Former Yemeni strongman Saleh killed in Sanaa attack

Reuters

Yemen’s steely former president of 33 years, Ali Abdullah Saleh, made his last political gamble and lost on Monday, meeting his death at the hands of the Houthi movement, his erstwhile allies in the country’s multi-sided civil war.
Officials in his General People’s Congress party (GPC) confirmed to Reuters that the 75-year-old Saleh had been killed outside the capital Sanaa in what Houthi sources said was an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) and gun attack.
A master of weaving alliances and advancing his personal and family interests in Yemen’s heavily armed and deeply fractious tribal society, Saleh unified his country by force, but he also helped guide it toward collapse in its latest war.
The Middle East’s arch-survivor once compared running Yemen to “dancing on the heads of snakes”, ruling with expertly balanced doses of largesse and force.
He outlived other Arab leaders who were left dead or deposed by uprisings and civil wars since 2011.
Cornered by “Arab Spring” protests, Saleh wore a cryptic smile when signing his resignation in a televised ceremony in 2012.
Saleh waged six wars against the Houthis from 2002 to 2009 before he made an impromptu alliance with the group that seized the capital Sanaa in 2014 and eventually turned on him.
The two sides feuded for years for supremacy over territory they ran together. The Houthis prob-ably never forgave his forces for killing their founder and father of the current leader.
As the conflict wrought a humanitarian crisis, mutual sniping about responsibility for economic woes in northern Yemeni lands that they together rule peaked on Wednesday when the capital erupted in gunbattles between their partisans.

ARCH-SURVIVOR
Saleh had seemed unshakeable in one of the world’s poorest and unstable countries. He managed to play his enemies off against each other as tribal warfare, separa-
tist movements and militants destabilised Yemen.
He survived a bomb attack in his palace mosque in 2011 which killed senior aides and disfigured him. As other leaders were toppled by the Arab Spring uprisings, he found a way to retire peacefully to his villa in the capital and plot a comeback.
Despite being forced to step down in 2012 under a Gulf-brokered transition plan following protests against his rule, Saleh won immunity in the deal and remained a powerful political player.
The ever-nimble Saleh was a pivotal figure in the war, which has killed at least 10,000 people,
displaced 2 million from their homes, led to widespread hunger and a cholera epidemic.
Saleh became the ruler of North Yemen in 1978 at a time when the south was a separate, commu-
nist state, and led the unified country after the two states merged
in 1990.
Saleh managed to keep Western and Arab powers on his side, styling himself as a key ally of the United States in its war on terrorism. He received tens of millions
of dollars in US military aid for units commanded by his relatives.
Born in 1942 near Sanaa, he received only limited education
before joining the military as a
non-commissioned officer.