Execution
of rebellious tribal leaders in Yemen, 1962. The tribal leaders are
being publicly executed in the town square, by sword. This is the moment
of execution of one of the condemned.
The
North Yemen Civil War (Arabic: ثورة 26 سبتمبر, romanized: Thawra 26
Sabtambar, lit. '26 September Revolution') was a civil war fought in
North Yemen from 1962 to 1970 between partisans of the Mutawakkilite
Kingdom and supporters of the Yemen Arab Republic.
The
war began with a coup d'état carried out in 1962 by revolutionary
republicans led by the army under the command of Abdullah as-Sallal, who
dethroned the newly crowned King and Imam Muhammad al-Badr and declared
Yemen a republic under his presidency.
The
Imam escaped to the Saudi Arabian border where he rallied popular
support from northern Shia tribes to retake power, escalating rapidly to
a full-scale civil war.
On the royalist side,
Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Israel supplied military aid, and Britain gave
covert support, while the republicans were supported by Egypt (then
formally known as the United Arab Republic) and were supplied warplanes
from the Soviet Union. Both foreign irregular and conventional forces
were involved. Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser supported the
republicans with as many as 70,000 Egyptian troops and weapons. Despite
several military actions and peace conferences, the war sank into a
stalemate by the mid-1960s.
Egypt's commitment
to the war is considered to have been detrimental to its performance in
the Six-Day War of June 1967, after which Nasser found it increasingly
difficult to maintain his army's involvement and began to pull his
forces out of Yemen. The surprising removal of Sallal on November 5 by
Yemeni dissidents, supported by republican tribesmen, resulted in an
internal shift of power in the capital, while the royalists approached
it from the north. The new republic government was headed by Qadi Abdul
Rahman Iryani, Ahmed Noman and Mohamed Ali Uthman, all of whom shortly
either resigned or fled the country, leaving the disarrayed capital
under the control of Prime Minister Hassan al-Amri. The 1967 siege of
Sanaa became the turning point of the war. The remaining republican
Prime Minister succeeded in keeping control of Sana'a and by February
1968, the royalists lifted the siege. Clashes continued in parallel with
peace talks until 1970, when Saudi Arabia recognized the Republic, and a
ceasefire came into effect.
Egyptian military
historians refer to the war in Yemen as "their Vietnam". Historian
Michael Oren (former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S.) wrote that Egypt's
military adventure in Yemen was so disastrous that the then ongoing
Vietnam War could easily have been dubbed "America's Yemen".
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