Ali Abdullah Saleh
Ali Abdullah Saleh ruled Yemen for thirty-three years, described the job as dancing on the heads of snakes, and was killed by the snakes he had last chosen to dance with. He was a tank officer from a village near Sanaa, with little schooling, who became president of North Yemen in 1978 after two predecessors had been assassinated in eight months and nobody else wanted the office. He kept it by distributing money, posts and weapons among the tribes, the army and the Islamists so that none of them could do without him. In 1990 he negotiated the union with the Marxist south and became president of the whole country. When the south tried to secede in 1994 he crushed it in two months. He sided with Saddam in 1990, which cost him the Gulf's money, and with Washington after 2001, which brought it back along with drones. He ran elections he won with ninety-six per cent, groomed his son Ahmed, and fought six wars against the Houthi movement in the north between 2004 and 2010 without ending it. The Arab Spring reached Sanaa in January 2011. He was badly burned by a bomb in his palace mosque in June, recovered in Riyadh, and signed the Gulf transition deal in November 2011 that gave the presidency to his deputy Hadi in exchange for immunity. Then he did the thing that defines him: he allied with the Houthis he had spent a decade fighting, and the army units still loyal to him carried them into Sanaa in September 2014 and started the civil war that Saudi Arabia entered the following March. In December 2017 he changed sides again, announced on television that he was open to talks with Riyadh, and the Houthis killed him at a checkpoint outside the capital two days later, and filmed it.
- Lived: 1947 CE – 2017 CE
- Nationality: Yemeni
- Roles: head_of_state, military
