Word: yemen
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Caught unawares by South Yemen's rapidly spreading civil war, the British and Soviet governments were participating in a joint rescue operation that in a modest way resembled the Allied evacuation at Dunkirk during World War II. As savage fighting between Marxist factions spread throughout the desert country, about 5,000 foreigners were transported from Aden, at the southern approach to the Red Sea, to the former French colony of Djibouti, 150 miles away...
Dismayingly little was yet known about what was happening in the war itself. The beleaguered President, Ali Nasser Muhammad, 46, apparently made a quick trip to nearby Ethiopia, possibly to secure arms and ammunition, then returned to South Yemen, where he was reported to be assembling a force of 40,000 soldiers and volunteers in the Abyan region, his stronghold to the east of the capital. Rebel radio broadcasts rarely referred to Abdul Fattah Ismail, the former President who was thought to be leading the rebellion, thereby fueling speculation that he had been killed when fighting began two weeks...
...struggle between the Marxist factions, which has both ideological and tribal overtones, is equally murky. Former President Ismail is a Moscow-line ideologue who caused endless mischief for his more conservative Arab neighbors. He was succeeded in 1980 by Muhammad, a pragmatist who sought closer ties with neighboring North Yemen, Oman and Saudi Arabia...
...same time, Muhammad was trying to build diplomatic ties between Saudi Arabia and the Soviet Union, a long-term aim of the Kremlin's foreign policy. Western diplomats tended to believe that Moscow had felt comfortable with him and was dismayed at the speed with which South Yemen dissolved into tribal warfare...
Behind them, across the water, the flames of tribal warfare had spread to the country's remote regions, and there was a danger that the fighting might eventually extend to North Yemen and beyond. How long the battle of South Yemen might continue was impossible to say. But at week's end the rebels, with apparent Soviet backing, were trying to cobble together some sort of provisional government...