One part of the Saudi-led coalition and the coalition’s puppet are continuing their feud in south Yemen:

Yemeni security and medical officials say clashes between forces loyal to the country’s internationally recognized president and others backed by the United Arab Emirates have killed at least one and wounded four others, including civilians.

Saturday’s clashes in the southern city of Aden are the latest escalation in a rift between President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi and the UAE, both key members of a Saudi-led coalition fighting Shiite rebels, known as Houthis, since 2015. The dispute concerns Hadi’s embrace of a local affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood, a pan-Mideast Islamist group that the UAE views as threat [sic]. Hadi accuses the UAE of violating his country’s sovereignty.

The rift between Hadi and the UAE is worth noting for what it tells us about the “legitimate” government of Yemen and its nominal supporters in the Gulf. Hadi didn’t care that the UAE and the other members of the coalition were running roughshod over Yemen’s sovereignty when they intervened in the name of restoring him to power. The “legitimate” president was happy to have foreign governments attack and occupy large portions of his country when it was ostensibly done for his benefit, but he is now so loathed inside Yemen that he has little value to his sponsors. Hadi has to hide behind Yemen’s sovereignty now because he has so little support inside Yemen. The UAE decided he was useless and made arrangements with other local political actors with real influence.

For their part, the UAE is now backing some Yemeni forces hostile to Hadi while opposing others, thus making a mockery of the main justification for the 2015 intervention and confirming that the coalition’s goals for its campaign are more unreachable than ever. The coalition’s goal of restoring Hadi was the thin veneer that provided their campaign with its very weak legal support, and without the pretense that they are fighting for the “legitimate” government they have absolutely no business interfering in Yemen. The war on Yemen has utterly failed on its own terms, and the governments that make up the Saudi-led coalition would be well-advised to abandon the campaign as soon as possible.