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NDF Rebellion | |||||||
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Part of the Cold War and the Arab Cold War | |||||||
CIA map of the NDF area of operations in May 1982 | |||||||
| |||||||
Belligerents | |||||||
North Yemen Islamic Front Supported by: Republic of China United States | NDF Supported by: South Yemen Libya | ||||||
Commanders and leaders | |||||||
Ali Abdullah Saleh Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar | Yahya Shami Sultan Ahmad Umar Abdul Fattah Ismail | ||||||
Strength | |||||||
| 15,000 |
The NDF Rebellion was an uprising and civil war in the Yemen Arab Republic (North Yemen) by the National Democratic Front, under Yahya Shami, [2] between 1978 and 1982. [3]
The rebellion began in 1978, following the assassination of Ahmad al-Ghashmi and the rise of Ali Abdullah Saleh. [3] The National Democratic Front (NDF) was supported in its rebellion by South Yemen [3] and Libya. [2] The NDF enjoyed various successes throughout the early phases of the conflict, although its foreign support dwindled after the peace treaty between North and South Yemen following the 1979 border war. [3]
There were several attempts at ceasefires between the government and the NDF. Kuwait managed to facilitate the signing of a ceasefire between the government and the NDF on 26 November 1981, although hostilities re-erupted in December 1981. [2] Later, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was able to mediate a ceasefire agreement on 3 April 1982, however hostilities began again later that same month, with the NDF capturing Juban. Government forces in turn attacked NDF positions in Juban in the following month and retook the territory.
South Yemeni support for the NDF diminished under the presidency of the less overtly militant Ali Nasir Muhammad, [3] and their support for the NDF finally ended in May 1982. [2] Dhamar, a major NDF stronghold, sustained major damage during the 1982 North Yemen earthquake. [4] The NDF was eventually defeated by a reorganized North Yemeni Army in conjunction with the pro-government Islamic Front, allowing the North Yemeni government to finally establish control over the North-South border region. [3]
South Yemen, officially the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, abbreviated to Democratic Yemen, was a state that existed from 1967 to 1990 as the only communist state in the Middle East and the Arab world. It was made up of the southern and eastern governorates of the present-day Republic of Yemen, including the island of Socotra. It was bordered by North Yemen to the north-west, Saudi Arabia to the north, and Oman to the east.
North Yemen is a term used to describe the Kingdom of Yemen (1918-1962), the Yemen Arab Republic (1962-1990), and the regimes that preceded them and exercised sovereignty over that region of Yemen. Its capital was Sanaa from 1918 to 1948 and again from 1962 to 1990. Located in the southwestern part of the Arabian Peninsula, the area of the region is 195,000 square kilometers, it used to have a population of about thirteen million people prior to the Yemeni unification. It was bordered to the north by Saudi Arabia, to the south and east by South Yemen, to the west by the Red Sea, and to Bab al-Mandab in the southwest.
Ali Salem al-Beidh is a Yemeni politician who served as the General Secretary of the Yemeni Socialist Party (YSP) in South Yemen and as Vice President of Yemen following the unification in 1990. He left the unification government in 1993, sparking the 1994 civil war in Yemen and then went into exile in Oman. He is a leader of the Southern independence movement known as Al Hirak.
Ahmad bin Hussein al-Ghashmi was a Yemeni military officer who served as the fourth President of the Yemen Arab Republic from 11 October 1977 until his assassination eight months later. Al-Ghashmi had assumed power when his predecessor, Ibrahim al-Hamdi, was assassinated.
The 1978 South Lebanon conflict, also known as the First Israeli invasion of Lebanon and codenamed Operation Litani by Israel, began when Israel invaded southern Lebanon up to the Litani River in March 1978. It was in response to the Coastal Road massacre near Tel Aviv by Palestinian militants based in Lebanon. The conflict resulted in the deaths of 1,100–2,000 Lebanese and Palestinians, 20 Israelis, and the internal displacement of 100,000 to 250,000 people in Lebanon. The Israel Defense Forces gained a military victory against the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as the latter was forced to withdraw from southern Lebanon, preventing it from launching attacks on Israel from across its land border with Lebanon. In response to the outbreak of hostilities, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 425 and Resolution 426 on 19 March 1978, which called on Israel to immediately withdraw its troops from Lebanon and established the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL).
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The Arab Cold War was a political rivalry in the Arab world from the early 1950s to the late 1970s and a part of the wider Cold War. It is generally accepted that the beginning of the Arab Cold War is marked by the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, which led to Gamal Abdel Nasser becoming president of Egypt in 1956. Thereafter, newly formed Arab republics, inspired by revolutionary secular nationalism and Nasser's Egypt, engaged in political rivalries with conservative traditionalist Arab monarchies, influenced by Saudi Arabia. The Iranian Revolution of 1979, and the ascension of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as leader of Iran, is widely seen as the end of this period of internal conflicts and rivalry. A new era of Arab-Iranian tensions followed, overshadowing the bitterness of intra-Arab strife.
The National Liberation Front was a Marxist–Leninist paramilitary organization and a political party operating in the Federation of South Arabia, during the Aden Emergency. During the North Yemen Civil War, fighting spilled over into South Yemen as the British attempted to establish an autonomous colony known as the Federation of South Arabia. Following the exit of the British armed forces, the NLF seized power from its rival, the Arab nationalist Front for the Liberation of Occupied South Yemen (FLOSY) (FLOSY). In the aftermath of the Emergency, the NLF renamed itself the National Front and eventually became the main force behind the creation of the Yemeni Socialist Party, which subsequently governed the country as a single-party Marxist–Leninist state.
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