Military officials in Yemen say UAE is building runway on Mayun Island, a crucial shipping chokepoint
Originally posted to The Guardian website, 25 May 2021
A mysterious airbase is being built on a volcanic island off Yemen that sits in one of the world’s crucial maritime chokepoints for energy shipments and commercial cargo.
While no country has claimed the Mayun Island airbase in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, shipping traffic associated with a prior attempt to build a massive runway across the 3.5-mile-long island years ago links back to the United Arab Emirates.
Officials in Yemen’s internationally recognised government say the Emiratis are behind this latest effort as well, even though the UAE announced in 2019 it was withdrawing its troops from a Saudi-led military campaign battling Yemen’s Houthi rebels.
“This does seem to be a longer-term strategic aim to establish a relatively permanent presence,” said Jeremy Binnie, the Middle East editor of the open-source intelligence company Janes, who has followed construction on Mayun for years. He said it was “possibly not just about the Yemen war and you’ve got to see the shipping situation as fairly key there”.
Emirati officials in Abu Dhabi and the UAE’s embassy in Washington did not respond to requests for comment.
The runway on Mayun Island allows whoever controls it to project power into the strait and easily launch airstrikes into mainland Yemen, convulsed by a bloody, years-long war. It also provides a base for any operations into the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden and nearby east Africa.
Satellite images from Planet Labs obtained by the Associated Press showed construction vehicles building a 1.85km (6,070ft) runway on the island on 11 April. By 18 May, that work appeared complete, with three hangars constructed on tarmac just south of the runway.
A runway of that length can accommodate attack, surveillance and transport aircraft. An earlier effort begun toward the end of 2016 and later abandoned had workers try to build an even-larger runway more than 3km long, which would allow for the heaviest bombers.
Military officials with Yemen’s internationally recognised government, which the Saudi-led coalition has backed since 2015, said the UAE was building the runway. The officials, speaking to the AP on condition of anonymity as they didn’t have authorisation to brief journalists, said Emirati ships had transported military weapons, equipment and troops to Mayun Island in recent weeks.
The military officials said recent tension between the UAE and the Yemeni president, Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi, had come in part from an Emirati demand for his government to sign a 20-year lease agreement for Mayun. Emirati officials have not acknowledged any disagreement.
The initial, failed construction project came after Emirati and allied forces retook the island from Iranian-backed Houthi militants in 2015. By late 2016, satellite images showed construction under way there.
Tugboats associated with Dubai-based Echo Cargo & Shipping and landing craft and carriers from Abu Dhabi-based Bin Nawi Marine Services helped bring equipment to the island in that first attempt, according to tracking signals recorded by the data firm Refinitiv. Satellite photos at the time show they offloaded the gear and vehicles at a temporary beachside port.
Echo Cargo & Shipping declined to comment, while Bin Nawi Marine Services did not respond to a request for comment. Recent shipping data shows no recorded vessels around Mayun, suggesting whoever provided transport for the latest construction turned off their boats’ Automatic Identification System tracking devices to avoid being identified.
Construction initially stopped in 2017, probably when engineers realised they could not dig through a portion of the volcanic island’s craggy features to incorporate the site of the old runway. The building restarted in earnest on the new runway site around 22 February, satellite photos show, several weeks after President Joe Biden announced he would end US support for the Saudi-led offensive against the Houthis.
The apparent decision by the Emiratis to resume building the airbase comes after the UAE dismantled parts of a military base it ran in the east African nation of Eritrea as a staging ground for its Yemen campaign.
Eleonora Ardemagni, an analyst at the Italian Institute for International Political Studies, said that while the Horn of Africa had “become a dangerous place” for the Emiratis due to competitors and local war risks, Mayun had a small population and offered a valuable site for monitoring the Red Sea. There has been a rise in attacks and incidents in the region.
“The Emiratis have been shifting from a power-projection foreign policy to a power-protection foreign policy,” Ardemagni said. It increases “their capacity to monitor what happens and to prevent possible threats by non-state actors close to Iran”.
The expeditionary al-Quds force of Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard was said to run a similar operation on a cargo ship long stationed nearby off Yemen before being apparently targeted by an Israeli attack.
Mayun, also known as Perim Island, sits two miles off the south-western edge of Yemen. World powers have recognised the island’s strategic location for hundreds of years, especially with the opening of the Suez Canal linking the Mediterranean and Red Seas.
Link to the original post: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/25/mysterious-airbase-being-built-on-volcanic-island-off-yemen
