Yemen’s ex-dictator shot dead by rebels he cast off
Former president’s gamble on betraying Houthi allies in civil war backfires as he is killed trying to flee
YEMEN’S former president was killed yesterday by Houthi rebels after he appeared to switch sides against them to join a Saudi-led military coalition.
Ali Abdullah Saleh held power for 33 years until he was ousted in 2011, but remained a central figure in the country. He spent two years fighting alongside Iran-backed Houthis against the Saudibacked government.
But the alliance between Mr Saleh and the Houthis collapsed last week and he began to make public overtures towards Saudi Arabia as his troops fought the Houthis in street battles in Sana’a, Yemen’s rebel-held capital.
The 75-year-old former leader was reportedly shot as he tried to flee the city. Pictures and video circulated online showed Houthi fighters joyfully parading his bloody corpse.
Abdul-malek al-houthi, the Houthi leader, said Mr Saleh had been killed for treason and warned the Saudi-led coalition it would not succeed in Yemen.
“Today is the day of the fall of the conspiracy of betrayal and treason. It’s a dark day for the forces of the coalition,” he said.
Mr Saleh’s death is a blow for Saudi Arabia and its UAE allies, who had reportedly wooed him through his son in the hope of bringing an end to a war that had descended into a frustrating stalemate for Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince.
More than 10,000 people have died in the fighting, which has destroyed the country’s infrastructure and left seven million people on the brink of starvation. Saudi Arabia has been criticised for killing civilians in airstrikes and for its tight blockade of the country. It accuses Iran of arming the Houthis and supplying rebels with missiles which they have fired into Saudi territory.
The Red Cross and other humanitarian groups said their operations in Sana’a had been paralysed by the fight- ing and by heavy Saudi bombardment against the Houthis.
Mr Saleh had been one of the Arab world’s wiliest and longest-reigning dictators. He once described his three decades in power as like “dancing on the heads of snakes”. He was among a group of young military officers who seized power in North Yemen in 1962 and he became the country’s president in 1978. In 1990 North and South were reunited and Mr Saleh became ruler.
He was forced from power in 2011 after protests inspired by the Arab Spring and narrowly survived an assassination attempt. Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, his vice president, took control. But when Houthi forces rose up against Mr Hadi in 2015, Mr Saleh and his loyalists joined them and seized control of much of North Yemen. Saudi Arabia then began air raids against the Houthis in support of Mr Hadi.
Tensions between Mr Saleh and the Houthis had been growing since the summer and in a speech on Saturday he denounced his one-time allies and said he was ready to “turn a new page” with Saudi Arabia and Mr Hadi.
His gamble backfired as Houthi forces overran his fighters in Sana’a over the weekend. He was reportedly trying to flee the city when his armoured vehicle was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade. Houthi fighters then allegedly shot him dead at the roadside.
Mr Hadi had appealed to Mr Saleh’s followers to join him against the Houthis and said he was ordering an offensive against Sana’a. Residents of the city said the fighting appeared to be calming last night as news of Mr Saleh’s death spread. Jamie Mcgoldrick, UN coordinator for Yemen, appealed for a ceasefire so aid could be delivered. “Sana’a has become a battleground,” he said.
“People are trapped in their homes, unable to access basic supplies.”
ALI ABDULLAH SALEH, the former president of Yemen, who has reportedly been killed aged 75, was the longestserving ruler in the post-ottoman Middle East and was known to some in the West as “Little Saddam” after the man he heroworshipped; but in the wake of 9/11, he became an unlikely ally in the American-led “War on Terror”.
He was forced from power in late 2011 after mass protests inspired by the Arab Spring, and handed power to Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, his vice president. But when Houthi forces rose up against Hadi in 2015, Saleh re-emerged as a political player, joining forces with the rebels in their fight against coalition forces led by Saudi Arabia, a former ally.
However, his alliance with the rebels began to unravel last week as the two sides fought in Sana’a, and Saleh indicated that he was ready to come to terms with Saudi Arabia and the Yemeni government. He was killed during the fighting, according to Houthi-controlled media; one of his aides subsequently confirmed his death to the BBC.
Ali Abdullah Saleh was born on March 21 1942 in the town of Almaradh, in what was then the Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen, to a Zaydi (Shia Muslim) peasant. His education was limited but he joined the army at an early age and became a corporal, taking part in the 1962 coup that overthrew the Zaydi imamate and installed a republic in North Yemen.
His leadership skills were noticed, and in 1977 the president of North Yemen, Ahmad bin Hussein alghashmi, appointed him military governor of Ta’izz. After al-ghashmi’s assassination by a “peace envoy” from South Yemen the following year, Saleh was elected president of North Yemen by a constituent assembly which saw him as someone who could easily be manipulated.
Instead, he proved shrewder, and more ruthless, than his predecessors. While allowing some democratic structures to grow, he built a system of patronage to keep a firm grip on power, surrounding himself with a circle of close aides – notably his brothers, whom he appointed to key military and security posts.
In 1990 he presided over the union of North Yemen and the communist South Yemen, which had just lost its Soviet patron. Like neighbouring Saudi Arabia, he also welcomed tens of thousands of Arab fighters returning from the jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, rewarding many of them with jobs in the country’s military and security forces.
The same year, however, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait punished Yemen for siding with Iraq in the Gulf War by expelling some 700,000 Yemeni expatriate workers, depriving the country of remittances that constituted one of its main revenues.
When a brief civil war broke out in 1994 between the north of Yemen and the more secular south, Saleh sent in the Islamist veterans of Afghanistan to crush the rebels, a feat which made him the one and only ruler, whereas before he had had to share power with former leaders of the south. Thus began a pragmatic relationship with Islamist militants that would come to trouble Saleh’s later alliance with the United States.
Following Yemen’s unification, Saleh launched a cautious reform process, introducing some elements of a multi-party system. He organised legislative elections in 1993 and 1997, and a presidential ballot in 1999, in which his only “rival” won 3.7 per cent of the vote. He would be re-elected to another seven-year term in 2006.
After the September 11 terrorist attacks, fearing that Yemen could become the target of an American invasion, Saleh flew to Washington and promised President George W Bush that he would cooperate in the fight against terrorism. He rounded up thousands of jihadists, and in the years that followed, Yemen’s elite Americantrained counter-terrorism forces captured and killed a number of militants.
Yet Saleh, a self-styled “field marshal”, was not an especially lovable ally and his relationship with Washington was complicated by the political juggling act which had kept him in power for so long.
Even though Washington spent tens of millions of dollars training his forces, his standard response when asked about cooperation with Washington was: “We’re not your employees!” Leaked cables from American diplomats published on the Wikileaks website in 2010 labelled Saleh “petulant” and “bizarre” in his dealings with them, “at times disdainful and dismissive and at others conciliatory and congenial”.
This was partly a reflection of the fact that his government was hopelessly ineffective at preventing infiltration by al-qaeda, whose presence in Yemen grew as the economic situation worsened. Indeed, Saleh and his allies occasionally seemed to encourage the militants: a jail break in 2006 that injected new energy into al-qaeda’s operations was thought to have been an inside job.
Washington was also angered by the freeing of such figures as Jamal al-badawi, wanted for the USS Cole bombing in 2000, and Jaber al-baneh, wanted by American prosecutors on terrorism charges.
Saleh also maintained close ties with extremist figures such as Abdul Majid al-zindani, a cleric who supported him in the 2006 presidential elections, but who is listed as a “specially designated global terrorist” by the UN and the United States. Others such as Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who mounted an unsuccessful attempt in 2009 to bomb a Us-bound passenger aeroplane, and US Army Major Nidal Hasan, who killed 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, are thought to have had links with Anwar al-awlaki, an American-born jihadist cleric hiding in Yemen, who was killed in 2011 in an American drone attack.
In 2009 al-qaeda’s Yemeni and Saudi wings merged into a new group, al-qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), based in Yemen.
Even without the problem of militancy, Saleh’s achievement in remaining in power for so long was a remarkable one. Beset by an exploding population, spiralling unemployment, a water shortage so acute that Yemen’s cities had water for only a couple of hours a day, and dwindling oil output, he was also dealing with a grinding civil war in the north and a resurgence of separatist sentiment in the south. By 2009 Yemen qualified as a failing state.
Yet until the “Arab Spring” protests of early 2011, Saleh had the support of the main pillars of power in Yemen – the tribes and the army – based on a network of patronage whereby all jobs were distributed according to political loyalty in a constant process of balancing and manoeuvring which Saleh himself likened to “dancing in a circle of snakes”.
A large proportion of the resources for this high-wire act were provided by Saudi Arabia which, much as they disliked the man, saw Saleh’s regime as a bulwark against extremist threats aimed at the Saudi royal family.
A notable exception to this network were the Houthis, a Shia-led religiouspolitical movement that emerged from Sa’dah, northern Yemen, in the 1990s and felt particularly marginalised by Saleh and angered by the growth of Saudi Arabia’s conservative religious influence and Yemen’s alliance with America in its war on terror. Hundreds of people died in fighting between the Houthis and pro-government forces between 2004 and 2010.
When Yemeni students joined the wave of popular protests sweeping the Arab world in 2011, even Saleh’s traditional support began to show signs of ebbing away.
At first he played for time, calling a state of emergency, sacking his cabinet and promising that he would not seek to extend his term in office beyond 2013. But he had made and broken similar promises in 2006, and his refusal to step down and deployment of thugs to intimidate the demonstrators merely intensified opposition to his regime.
The event that propelled Yemen’s crisis to an apparent climax was the announcement in March 2011 by Major-general Ali Mohsen al-ahmar, the country’s most powerful military leader, that he was supporting the youthful protesters, after police, including rooftop snipers, shot dead 52 of them after Friday prayers on March 18.
His announcement was followed by a series of high-profile defections by generals, ambassadors and some tribes, putting Saleh in the position of choosing between sending his elite units into battle to defend his authority or negotiating his own exit.
With a push from the Gulf states, Saleh stepped down early in 2012 and was succeeded by Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi. Thus began a shortlived period of optimism, during which talks brokered by the UN led to a plan in 2014 for a new constitution enshrining a federal system.
However, resentment towards Hadi and disquiet over the growing power of Islah, an Islamist party affiliated to the Muslim Brotherhood, brought the Houthis and Saleh, who apparently still harboured hopes of regaining the presidency, into an unlikely tactical alliance. In September of 2014 their forces entered Sana’a and were welcomed by many Yemenis.
In early 2015 the rebels seized control of the capital, forcing Hadi to flee and prompting Saudi Arabia and eight other mostly Sunni Arab states, alarmed by the rise of a group they believed to be backed by Iran, to launch an air campaign aimed at restoring Hadi’s government.
Since then more than 8,600 people have been killed and 49,000 injured, many of them in air strikes by the Saudi-led coalition, while the conflict and a blockade imposed by the coalition have also left 20 million people in need of humanitarian assistance. Although neither side appears close to achieving a military victory, cracks which appeared last week between forces loyal to Saleh and the Houthis have raised hopes of a fresh effort at negotiating an end to the war.
Saleh was married and had seven sons.