5 - Civil War in Yemen

Summary

Mr. President [Nasser], there's one thing to remember about Yemen. Everybody, including the Romans, who went into Yemen got burned doing it. If I could give you any advice, stay out of there!

Ambassador Raymond Hare recalling a conversation with President Nasser, 1987

In September 1962, a group of Yemeni army officers led by Colonel Abdullah al-Sallal overthrew the Hamid'Ud'Din royal family. Sallal was a high ranking officer of humble origins – rumour has it that at the age of thirty, Sallal had never slept in a bed and was so confused by the first pair of trousers he owned that he wore them as a shirt. On the night of the coup, one of Sallal's men botched an attempt to shoot Imam Badr in the back, the rifle's trigger jammed and he shot himself in the chin as a guard moved to arrest him. Less than an hour later, however, tanks moved to close in on the royal palace, holding Badr under siege for twelve hours before, having run out of cigarettes and ammunition, he managed to escape disguised as a common soldier.

The farcical nature of the Yemeni revolt would later be a popular topic of conversation between Nasser and his political colleagues at home and abroad. But the experience took its toll on the Egyptian republic and it was the last of the Arab revolutions in which the Egyptian nationalist was to become enmeshed. In an effort to sustain the republican revolutionaries, Nasser sent over a third of his army to help fight guerrilla royalist forces loyal to the deposed Imam together with his uncle, Prince Hassan, propped up by Saudi Arabia and the British in what became known as Egypt's ‘Vietnam’. The Yemeni conflict became a proxy war between these rival interests and a powerful if increasingly futile symbol of the Arab division between ‘traditional’ dynasties versus ‘progressive’ republics. It was not the first Middle Eastern conflict to place Anglo-American allies on opposing sides.

Scholars have explored this conflict from many perspectives. Anglo-American political and intelligence assessments of Nasser's final Arab revolution add valuable detail to this picture of the Yemeni revolution thus far constructed. There was good strategic notice of a possible coup in Yemen and analysts recognised that Nasser had supported but not orchestrated this Arab revolution.