The Houthis took vengeance on “betrayal”: Saleh killed

Saleh speaks to his people asking for a change of course: siding with Saudi Arabia Saleh speaks to his people asking for a change of course: siding with Saudi Arabia Khaled Abdullah/Reuters

15 January 2018
Last December 2, former Yemen president Saleh asked the people to line up with the Saudi rivals. Two days later he is found dead.

Ali Abdullah Saleh, president of Yemen until 2012, had allied three years later with the Houthis, the group of anti-government rebels of the north of the country, at the dawn of what is now a bloody civil war.

The coalition between Saleh and Shiite militiamen was destined to fail because it was not built on trust: it was sought by Saleh to overthrow the government of his successor Hadi and by the militiamen to control much of the country resisting the military coalition led by the Sunni Saudi Arabia.

The alliance was broken with the speech, broadcast on television, of the former president: the Houthi believe what Saleh had said was a real betrayal that must be punished. Death, probably caused by a deep head wound, was soon publicly claimed by the rebels.

The turn of the former president pushed by the United Arab Emirates, in exchange for a reconquest of the presidency, should have served to end the war and to finally defeat the Houtis (supported by Shiite Iran, who has always been in conflict with the Sunni Arabs).

Saleh, for a long time head of Yemen, had always been an important player in the civil war and his killing did not stop the clashes, but exacerbated the tensions: the conflict will not see an end until the rebel group will control much of the country and members of the Saudi coalition won’t be tired of sending bombs and soldiers to Yemen.

 

For more information, please read:

https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/news/2017/5/10/houthi-saleh-divorce-yemens-former-president-reaches-out-to-saudis
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/12/yemen-level-civil-war-171204162917355.html
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/09/yemen-the-forgotten-war/
http://www.arabnews.com/node/1203936/middle-east
https://www.cfr.org/interactives/global-conflict-tracker#!/conflict/war-in-yemen
http://www.ecfr.eu/mena/yemen
http://en.rfi.fr/middle-east/20171205-saleh-killing-increases-chaos-yemen

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