yemen.

The latest crisis began in December after the UAE-backed separatist Southern Transitional Council launched an offensive to take control of Yemen’s Hadhramaut and al-Mahra provinces, which border Saudi Arabia. Riyadh said the STC’s advances threatened its national security and accused the UAE of approving the attack.

In 2015 Saudi Arabia and the UAE intervened as coalition partners in Yemen’s civil war against Iran-backed Houthi rebels, who control much of the country’s north. But the two Gulf neighbours backed different groups within the loose alliance fighting the Houthis, and those groups often competed with each other.

Saudi journalist Jassir al-Jassir on Monday told Al Arabiya channel that the UAE “betrayed the partnership with the kingdom in Yemen”. He drew a contrast between the Emirati capital Abu Dhabi, which is often seen as the political centre that drives foreign policy, and its commercial hub Dubai which has been praised as an economic success story.

The attempt to highlight differences between Abu Dhabi and Dubai, the largest two emirates of the UAE, has been a recurrent theme in attacks by Saudi media and pundits.

Saudi analyst Salman al-Oqeily wrote on X that the tension between the kingdom and the UAE should be seen as differences over how the region’s complex crises should be resolved, rather than a battle for hegemony in the Middle East.

While Saudi Arabia was focused on “restoring the power of the central nation-state”, the UAE sometimes “takes more flexible approaches with non-state actors and resolving crises through networks of influence and proxies, even if that comes at the expense of the full nation-state model”, he wrote on X.

UAE state media has been slightly more restrained in comparison to their Saudi counterparts, but Emirati pundits and influencers responded strongly on social networks.

Hadi al-Mansouri, an Emirati poet with 20,000 followers on Instagram, mocked how anti-UAE posts from Saudi Arabia share almost identical language, calling them a “herd ready for copy and paste” who receive instructions from one source, suggesting this was an orchestrated campaign by the kingdom.