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Yemen’s President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi has sworn in a new government that was formed thanks to a power-sharing deal brokered by Saudi Arabia last year.

The 24-member cabinet, announced last week, was sworn in during a ceremony held on Saturday in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, where Hadi is living.

The new government, headed by Prime Minister Maeen Abdul Malik, represents Yemen’s northern and southern areas with equal numbers of members from each region.

The Yemeni government has accused the United Arab Emirates of landing around 100 separatist troops on a remote island in the Arabian Sea this week, deepening a rift between nominal allies in Yemen's war.

The UAE is one of the Arab countries fighting formally on behalf of Yemen's internationally recognized government against the Iran-aligned Houthi movement that controls the capital.

But the UAE has had a tense relationship with the government and has recruited thousands of fighters from a movement of southern separatists who have clashed with government troops.

The former governor of Yemen’s southern port city of Aden, recently sacked by the president, said he formed a new “transitional political council of the south” on Thursday, after thousands of pro-secessionist Yemenis rallied in his support.

Different factions across Yemen have established a national council aimed at uniting the local environment in Yemen against the US-backed Saudi aggression.

Sources in Sanaa told al-Manar that the Yemeni factions met on Wednesday in the capital, Sanaa, and formed the High Popular Council for General Mobilization.

The factions said the aim of forming such council is to “unite and strengthen the local front against the Saudi aggression,” and to “set dialogue with all the Yemeni factions,” the sources said.Yemen flag

On March 3, 2013, as a means of curbing illegal immigration, the Civil Status Authority implemented a ban on issuing identity cards to those unable to present legal documents proving their Yemeni nationality.

According to the ban, the provision of Yemeni identity cards for Muwaladeen (“mixed race”—in this case being the child of a Yemeni national and a foreign national) born in the Horn of Africa is to be stopped. However, Muwaladeen born in the Gulf, Europe, and Asia, provided their fathers were born in Yemen, can still be issued identity cards.

Thousands of separatists rallied in Yemen's main southern city Aden Wednesday demanding renewed independence for the region on the 20th anniversary of a secession bid that was crushed by northern troops.

The demonstrators waved the flag of the formerly independent south and pictures of exiled separatist leader Ali Salem al-Baid as they commemorated the short-lived Democratic Republic of Yemen that was crushed in the 1994 civil war.

“We swear to God Sanaa will not govern us,” the protesters chanted. “Twenty years of oppression and resistance.”