For more than a year, the ancient port city of Mukalla belonged to al-Qaeda. In April 2015, amid the chaos of Yemen's civil war, militants from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula had seized the city of 300,000 people, freed inmates from its prison, captured Riyan Airport, and declared Mukalla the capital of their self-proclaimed emirate. They taxed the oil terminal. They ran the courts. They governed. Then on April 24, 2016, Emirati soldiers entered the city, and within thirty-six hours, AQAP's flag was gone. US Defense Secretary James Mattis would later call the operation a model for American troops. The reality of how Mukalla changed hands, however, was more complex than the narrative of a swift military victory suggests.
Long before ground forces arrived, American drones had been methodically dismantling AQAP's leadership in and around Mukalla. On May 11, 2015, a US drone strike killed four militants in a car near the city, including commander Mamoun Abdulhamid Hatem. On June 12, a strike killed the AQAP emir himself, Nasir al-Wuhayshi -- the organization's overall leader -- who was replaced by military chief Qasim al-Raymi. The strikes continued through the summer: three fighters at the port in June, four more at a training facility, ten inside a weapons-laden vehicle in July. On September 9, a strike near Riyan Airport killed militants but also four civilians. The most devastating single blow came on March 23, 2016, when an American airstrike hit an AQAP camp during dinner, killing more than fifty fighters and wounding over thirty. By the time the ground offensive launched, AQAP had already been significantly weakened from above.
The ground operation began on April 24, 2016, led by UAE special forces supported by pro-government Yemeni troops loyal to President Hadi. The coalition killed roughly thirty AQAP fighters on the first day, but what followed was less a battle than a withdrawal. Behind the scenes, negotiations between al-Qaeda, local tribal leaders, and religious clerics had produced an arrangement: AQAP would pull out of the city to avoid the destruction that a full-scale urban fight would bring. The militants retreated deeper into Hadramaut Province. By April 25, coalition forces controlled Mukalla and the surrounding coastal regions. Coalition officials claimed more than 800 AQAP fighters had been killed in the broader campaign, though Yemeni journalists who covered the events disputed this figure, reporting that the group had largely departed through negotiation rather than combat.
The official narrative emphasized the UAE-led nature of the operation. But on May 6, Pentagon spokesman Captain Jeff Davis confirmed that US forces had been deployed near Mukalla during the battle -- Force Reconnaissance Marines and Special Forces soldiers. He declined to say how many. The distinction mattered politically: the United States could support the operation without claiming ownership of it, avoiding the kind of public backlash that had followed earlier American strikes in Yemen. The arrangement reflected lessons learned from the 2002 Marib airstrike, when premature public disclosure had infuriated the Yemeni government and population. This time, Washington stayed in the background. Mattis's later praise of the operation focused on the UAE's execution, casting American involvement as advisory rather than central.
Following the battle, the UAE established a primary base of operations in Mukalla, enabling deeper cooperation between Emirati forces, the CIA, and the Joint Special Operations Command. The base allowed targeting of AQAP's remaining cells across Yemen. For the residents of Mukalla, liberation brought relief but not normalcy. The city had already been battered by Cyclone Chapala just months earlier, in November 2015, which had flooded the hospital, buried roads in mud, and triggered a dengue fever outbreak. Now the population faced the uncertain aftermath of both natural disaster and militant occupation, in a country where civil war continued to rage. AQAP had lost its capital, but it had not been destroyed. The group dispersed into the mountains and wadis of Hadramaut, and the broader conflict that had allowed it to seize Mukalla in the first place showed no sign of ending.
Coordinates: 14.53N, 49.12E. Mukalla sits on a narrow coastal plain along the Gulf of Aden in southern Yemen. Riyan Airport (OYRN) is located east of the city. The Hadhramaut plateau rises steeply behind the coastal strip. From altitude, the city appears as a white cluster against brown desert, with the deep blue of the Gulf of Aden to the south.