A mysterious air base being built on a volcanic island off Yemen sits in one of the world’s crucial maritime chokepoints for energy shipments and commercial cargo.
While no country has claimed the air base on Mayun Island in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, shipping traffic associated with an attempt years ago to build a massive runway across the 5.6km-long island links back to the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Officials in Yemen’s internationally recognized government have said that the Emiratis are behind this latest effort as well, even though the UAE in 2019 announced that it was withdrawing its troops from a Saudi Arabia-led military campaign battling Yemen’s Houthi rebels.
Photo: AP
“This does seem to be a longer-term strategic aim to establish a relatively permanent presence,” said Jeremy Binnie, Middle East editor at the open-source intelligence company Janes, which has followed construction on Mayun for years.
It is “possibly not just about the Yemen war and you’ve got to see the shipping situation as fairly key there,” Binnie added.
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.
It also provides a base for any operations into the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden and nearby East Africa.
Satellite images provided by Planet Labs showed dump trucks and graders building a 1.85km runway on the island on April 11.
By Tuesday last week, that work appeared to be complete, with three hangars constructed on a 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 of more than 3km long, which would allow for the heaviest bombers.
Military officials with Yemen’s internationally recognized government, which the Saudi Arabia-led coalition has backed since 2015, said that the UAE is building the runway.
The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that Emirati ships transported military weapons, equipment and troops to Mayun over the past few weeks.
Tensions between the UAE and Yemeni President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi came in part from an Emirati demand for his government to sign a 20-year lease agreement for Mayun, the military officials said.
Emirati officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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 underway there.
Tugboats associated with Dubai-based Echo Cargo and Shipping, and landing craft and carriers from Abu Dhabi-based Bin Nawi Marine Services helped bring equipment to the island in that first attempt, tracking signals recorded by data firm Refinitiv showed.
Satellite photographs at the time showed that they offloaded the gear and vehicles at a temporary beachside port.
Echo Cargo and Shipping declined to comment, while Bin Nawi Marine Services did not respond to a request for comment.
Shipping data showed no recorded vessels around Mayun Island, indicating that whoever provided the sealift for the latest construction turned off their boats’ devices called an Automatic Identification System, which manages their GPS signals, to avoid being identified.
Construction initially stopped in 2017, likely when engineers realized that they could not dig through a portion of the volcanic island’s craggy features to incorporate the site of the island’s old runway.
Construction on the new runway site restarted on about Feb. 22, satellite photographs showed, several weeks after US President Joe Biden announced that he would end US support for the Saudi Arabia-led offensive against the Houthis.
The apparent decision by the Emiratis to resume building the air base comes after the UAE dismantled parts of a military base that it ran in the East African nation of Eritrea as a staging ground for its Yemen campaign.
While the Horn of Africa “has become a dangerous place” for the Emiratis due to competitors and local war risks, Mayun has a small population and offers a valuable site for monitoring the Red Sea, said Eleonora Ardemagni, an analyst at the Italian Institute for International Political Studies.
The region has seen a rise in attacks and incidents.
“The Emiratis have been shifting from a power-projection foreign policy to a power-protection foreign policy,” Ardemagni said, adding that it increases “their capacity to monitor what happens and to prevent possible threats by non-state actors close to Iran.”
The base might interest US forces, which operated from Yemen’s al-Anad Air Base, running a campaign of drone strikes targeting al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula until the Houthi advance forced them to withdraw in 2015.
Special forces raids and drones have also targeted the country.
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