YEMEN’S SALEH ‘SHOT DEAD’ BY HOUTHIS AFTER RPG ATTACK
▶ Senior government official confirms death initially claimed by rebels ▶ Residents in Sanaa report rebels besieging homes of Saleh loyalists ▶ GPC spokesman says Saleh was betrayed ‘by some of his consultants’
Former Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh was shot dead yesterday in a roadside attack after apparently switching sides in the country’s civil war.
Saleh and his supporters formed an alliance with the country’s Houthi rebels in 2014 against the internationally recognised government of president Abdrabu Mansur Hadi, Saleh’s successor. But this alliance had broken down in recent days as fighting erupted on the streets of the capital between the two sides.
The Houthis accused Saleh of a coup on Saturday after he said he was open to talks with the Saudi-led military coalition backing Mr Hadi’s government. Two days later he was dead, with rebel sources saying that Houthi fighters had stopped Saleh’s armoured vehicle outside Sanaa with an RPG rocket before shooting him dead, Reuters reported.
Fahed Al Sharafi, a leading member of the General People’s Congress, said Saleh had been betrayed by “some of his consultants who were in fact traitors. We kept advising him constantly not to ally with the rebels but unfortunately he didn’t pay attention to us and followed his obstinacy”.
“But what is done is done, no use crying over spilt milk,” Mr Al Sharafi told Saudi Arabia’s Al Arabiya news channel.
Earlier in the day, Sanaa residents had told The National the Houthis were besieging Saleh’s palace, as well as residences belonging to his relatives and prominent supporters. The rebels later said they had blown up Saleh’s home.
The violence directed at Saleh is an extension of a civil war in which renegade soldiers loyal to Saleh and Houthi militants had together been fighting pro-government forces backed by the Saudi-led coalition.
Fighting first broke out after the Houthis seized Sanaa in September 2014 and later advanced south, forcing the internationally recognised government of Mr Hadi to relocate to the southern city of Aden.
Cracks began to emerge in the Houthi-Saleh alliance this year when both sides accused each other of jeopardising the partnership. The two camps eventually agreed to reduce the tensions but friction remained and came to a head last week when fighting broke out between Saleh loyalists and the Shiite rebels.
The death of Yemen’s former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, will create an enormous vacuum in the country’s political life — one that is unlikely to be filled quickly by anyone else.
For 35 years Saleh ruled over Yemen with a blend of ruthlessness, charisma and political guile that enabled him to play the various parties off against each another and ensure that his interests were satisfied first, usually well before those of the nation he professed to serve.
To him, those interests were inseparable from those of the nation he united in 1990 after a civil war, and ensuring that his place in Yemen’s history was secure animated much of what he did as president, and afterwards.
Because Saleh saw himself as the unquestionable leader of Yemen – the only person who could control a fractious, unruly nation – he was deeply offended in 2011 when he was ousted from the presidency in a deal orchestrated by Saudi Arabia and the other GCC states, with the support of the US, the UK and other western powers.
He never forgave Riyadh or Abdrabu Mansur Hadi, his long-time vice president who replaced him as Yemen’s leader, for the manner in which he was treated.
In large measure, this resentment led in 2014 to his most unlikely alliance with the Houthi movement, against whom his government had fought six inconclusive rounds of war from 2004 to 2010.
Proving again that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, Saleh decided to cast his lot with the Houthi rebels who marched into Yemen’s capital in September 2014, taking over the reins of government and forcing Mr Hadi into exile.
From there, drawing on weapons stocks that Yemeni armed forces loyal to Saleh placed at their disposal, the Houthis continued their march south, ending up in the southern port city of Aden — a development that prompted the Saudi-led military intervention in March 2015.
Although pro-government forces, backed by the coalition, have since retaken Aden as well as other parts of the south, the civil war that has so devastated Yemen’s already impoverished population and its infrastructure continues today.
Now, Saleh’s death deeply complicates efforts that were under way to try to bring this conflict to a politically negotiated end.
Just days before his death at the hands of his erstwhile allies, Saleh made a dramatic speech in which he said he was ready to “turn the page” with the Saudi-led coalition and break with the Houthis.
It was an overture that was welcomed for its potential to inject material change into the military and political realities on the ground in Yemen, and perhaps create a new equation that might brighten prospects for peace.
Now that Saleh is dead we will never know if he was serious in his offer, or if it was just one more play by a wily politician who saw his uneasy alliance with the Houthis collapsing and was desperately trying to rewrite the next chapter of his life’s story.
What we do know is that this time Saleh could not outrun the consequences of his own actions.
Sadly, with his death yesterday, it seems unlikely that the nation he dominated for so long will be able to do so either.