Abdullah al-Sallal
Abdullah al-Sallal was the first president of the Yemen Arab Republic, from the night of 26 September 1962, when as commander of the royal guard he sent the tanks against the palace of the week-old imam al-Badr in Sanaa and proclaimed the republic on the radio, to November 1967, when his own officers removed him while he was in Baghdad. In five years he was Nasser's man in a civil war that Nasser fought, with seventy thousand Egyptian soldiers at its height, the bombing and gassing of the royalist villages, the Saudi money and weapons to the tribes of the north, and the imam, who had not died in the palace, was in the mountains with the Zaydi sheikhs and the mercenaries the British sent from Aden. The republic held the towns and the roads and the royalists the hills. The war, which the world called Egypt's Vietnam, killed some hundred thousand Yemenis and was still on when the Egyptians left after the defeat of June 1967. He was born in Sanaa in 1917, the son of a blacksmith, one of the first Yemenis the imam sent abroad, to the Iraqi military college in 1936. He was jailed for seven years on his return for the free officers' ideas he brought back, was in the plot of 1948 and jailed again. He was let out to command the imam Ahmad's guard, which was the imam's misjudgment. He became al-Badr's chief of the royal guard in 1962, which was the son's. The presidency was a marshal's baton, a revolutionary command council, the Egyptian embassy's decisions and Sallal's speeches, a constitution written in Cairo, and the republicans' own quarrel between the Egyptians' man and the tribal republicans under Qadi Iryani who wanted the Egyptians gone and the royalists reconciled. When Nasser withdrew after 1967 the Iryani faction took Sanaa on 5 November while Sallal was abroad. The republic he had founded survived the royalist siege of Sanaa that winter without him, made its peace with the tribes and the Saudis in 1970. It left the imam's family out. He lived in Baghdad and Cairo for fourteen years. He was allowed home in 1981 by Saleh with a pension and the title of the revolution's father. He died in Sanaa in March 1994, two months before the next civil war, between the north and the south he had never governed.
- Lived: 1917 CE – 1994 CE
- Nationality: Yemeni
- Roles: president, general, revolutionary
