The North Yemen Civil War is fought in North Yemen between royalists of the Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen and factions of the Yemen Arab Republic from 1962 to 1970.
The war begins with a coup d'état carried out by the republican leader, Abdullah as-Sallal, which dethrones the newly crowned Imam al-Badr and declares Yemen a republic under his presidency.
The Imam escapes to the Saudi Arabian border and rallies popular support.On the royalist side, Jordan and Saudi Arabia supply military aid, and Britain gives covert support, while the republicans are supported by Egypt and allegedly receive warplanes from the Soviet Union.
Both foreign irregular and conventional forces are involved.
The Egyptian President, Gamal Abdel Nasser, supports the republicans with as many as 70,000 Egyptian troops and chemical weapons.
Despite several military moves and peace conferences, the war sinks into a stalemate.
Egypt's commitment to the war is considered to have been detrimental to its performance in the Six-Day War of June 1967, after which Nasser finsd it increasingly difficult to maintain his army's involvement and begins to pull his forces out of Yemen.Egyptian military historians refer to the war in Yemen as their Vietnam, and historian Michael Oren (current Israeli Ambassador to the U.S) wrote that Egypt's military adventure in Yemen was so disastrous that "the imminent Vietnam War could easily have been dubbed America's Yemen."
