Eritrea Let the UAE Run a Military Base on Its Coast for Four Years to Help Fight the Houthis. Its Foreign Minister Just Called Abu Dhabi's Ports Strategy 'Imperialism.'

Abstract: Eritrean Foreign Minister Osman Saleh accused the United Arab Emirates of pursuing "port imperialism" across Africa, in an exclusive interview conducted in Asmara and published by Middle East Eye on 12 September 2026. Saleh said the UAE's two state-linked port operators, DP World and AD Ports Group, hold stakes in or manage facilities across the region, including Somaliland's port of Berbera, Puntland's port of Bosaso, and facilities in Egypt and Tanzania, and said that presence reflects strategic rather than purely commercial objectives. "The UAE has port facilities everywhere in the region, and African countries have to ask why," Saleh said; asked directly whether the motive was economic, he answered, "No." Saleh separately voiced concern over the prospect of an Israeli military presence in Somaliland, warning it could draw the Horn of Africa into a wider confrontation involving Israel, Iran and armed groups operating around the Red Sea, and pointed to what he characterised as a deepening strategic convergence between the UAE, Israel and Ethiopia. The accusation carries an unusual weight coming from Asmara specifically: the UAE itself operated a military base on Eritrean soil at the port of Assab from 2015 to 2019, using it to help supply the Saudi-led coalition's war against the same Houthi movement Eritrea's government now declines to take Saudi Arabia's side against, and Eritrea separately rejected a UAE request around 2016 to share a base with Israel on the Dahlak Archipelago. The interview lands as Ethiopia presses publicly for access to Assab, a port Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed said in early September it was only "a matter of time" before Addis Ababa regained, while receiving weapons and drone support from the UAE, the same government Eritrea's foreign minister has now accused of practising port-based colonialism against the wider continent.

What Saleh said, and where he said it

The interview was conducted in Asmara and published by Middle East Eye on 12 September as an exclusive, a format Eritrea's government, one of the world's most closed and least press-accessible, grants rarely. Saleh's central charge was that the UAE's port investments across Africa are not what they appear: "The UAE has port facilities everywhere in the region, and African countries have to ask why," he said, and when asked whether the motive was simply economic, he said, "No." He named DP World and AD Ports Group, the UAE's two state-linked port operators, as holding stakes in or managing facilities in Egypt, Tanzania, Somaliland and Puntland, arguing that African governments needed to examine the broader strategic consequences of allowing a single foreign power to accumulate long-term control over the continent's critical maritime infrastructure. In the same interview, Saleh addressed Yemen directly, saying there was no military solution to the conflict there and that the country needed to be given a chance at peace, a position that, as later analysis noted, puts real distance between Eritrea and Saudi Arabia's own framing of the war.

A history Eritrea knows from the inside: the UAE's own base at Assab

Saleh's accusation carries a specific irony given Eritrea's own recent history with the UAE on its own coast. Starting in September 2015, the UAE built a port and expanded an airstrip at Assab under a 30-year lease for military use, turning the mothballed deep-water port and its nearby airfield, with a runway long enough to land large transport aircraft, into a staging ground to ferry heavy weaponry and allied Sudanese troops into Yemen as part of the Saudi-led coalition's war against the Houthis. Relations between Asmara and Abu Dhabi soured in the years that followed. Around 2016, a senior Eritrean official has said, the UAE asked to establish a further military facility on one of the islands of the Dahlak Archipelago, to be shared jointly with Israel; Eritrea refused. In the summer of 2019, the UAE began withdrawing its forces from the Yemen war, and satellite imagery subsequently showed it dismantling parts of the Assab base it had built. The base Eritrea hosted to help the UAE fight the Houthis is the same coastline from which its foreign minister is now warning the rest of Africa about the UAE's port ambitions.

The ports Saleh named, and the pattern behind them

Saleh's list of examples was not abstract. DP World operates the port of Berbera in Somaliland under a concession that has anchored Hargeisa's own bid for international recognition and investment, and UAE-linked operators have also been involved in developing and managing the port of Bosaso in Somalia's Puntland region, both facilities sitting close to the Gulf of Aden shipping lanes that feed into Bab el-Mandeb. Saleh's warning follows two precedents elsewhere on the same coastline that predate his interview by years. Djibouti nationalised the Doraleh Container Terminal in 2018, nine years into a concession DP World had held since 2006, with Djibouti's government describing the move as necessary to protect national sovereignty; DP World has continued to contest the seizure in international arbitration. Sudan, separately, scrapped a 2022 agreement under which AD Ports Group was to build a $6 billion Red Sea port, after accusing the UAE of backing the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan's civil war, an allegation Abu Dhabi has repeatedly denied. Both episodes, cited by regional analysts examining Saleh's remarks, show that Eritrea is not the first Red Sea state to conclude that a UAE port concession carried strategic strings a commercial lease would not.

The Israel warning, and a "shadow alliance" Eritrea says it is watching

Beyond ports, Saleh used the interview to raise a more pointed security concern: the prospect of an Israeli military presence in Somaliland, which recognised Israel's own December 2025 recognition of Somaliland's independence with enthusiasm and which FIKIR Institute has separately reported offered troops to a Gaza stabilisation force in September. Saleh questioned why Israel would seek a military foothold in the Horn of Africa at all, and warned that such a presence could be read by the Houthis or other hostile actors as an extension of Israeli power into the Red Sea, risking drawing Somaliland, and by extension the wider Horn, into a confrontation involving Israel, Iran and Red Sea militant groups that has nothing to do with the Horn's own disputes. He framed this concern as part of a broader pattern he said Eritrea was monitoring closely: a deepening strategic convergence between the UAE, Israel and Ethiopia in the region, at a moment when Ethiopia's own government has publicly pursued closer ties with both Abu Dhabi and Jerusalem while continuing to press its claim on Eritrean territory.

Why Asmara is saying this now: Assab, Abiy, and a war Eritrea won't take sides in

The timing is not incidental. Assab sits just 75 kilometres from the Ethiopian border and functions, in Eritrea's own telling, as a pillar of the sovereignty its government earned through a decades-long independence struggle against Addis Ababa; Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed said in early September that regaining access to the port was only "a matter of time," repeating a claim he has made with growing frequency over the past year even as Ethiopia continues to receive weapons and drone support from the UAE, the same government Saleh's interview now accuses of pursuing port-based colonialism against the wider continent. Eritrea's own posture toward the Houthi war compounds the picture: unlike Saudi Arabia, which has spent the past two months building coalitions and absorbing direct Houthi missile strikes on its own territory, Eritrea's foreign minister has declined to condemn the Houthi blockade of Saudi shipping or the group's attacks, telling Middle East Eye instead that Yemen's war has no military solution. A government that will not take Riyadh's side against the Houthis, but is happy to publicly accuse Riyadh's own Gulf ally of colonial ambitions in ports across the continent, is signalling a considerably more independent, and more exposed, position in the Red Sea's widening conflict than Eritrea's small navy and limited diplomatic reach would suggest it could afford.

What to watch

Three signals will show where this goes next. First, whether the UAE responds substantively to Saleh's accusation, since Abu Dhabi has so far said nothing beyond its standing, general denial of imperial ambitions on the continent, and a continued silence would leave an unusually direct charge from a sitting foreign minister unanswered. Second, whether Ethiopia's continued push for access to Assab draws any further Eritrean linkage to the UAE relationship Saleh has just criticised in public, given that Addis Ababa's two closest external partners on the Assab question, the UAE materially and Israel diplomatically, are the same two governments Saleh named in his warning about regional alignment. Third, whether other African governments with UAE port concessions, beyond Djibouti and Sudan, begin echoing Eritrea's framing, since a foreign minister publicly urging the continent to "ask why" a single Gulf state has acquired maritime infrastructure across so many of its coastlines is the kind of remark that either gets picked up elsewhere or gets left to stand alone.

Policy implications

For Eritrea, going public with an accusation this direct against a government with which it has a complicated but not hostile history is a marked shift from Asmara's usual diplomatic reticence, and suggests its government judges the UAE's regional entrenchment, especially alongside Ethiopia and Israel, now poses more risk to Eritrean interests than staying quiet would avoid. For the UAE, a public charge of "port imperialism" from a Red Sea state that once hosted its own military base, echoing complaints already lodged by Djibouti and Sudan, is a reputational problem that a general denial of imperial ambition is unlikely to resolve, particularly if other littoral states begin citing Saleh's remarks. For Somaliland, being named alongside Puntland as an example of the UAE's port strategy, while separately fielding scrutiny over any future Israeli military presence, puts Hargeisa's recognition campaign and its port-based development model under a spotlight it did not ask for, from a neighbour it does not answer to but cannot fully ignore. For Ethiopia, Saleh's linkage of its Assab ambitions to a broader UAE-Israel convergence gives Eritrea a new argument, beyond sovereignty and history, for treating Addis Ababa's port diplomacy as part of a coordinated external campaign rather than a bilateral dispute, a framing that will make any future Ethiopia-Eritrea negotiation over sea access harder to insulate from the wider Gulf and Red Sea rivalries now surrounding it.