Veteran former president Ali Abdullah Saleh was killed in a shooting on Monday after switching sides in Yemen's civil war, abandoning his Iran-aligned Houthi allies in favour of a Saudi-led coalition, foes and supporters said. Sources in the Houthi militia said its fighters stopped Saleh's armoured vehicle with an RPG rocket outside the embattled capital Sanaa and then shot him dead. Sources in Saleh's party confirmed he died in an attack on his convoy.
Unverified footage of his bloodied body lolling in a blanket circulated just days after he tore up his alliance with the Houthis following nearly three years in which they had jointly battled the Saudi-led coalition that intervened to try to reinstate Yemen's internationally recognised government.
In a televised speech on Monday, Houthi leader Abdul Malik al-Houthi congratulated the Yemeni people for what he described as a victory against a "conspiracy of treason" engineered by the group's Gulf Arab enemies. He did not mention Saleh's death.
Saleh, 75, had said in a speech on Saturday that he was ready for a "new page" in ties with the coalition and called the Houthis a "coup militia", leading them to accuse him of betrayal. Warfare between the former allies has torn densely populated Sanaa for days as Houthi fighters seized control of much of the capital and on Monday blew up Saleh's house while coalition jets bombed their own positions.
The end of their alliance had seemed poised to transform the fortunes of war after two years of attrition along mostly static front lines, which gave the Saudi-led coalition a new advantage over the Houthis. Stalemate in Yemen has contributed to a human catastrophe as a Saudi-led blockade and internal fighting has thrust millions to the brink of famine and accelerated the spread of deadly epidemics.
Eyes will now turn to Saleh's political allies and military commanders, whom analysts credited with aiding the Houthi march southwards in 2014 to dominate swathes of western Yemen. "What happens now and whether his family and political allies fight on is not yet clear," said Adam Baron, a Yemen expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
"His people will be angry, and many will certainly be out for blood, but there are many in the middle especially among the tribes who will fall with whoever appears stronger," he said. "The (Saudi-led) coalition may have put a lot of their eggs in Saleh's basket only for it to fall over now. They appeared to strongly support his attempt to confront the Houthis and now that bid may have failed."
HEADS OF SNAKES
Saleh once compared his 33-year rule over Yemen to "dancing on the heads of snakes", a period that included unification of conservative north and Marxist south Yemen, civil war, uprisings, Islamist militant campaigns and tribal feuds.
Comments
Comments are closed for this article.