Ali Abdullah Saleh (21 March 19474 December 2017) was a Yemeni military officer and politician who served as the first president of the Republic of Yemen from the Yemeni unification in 1990 until his resignation in 2012, following the Yemeni revolution. Previously, he had served as the fifth and last President of the Yemen Arab Republic (North Yemen), from July 1978 to 22 May 1990, after the assassination of President Ahmad al-Ghashmi. al-Ghashmi had earlier appointed Saleh as military governor in Taiz.
A veteran and officer of the North Yemen civil war, Saleh consolidated power and restored civilian rule after al-Ghashmi's assassination in 1978. Despite military defeat against South Yemen in the Second Yemenite War, a rebellion, and multiple coup attempts, Saleh, though challenged with stagnant economic growth and significant poverty, had managed to bring stability to North Yemen by the mid 1980's, and enjoyed support from both the United States and the Soviet Union. After South Yemen had become unstable following the 1986 crisis and the fall of communism, Saleh achieved reunification as President of the new Republic of Yemen, sharing power in tandem with South Yemen's last leader and transitional Vice President Ali Salem al-Beidh, prominent general Mohsen al-Ahmar and tribal Sheikh and leader of the Islamist Islah movement, Abdullah al-Ahmar, through a Presidential Council. Due to apparent North–South divisions, al-Beidh left the Council in 1993, and in the brief civil war that followed, Saleh's forces, assisted by jihadists such as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, roundly defeated Southern forces in July 1994.
From 1994 onward, Saleh returned to autocratic rule through rule by decree, and was confirmed by elections in 1999, 2006, and a controversial constitutional referendum in 2001. Until 2011, he presided over stable economic growth and an insurgency by the Ansar Allah movement, commonly known as the Houthis. As President of unified Yemen, Saleh and the Presidential Council alienated the US and Saudi governments by expressing opposition to the Gulf War, which prompted an exodus of over 800,000 Yemenis from Saudi Arabia, but after Saleh consolidated absolute power, he developed deeper ties with Western powers, especially the United States, during the war on terror. Subsequently, evidence emerged that Islamic terrorism may have been used and encouraged by Saleh in order to win Western support and for disruptive politically motivated attacks. In 2011, in the wake of the Arab Spring, which spread across North Africa and the Middle East (including Yemen), Saleh's time in office became increasingly precarious, until he was eventually ousted as president in 2012. He was succeeded by Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, who had been serving as vice president since 1994, and acting president since 2011.
Himself a Zaydi Shia Muslim, Saleh openly allied with the Houthis in May 2015 during the Yemeni civil war, in which a protest movement and subsequent insurgency succeeded in capturing Yemen's capital, Sanaa, causing President Hadi to resign and flee the country. In December 2017, he declared his withdrawal from his coalition with the Houthis and instead sided with his former enemies – Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and President al-Hadi.
On 4 December 2017, during a battle between Houthi and Saleh supporters in Sanaa, the Houthis accused Saleh of treason, and he was killed by a Houthi sniper. Reports were that Saleh was killed while trying to flee his compound in a car; however, this was denied by his party officials, who said he was killed at his house.
Early life Ali Abdullah Saleh Affash was born on 21 March 1947 to a poor Zaydi family in Beit al-Ahmar village (Red House village) from the Sanhan () clan (Sanhan District), whose territories lie some 20 kilometers southeast of Sanaa, then capital of the northern Kingdom of Yemen. Saleh's father, Abdallah Saleh died after he divorced Ali Abdullah's mother when Saleh was still young. His mother later remarried her deceased former husband's brother, Muhammad Saleh, who soon became Saleh's mentor and stepfather. Saleh's brother Mohammed was a major general and had three children: Yahya, Tareq, and Ammar, who all served under Saleh during his rule.
Saleh's cousin, Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar from the Al Ahmar family, which is also part of the Sanhan clan is often confused with the same-named leading family of the Hashid tribe, with which the Sanhan clan was an ally. The Hashid tribe, in turn, belongs to the larger Yemeni parent group, the Kahlan tribe. The clans Sanhan and Khawlan are said to be related.
Ali Abdallah Saleh married Asama Saleh in 1964.
Military career and rise to the presidency Saleh received his primary education at Ma'alama village before leaving to join the Royal (North Yemeni) Armed Forces in 1958 as an infantry soldier and was admitted to the Royal Military Academy in 1960. Three years later, in 1963, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in armoured corps. Though not a Nasserist himself, he participated in the Nasserist-inspired military coup of 1962, which was instrumental in the removal of King Muhammad al-Badr and the establishment of the Yemen Arab Republic. During the North Yemen Civil War, he attained the rank of major by 1969. He received further training as a staff officer in the Higher Command and staff C Course in Iraq, between 1970 and 1971, and was promoted to lieutenant colonel. He became a full colonel in 1976 and was given command of a mechanised brigade. In 1977, the President of North Yemen, Ahmad al-Ghashmi, appointed him as military governor of Taiz.
After al-Ghashmi was assassinated on 24 June 1978, Colonel Saleh was appointed to be a member of the four-man provisional presidency council and deputy to the general staff commander. On 17 July 1978, Saleh was elected by the parliament to be the president of the Yemen Arab Republic, while simultaneously holding the positions of chief of staff and commander-in-chief of the armed forces.
Governance in the Middle East and North Africa: A Handbook describes Saleh as being neither from a "sheikhly family" nor a "large or important tribe" either, but instead rising to power through "his own means", and creating a patronage system with his family at the top. His seven brothers were placed "in key positions", and later he relied on "sons, daughters, sons-in-law and nephews". Beneath the positions occupied by his extended family, Saleh "relied heavily on the loyalty" of two tribes, his own Sanhan tribe and the Hamdan San'a tribe of his mentor, the late president al-Ghashmi. The New York Times Middle Eastern correspondent Robert F. Worth described Saleh as reaching an understanding with powerful feudal "big sheikhs" to become "part of a Mafia-style spoils system that substituted for governance". Robert Worth accused Saleh of exceeding the aggrandisement of other Middle Eastern strongmen by managing to "rake off tens of billions of dollars in public funds for himself and his family" despite the extreme poverty of his country.
North Yemen presidency On 10 August 1978, Saleh ordered the execution of 30 officers who were charged with being part of a conspiracy against his rule. Saleh was promoted to major general in 1980, elected as the secretary-general of the General People's Congress party on 30 August 1982, and re-elected president of the Yemen Arab Republic in 1983.
The People's Constituent Assembly, which had been created somewhat earlier, selected Col. Ali Abdullah Saleh as al-Ghashmī's successor. Despite early public skepticism and a serious coup attempt in late 1978, Saleh managed to conciliate most factions, improve relations with Yemen's neighbours, and resume various programs of economic and political development and institutionalization. More firmly in power in the 1980s, he created the political organization that was to become known as his party, the General People's Congress (GPC), and steered Yemen into the age of oil.
In the late 1980s, Saleh was under considerable international pressure to permit his country's Jewish citizens to travel freely to places abroad. Passports were eventually issued to them, which facilitated their unrestricted travel.
Unified Yemen presidency
The decline of the Soviet Union severely weakened the status of South Yemen, a communist-originated state, and, in 1990,Interview of Ali Abdallah Saleh with Eric Rouleau in Sanaa in the early 1990s, eng, Calames, Sound Archives Center, MMSH, http://calames.abes.fr/pub/ms/Calames-202404181618354315 the North and South agreed to unify after years of negotiations. The South accepted Saleh as President of the unified country, while Ali Salem al-Beidh served as the Vice President and a member of the Presidential Council.
After Iraq lost the Gulf War, Yemeni workers were deported from Kuwait by the restored government.
In the 1993 parliamentary election, the first held after unification, Saleh's General People's Congress won 122 of 301 seats. South disagreeing with their party's third place position, started a brief civil-war until 1994 when Saleh's army ended the insurgency.
Links to Islamist militant groups Around 1994, jihadists from Ayman al-Zawahiri's Egyptian Islamic Jihad attempted to regroup in Yemen following a harsh crackdown in Egypt. In this, they were tacitly supported by the regime of Ali Abdullah Saleh, as he found them useful in his fight against southern separatists in the civil war of 1994. After using Islamic militants to repress the separatist Yemeni Socialist Party and keep the country under his rule, Saleh turned a blind eye to their activities and allowed their sympathizers to work in his intelligence services.
Military promotion On 24 December 1997, Parliament approved Saleh's promotion to the rank of field marshal, making him the highest-ranking military officer in Yemen.
1999 election He became Yemen's first directly elected president in the 1999 presidential election, winning 96.2% of the vote. The only other candidate, Najeeb Qahtan Al-Sha'abi, who was the son of Qahtan Muhammad al-Shaabi, the former president of South Yemen. Though a member of Saleh's General People's Congress (GPC) party, Najeeb ran as an independent.
After the 1999 elections, the Parliament passed a law extending presidential terms from five to seven years, extending parliamentary terms from four to six years, and creating a 111-member, presidentially-appointed council of advisors with legislative power. This move prompted Freedom House to downgrade their rating of political freedom in Yemen from 5 to 6.
2006 election