Word: badr
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Cairo newspapers derisively called him a ghost. But the ousted Imam of Yemen, Mohamed el Badr, seemed very real last week. Badr's enemies had repeatedly reported him dead ever since September, when rebel tanks commanded by Strongman Abdullah Sallal ringed the palace in San'a and opened fire at point-blank range. But the royal troops held out until the next day, when the Imam darted through a breach in the wall. A woman in a nearby house helped him replace his fancy clothes with a common soldier's khaki tunic, and Badr safely made...
Dressed in the same clothes, and wearing a bandolier of bullets across his chest, Badr told of his escape to a group of 16 newsmen who huddled on mats in a camel-skin tent at an encampment a few miles inside Yemen near the Saudi Arabian border. While dagger-wielding, shouting followers raised a din outside, Badr cheerfully predicted that he would be back on the throne in a few weeks. He claimed to command 20,000 tribesmen...
...Sallal's "republican'' regime, Badr said scornfully: "It seems all you need to make a government these days is a broadcasting station and a declaration that you have formed a government." Furthermore, said the Imam, who has never been much interested in women himself, the new regime has the wrong attitude toward sex: "It encourages the unveiling of women, adultery, alcoholism, and every other kind...
...much to fight over, but it has become a symbolic object of contention between the Middle East's two most powerful Arab factions. On one side is Nasser's Egypt, which supports the Sallal regime. On the other side is feudal Saudi Arabia, which backs Badr. Allied with Saudi Arabia's King Saud is Jordan's young King Hussein, 28, who believes that "if Saud goes...
...Crown Prince Badr tried to get the clocks moving again. An arms deal with Russia engineered by him brought T-34 tanks, Yak fighter planes and an arsenal of small arms to Yemen, although Ahmad cried: "I don't need them-I have my sword!" He never paid for the Red hardware and was content to let it rust into uselessness. As fast as Badr brought in Egyptian teachers, Czech technicians and Yugoslav pilots and maintenance crews, Ahmad deported them. The Red Chinese built a showcase highway from the port of Hodeida to the capital, but after nine months...