UAE seeks turnaround in relations with Somalia for help in Yemen war
The United Arab Emirates has offered Somalia to reopen a hospital in the capital, in exchange for backing the UAE’s involvement in the Yemeni war, but Somalia rejected this amid deteriorating relations between the two countries.
After a period of cold relations, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) now seeks to court Somalia, offering to reopen the Sheikh Zayed Hospital in Mogadishu, which it closed two years ago. Yet like many of Abu Dhabi’s humanitarian gestures, this helping hand comes at a price.
Somalia News reported July 1 that, in exchange for restoring the hospital, Abu Dhabi requested that Somalia backs its involvement in Yemen. The offer came after the UAE-backed Southern Transitional Council (STC) seized Yemen’s Socotra island in the Gulf of Aden on June 20, which the UAE has eyed for some time.
“The UAE is attempting to creep back into Somalia’s good books for a variety of reasons. The most important reason centers around the strategic Socotra Archipelago,” Mohammad Shire, lecturer at the University of Portsmouth, told Al-Monitor. “The island lies in the middle of one of the world’s most important oil trading channels and has served the UAE for the past two years as a strategic foothold for projecting its military and economic interests.”
Emirati and Somali relations plummeted to an unprecedented low after the 2017 Gulf crisis, when Somalia refused to take the UAE and Saudi Arabia’s side against Qatar, and instead opted for neutrality. In May 2018, the UAE withdrew its life-saving aid and military cooperation programs from Somalia to punish and pressure it into supporting their stance. It [the UAE] also aimed to weaken the influence of Qatar and Turkey, which have strong ties with Somalia.
