Southern Transitional Council supporters rally in Aden and Hadramawt to mark southern army anniversary
Yemen Herald News 
ADEN, Yemen — Supporters of the Southern Transitional Council rallied in Aden and Hadramawt on Tuesday to mark the anniversary of the founding of the southern army.
Organisers said hundreds of thousands took part. Yemen Herald could not independently verify the turnout.
The account of the rallies rests on the Yemeni outlet Yemen Online, which carried the organisers’ closing statement. No independent estimate of attendance has been published, and no international news organisation has reported the gathering.
Organisers billed the event the “Million-Man Rally”.
Participants travelled to Aden from Shabwa, Abyan, Lahj and al-Dhalea, the outlet said. Al-Dhalea is the home region of Aidarous al-Zubaidi, the council’s president.
Al-Zubaidi is also supreme commander of the Southern Armed Forces.
He sits on Yemen’s Presidential Leadership Council, the eight-member body that has headed the internationally recognised government since April 2022.
The council’s other members are Tariq Saleh, Abdulrahman al-Muharrami, Abdullah al-Alimi, Othman Mujalli, Mahmoud al-Subaihi and Salem Khanbashi.
Al-Zubaidi had been appointed governor of Aden in December 2015, months after government forces retook the city from the Houthis.
The council dates the founding of the southern army to 1 September 1971 and described Tuesday’s gathering as the 55th anniversary. Yemen Herald found no independent confirmation of that date.
Demonstrators marked what the organisers called the role of southern forces against the Houthis, in counterterrorism operations and in securing shipping lanes.
Those lanes include Bab al-Mandab, the Gulf of Aden, the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea.
The statement said the south, represented by Aden and Hadramawt, had assembled to display its achievements. It named the Southern Armed Forces first among them.
It credited those forces with contributions to regional and international security, including action against terrorism and piracy on global maritime routes.
It praised al-Zubaidi for rebuilding what it called a modern southern army, combining battlefield veterans with recruits drawn from the southern resistance.
The organisers pledged to protect the armed forces as a sovereign national institution and to honour soldiers killed in the fighting.
The statement condemned what it described as attempts to weaken or dismantle southern forces. Such attempts strengthen the Houthis, it said.
Decisions on war and peace remain a sovereign southern prerogative, the organisers said.
The armed forces would go on defending the south against the Houthis, the statement added, describing the group as a danger to regional security and to international navigation.
The Houthis did not respond to the statement. The group rejects the council’s claim to speak for southern Yemen.
The internationally recognised government has not accepted the council’s demand for separation either.
The organisers also rejected what they called fabricated councils, and initiatives they said were aimed at undermining the southern cause or the council’s legitimacy. The statement did not name them.
The southern cause, as the council uses the term, refers to demands for self-rule in the territory of the former South Yemen.
They reaffirmed a political declaration issued on 2 January 2026. That document sets out a path towards independence and the restoration of a southern state within the borders of 1990, according to the outlet.
Those are the borders that existed before unification.
South Yemen was a separate state from the British withdrawal in 1967 until 22 May 1990, when it merged with the north to form the Republic of Yemen.
A southern attempt to secede led to civil war in 1994. Northern forces took Aden that July and the attempt failed.
The Southern Transitional Council was formed in Aden on 11 May 2017, weeks after President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi dismissed al-Zubaidi as governor of the city. The council has been backed by the United Arab Emirates.
Its forces took control of Aden from units loyal to the internationally recognised government in August 2019.
Saudi Arabia brokered the Riyadh Agreement, signed on 5 November 2019, to end that confrontation and bring the council into a shared government. Implementation was repeatedly delayed.
Hadi transferred his powers to the Presidential Leadership Council on 7 April 2022. Rashad al-Alimi became chairman and al-Zubaidi one of its members.
Hadi had governed largely from Riyadh after 2015 and has held no executive office since the transfer.
The arrangement placed the council inside the government it had fought. It left the question of southern statehood open.
Yemen’s war began when Houthi forces took Sanaa in September 2014 and pushed the government out of the capital. A Saudi-led coalition intervened in March 2015.
A United Nations-brokered truce took effect in April 2022 and formally lapsed that October. Fighting has continued on several fronts since, including the western coast.
Houthi forces began attacking merchant shipping in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden in November 2023.
The Bab al-Mandab strait separates Yemen from Djibouti and Eritrea and links the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden. Traffic through it runs between the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean.
Aden serves as the government’s temporary capital, a status it was given in 2015. Sanaa has been held by the Houthis since 2014.
The Southern Transitional Council maintains its own security and military formations across several southern governorates.
Hadramawt, where the second set of rallies was held, is Yemen’s largest governorate by area. Its capital, Mukalla, is a port on the Arabian Sea.
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