Ali Abdullah Saleh

Biography

Ali Abdullah Saleh was born in 1947 into a poor Zaydi family of the Sanhan clan near Sanaa and joined the army of the Kingdom of Yemen as a youth, later fighting for the republic in the North Yemen civil war. President Ahmad al-Ghashmi made him military governor of Taiz, and after al-Ghashmi was assassinated in June 1978 the assembly chose Saleh, then a colonel, as President of the Yemen Arab Republic.

He survived an early coup attempt, a military defeat by South Yemen and a rebellion, and founded the General People's Congress in 1982 as his ruling party. In 1990 he led North Yemen into unification with the South and became president of the new Republic of Yemen. When southern leaders broke away in 1994 his forces won the short civil war, after which he ruled with few checks, winning presidential elections in 1999 and 2006 while facing a Houthi insurgency in the north.

Mass protests in 2011 and a bomb attack on his compound that June, which left him badly burned, led him to sign a Gulf Cooperation Council transition deal; he handed power to Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi in February 2012 in exchange for immunity. He then allied with the Houthis against Hadi, but in December 2017 he switched sides towards Saudi Arabia, and he was killed by Houthi fighters in Sanaa on 4 December 2017.