Yemen launches eastern security campaign after commander killed in Hadramawt ambush

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Yemen’s Ministry of Defence has launched a wide-ranging security campaign across government-held territory, concentrated in the eastern governorates of Hadramawt and al-Mahra, following a run of highway robberies and targeted killings that culminated in the assassination of a senior military commander.

The most prominent of those killings was that of Brigadier General Osama Abdulkarim Mohsen al-Radfani, commander of the Fourth Brigade of the Nation’s Shield Forces, who was shot dead alongside members of his escort in an ambush in the al-Abr area of Hadramawt. No group claimed responsibility, and the identity and motives of the gunmen remain unclear. Yemeni human rights organisations have called for an independent investigation into the attack.

Al-Radfani’s death followed a separate ambush days earlier in the Ramah district of Hadramawt, in which gunmen opened fire on Nation’s Shield personnel, killing several soldiers and wounding others. Accounts of the casualty toll from that attack differ between Yemeni outlets. Taken together, the two incidents pointed to a continuing capacity among armed groups to mount lethal operations in a governorate where the government has invested considerable effort in consolidating control.

The ministry framed the campaign as an obligation to protect public safety in areas outside Houthi control. It said the operation is designed to identify and dismantle networks involved in terrorism, smuggling and organised crime, and to arrest those responsible for attacks on civilians and on military personnel. In practice that means a heavier police and army presence on the main highways, which the ministry described as vital both to civilian movement and to the economy.

Geography helps explain why those routes matter. Hadramawt is by far Yemen’s largest governorate by area, stretching from a long stretch of Arabian Sea coastline north across desert to the Saudi border, and it contains much of the country’s remaining onshore oil infrastructure. Al-Mahra, further east, borders both Oman and Saudi Arabia. The al-Abr junction where al-Radfani was killed sits on the desert road connecting Hadramawt to Marib and to the Saudi frontier, a corridor used for legitimate trade and for smuggling alike.

The security picture in the east is unusually crowded. Yemeni officials and independent analysts describe a governorate in which Houthi cells operate alongside networks linked to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, tribal armed groups with their own grievances against the central authorities, and criminal operations moving weapons and narcotics. Attributing any single attack to one of those actors is rarely straightforward, which is part of why investigations into assassinations in the governorate have so often stalled.

The Nation’s Shield Forces, the formation al-Radfani served in, were established under Rashad al-Alimi, chairman of the Presidential Leadership Council, and were conceived as a unified force answering to central command rather than to the patchwork of regionally and factionally aligned units that make up much of the government’s military strength. Their deployment into Hadramawt formed part of a broader effort to extend state authority in the east, and it has been contested by rival southern formations that regard the governorate as within their own sphere.

That contest is not hypothetical. The Southern Transitional Council mounted a brief offensive in late 2025 aimed at expanding its control in the southeastern governorates, Hadramawt and al-Mahra among them, an episode that underlined how far the anti-Houthi camp remains from a single chain of command. The Presidential Leadership Council, formed in April 2022, brought the main anti-Houthi factions together on paper, but forces on the ground continue to answer to different patrons and to different political projects.

The wider war provides the backdrop. Fighting between the internationally recognised government, backed by a Saudi-led coalition, and the Houthi movement has continued since 2015. United Nations assessments put the number of Yemenis requiring some form of humanitarian assistance at more than 18 million, with over 4.5 million displaced inside the country. Secure overland routes are not only a policing question in that context; they determine whether aid convoys and commercial goods can reach inland governorates at all.

There is also an economic dimension the ministry did not spell out but which shapes the urgency of the campaign. Government revenues have been squeezed since attacks on oil terminals halted crude exports, leaving the administration heavily dependent on customs receipts, on external support and on whatever commerce continues to move by road and through the ports at Mukalla and Nishtun. Banditry on the trunk roads raises the cost of every consignment that crosses them and pushes transport operators to demand armed escorts, a cost ultimately passed on to consumers already contending with a depreciated currency and rising food prices.

The ministry did not announce a timeline for the campaign, the number of personnel committed to it, or any arrest figures. Nor did it identify the networks it intends to target. Previous security drives in the east have been announced in similar terms and have produced few publicly reported prosecutions, and residents of Hadramawt have complained for years that investigations into assassinations are opened and then quietly abandoned. Whether this campaign proves different will be measured less by the scale of the deployment than by whether anyone is brought before a court for the killings that prompted it.