Yemen in 1962 was a trifurcated political entity – in the south and southwest was Britain’s eastern and western protectorates beset by tribal insurrection. In North Yemen (which borders Saudi Arabia), the ruler of the Hamid al-Din branch of the al-Qasim dynasty (of the Yemeni Mutawakkilite Kingdom) was about to face his own formidable internal challenge. In that year fighting broke out in the north when the newly elected imam (Muhammad al-Badr) was deposed by Yemeni rebel forces led by army strongman Abdullah as-Sallal.
YAR republican coup leader as-Sallal at military display in 1963 ⍗
An internal war augmented by ‘friends’ with benefits
Al-Badr escaped to Saudi Arabia where he rallied support from the northern Zaydi Shia tribes. Meanwhile the rebels declared North Yemen a republic – the Yemen Arab Republic. With the battle lines of the Civil War drawn, royalists V republicans, it immediately attracted the willing participation of competing foreign elements. Within a very short time, Egypt had entered the conflict on the republic’s side. President Nasser provided as-Sallal with bulk shipments of military supplies and a massive infusion of troops to fight the royalists. Later, the Soviet Union, after switching ‘horses’ in the conflict, contributed to the republicans’ armaments, delivering them 24 Mig-19 fighter planes.
At the same time Md al-Badr’s royalist partisans were receiving military aid from the Saudis and Jordan※, and diplomatic support from the UK – who was also bankrolling mercenaries to fight for the royalists [Stanley Sandler, Ground Warfare: The International Encyclopedia, Vol 1 (2002)]. In addition the Shah of Iran provided advisers for the royalist side, while Israel provided intelligence and its air force to airlift supplies to them.
A regional proxy war: Egypt V Saudi Arabia
There has been much written about Nasser’s motives for involving Egypt in the war (including the haste with which he committed the UAR). Nasser’s ambition to be recognised as leader of the Arab world had taken a hit in the couple of years prior to the war’s outbreak…in 1961 Nasser’s showcase creation, the United Arab Republic had unravelled when Syria, tired of the “second-class treatment” from Egypt, broke away from the UAR. By the summer of 1962 Egypt’s regional prestige had plummeted… only Algeria remained on good terms with Egypt, the UAR had lost control of the Arab League and the other major Arab states were all aligned against Nasser [Nasser’s Gamble: How the Intervention in Yemen Caused the Six-Day War and the Decline of Egyptian Power, Jesse Ferris, (2012)].
These Egyptian reversals of fortune and an attempt in the same year at a power play by Iraq’s dictator Qasim who threatened to annex newly-independent Kuwait✣, were a wake-up call for the Egyptian president – he was, he knew, at risk of being isolated in the Arab world. Therefore, as has been noted, the Yemen Civil War presented “a foreign policy opportunity for Nasser to become relevant again” [Asher Aviad Orkaby, ‘The International History of the Yemen Civil War, 1962-1968’, (unpublished PhD thesis, Harvard University, Mass.), April 2014]. And the involvement of the region’s leading monarchy, Saudi Arabia, in the conflict on the deposed imam’s side, was impetus for Nasser to do what he could to limit its expansion in the peninsula.
The early phases of the civil war saw initial successes by the royalists commanded by al-Badr’s uncle Prince Hassan, culminating in a drive towards Sana’a to retake the capital for the Imam. The offensive was checked only after Egypt increased its commitment to the conflict, providing essential air support for the republican troops. Estimated numbers vary but all up Nasser is thought to have injected at least 70,000 Egyptian soldiers into the war. As the war dragged on without resolution Egypt unleashed chemical warfare, a series of poison gas bombings of Yemeni villages loyal to the Royalists (1966/67).
UAR military instructors training Yemeni republican soldiers ⍗.
Parallel with the ongoing prosecution of the civil war on the battlefield, international efforts, spearheaded by the UN, were being made to encourage the proxy combatants Egypt and Saudi Arabia to pull back from the domestic conflict.
Yemen, “a cage for Nasser and Arab nationalism”
With regard to the superpowers’ role in reining in the combatants through mediating the conflict, some historians have argued that, behind the scenes, the superpowers were actually not unhappy with the prospect of Egypt being tied up militarily in Yemen for so long. The US and USSR, they contend, were content to see Egypt’s military strength shunted off into the Yemeni imbroglio. Thus preoccupied, the chances of war breaking out between Israel and the UAR (which would lead to the two superpowers intervening and the risk of a dangerous confrontation between them), was headed off. Washington also saw a secondary benefit in Egypt’s preoccupation with the war in North Yemen – it would be less likely to pose a threat to the UK base in Aden and to the US base in Libya [ibid.].
⍐ The Civil War in stamps – royalist & republican
The US had a vested interest in maintaining stability in the Arabian Peninsula … preserving access to vital oil resources was high on its agenda. The Soviet Union also had its own interests in Yemen to consider – it was of geopolitical advantage, making it a potential base for the Soviets to expand into the Arabian Peninsula, as well as a jump-off point into post-colonial Africa to make Cold War gains at the expense of western interests [Orkaby, loc.cit.]. The Soviet-built port at al-Hudaydah (Hodeida) was constructed to give Moscow an influential role in international shipping through the Red Sea.
YAR stamps commemorating the Soviet-built port at Hodeida ⍗
Egypt’s folly – the Vietnam parallel
The conservative western media at the time (Time, The New Republic, etc) was quick to call out Nasser’s military engagement as a monumental blunder [Tharoor, loc.cit.]. Later historians in hindsight have labelled Yemen Egypt’s ‘Vietnam’. Historians such as Michael Oren have attributed Egypt’s abysmal performance in the 1967 Six-Day War in part to the Egyptians’ being seriously understrength owing to the massive over-commitment to the Yemen war [Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, (M Oren), (2002)].
Sana’a (old town) ⍐
The civil war reached its climax in 1967/68. The royalist forces laid siege to Sana’a to try to break the back of the republican heartland. Bolstered by the hefty Egyptian contribution this attempt was resisted by the republicans and proved the war’s turning point. Although pockets of tribal royalist resistance lingered on till 1970, the royalists and al-Badr were effectively defeated. In late 1967 the republicans replaced as-Sallah (who voluntarily went into exile in Baghdad) as president with Abdul al-Iranyi (formerly the YAR prime minister in 1962-63).
Royalist territory in red/Republican territory in black ⍗
Rapprochement
In March 1969 the warring parties – of a conflict that had claimed around 200,000 lives including civilians – held peace talks in Jeddah (Saudi Arabia), from which agreement was reached to form a unified government in North Yemen. The government was to represent both royalists and republicans although it would excluded members of the Hamid al-Din family. Subsequently in 1970, Saudi Arabia recognised the Yemen Republic (YAR) [Orkaby, op.cit.].
Wash-up of the war
As suggested from the above, Egypt, despite being on the winners’ side in the civil war, was a loser in the wider, regional political contest. Nasser’s reckless foray into the Yemen adventure expended an horrendous casualty toll on Egypt’s military manpower✪ and left it woefully ill-prepared materially for the pre-emptive, surprise strike from Israel when it came in June 1967. The six-day catastrophe that followed left Egypt with long-term disadvantages, loss of key strategic territories to its enemy and forfeited the ascendency to it in the Arab-Israeli conflict.
⍗ King Faisal – Saudi ruler 1960s-70s
Though a blow to Nasser’s foreign policy ambitions and a setback to the cause of Pan-Arabism, there were nonetheless some positives for Egypt that came out of the foreign venture. The Khartoum Agreement (1967) saw Saudi king Faisal and Nasser “bury the hatchet” and agree that both withdraw their support from the two sides in the war [‘How the 1967 War dramatically re-oriented Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy’, Brookings, (Bruce Riedel), 30-May-2017, www.brookings.edu]. In material terms, Egypt benefitted from the closer ties with its wealthy neighbour – many thousands of Egyptian workers gained employment in the Saudi oil industry. Geo-strategically, the outcome in South Yemen was a plus for Egypt – the British colonials were vanquished from Aden, allowing Nasser to secure the Red Sea approach to the Suez Canal (albeit with the loss of Sinai) [Orkaby, op.cit.].
As the YAR moved to the right (recognising West Germany in return for aid), Saudi Arabia acquired itself a stable ally on its southern flank, one dependent on Saudi financial support. The Soviet Union, despite seeing the YAR moving towards alliances with the West, also benefitted in the Cold War game of “one-upmanship” from the new status quo – the emergence of a Marxist regime in South Yemen saw its influence in the region broaden. The Soviets’ new naval and military base in Aden gave Moscow a convenient haven to launch missions into Africa countries experiencing revolutionary turmoil, (especially Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia and Somalia) [ibid.].
Footnote: North Yemen tribal politics and coup proclivity
The coup in 1962 would not have come as a surprise to the Hamid al-Din rulers of North Yemen. There had been a history of tribal-centred coup attempts in the kingdom⊡…in 1948 al-Badr’s grandfather Imam Yahya was assassinated by the Hamid al-Din’s Sayyid rivals, the Alwaziris, who briefly assumed the imamate until Yahya’s son regained power for the family after tribal and Saudi intervention. A second coup was launched in 1955 by the Alwaziris and some military officers but was easily squashed [Peterson, J.E. “Tribes and Politics in Yemen.” Arabian Peninsula Background Note, No. APBN-007. Published on www.JEPeterson.net, December 2008].
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※ however the Jordanians severed their material support to the royalist side in 1963 and formally recognised the YAR one year later
✣ prompting Britain and other Arab states to send troops to Kuwait to protect its sovereignty (forcing Iraq to back down)
✪ about 10,000 of which are thought to have died in the drawn-out war. Egypt also incurred massive war debts from its intervention [‘How Yemen was once Egypt’s Vietnam’, Ishaan Tharoor, Washington Post, 28-Mar-2015, www.washingtonpost.com]
⊡ Yemen has been described as perhaps the most tribal-based society and nation in the entire Arab world (Peterson, op.cit.)
Egyptian president and Arab unity strongman Gamal Abdel Nasser died in 1970 and gradually the government in Cairo started to soften its hard-line stance on the blockade (plus there was the worrying consideration of the ongoing lost revenue from the canal tolls that Egypt was suffering). For the last couple of years of the closure a Norwegian company took over the management of the fleet. By 1974 work had begun on the extremely onerous task of clearing the scuttled ships and sea mines before shipping in the canal could resume. American naval units and British and French minesweepers assisted the operation, with the salvage job finished by Californian company Murphy Pacific Marine Salvage. With the Suez Canal finally opened again, eleven of the remaining thirteen vessels⊟ were unable to continue their journey unaided, only the two German container ships were capable of making it back to their destination (Hamburg) under its own power.
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