President Hadi has scrapped two rival army formations Sanaa – Ali Rabea The decrees issued by Yemeni President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi restructuring the Yemeni armed forces and healing the severe division in the ranks have been met with wide-ranging support at home and abroad.The move has scrapped two rival army formations, the First Armoured Division and the Republican Guard, and removed their commanders from office—a move demanded by local and global forces alike. The decrees place President Hadi in direct control of elite units whilst expanding the Minister of Defence and Chief of Staff’s powers.
In a telephone call with Hadi, the Secretary General of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), Abdullatif az-Ziyani, expressed the GCC’s “support for these measured decisions and appointments.” The long-awaited decree package aimed towards restructuring and centralising the Yemeni army was finally announced Wednesday, only one day after the return of United Nations envoy to Yemen Jamal Benomar’s meeting with Hadi. Yemenis took to the streets on Thursday afternoon in the capital Sanaa to express their support for the decisions. Thousands of members of the opposition forces that led the 2011 wave of protests against former President Ali Abdullah Saleh took part in the celebratory demonstrations. Benomar, the UN envoy to Yemen, also took to Twitter to applaud Hadi’s decisions which he described as a “constructive step in line with the latest United Nations resolution on conditions in Yemen.”
While separatist southern leader Ali Salim Al-Beidh refused to comment on the military reshuffle and described it as a “northern matter that does not concern southerners,” Saleh’s media secretary, Ahmed Al-Sufi, has welcomed the move. In remarks made to Arab satellite channels, Al-Sufi said the decrees: “Liberate the General People’s Congress from the heavy burdens of security and military authority” as well as liberating the party—to which both Saleh and Hadi belong—from “the remainder of its commitments.”  The General People’s Congress now, Al-Sufi said, “is capable of expressing itself and honouring its supporters.”
Hadi’s decrees do not directly state that the Republican Guard and the First Armoured Division are to be scrapped and their commanders sacked. After controversy erupted on social networking websites the director of the president’s office, Nassr Taha Mustafa, volunteered to explain the decrees in a Facebook post. Mustafa clarified that the two formations “no longer exist, legally.” “Restricting army formations to ground, naval and air forces as well as border guards, cancels all pre-existing entities,” he wrote, adding “there is no longer such a thing as a Republican Guard or a First Division.”
The army shake-up has been backed by the Commander of the First Armoured Division, Major General Ali Mohsen Al-Ahmar, the former President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s one-time right-hand man who defected in March 2011 in opposition to Saleh.
The decrees break-up the bulk of the Yemeni armed forces into air, naval and ground forces as well as border guards, in addition to a fifth formation under the heading of ‘strategic reserves’. The entities were defined by Hadi in line with conclusions arrived at by the military committee tasked with the restructuring operation. The committee was assisted by American, European and Jordanian military experts.  The strategic reserves will bundle together the missiles battalion, presidential protection, special forces and anti-terrorism units and place them under the command of President Hadi, now the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces.