Obituary: Ali Abdullah Saleh was killed on December 4th

WHEN Houthi rebels broke into Ali Abdullah Saleh’s house in Sana’a on December 4th to ransack it, they found several bottles of vodka and premium Lebanese arak. The unIslamic hoard cast doubt on the president’s public shows of prayer and the great mosque, with six white minarets, looming beside his palace. It surprised no one who knew that, as a highlander from Yemen’s northern mountains, he probably liked a chaser after a pleasant chew of qat in the afternoons. Others would have remembered how, as a young army officer in charge of a checkpoint on the main road to Taiz from the Red Sea, he would wave through whisky smuggled up from Africa if enough rials crossed his palm. That blind eye won him useful allies among the merchants of Taiz.

He needed such ruses because he was a nobody. His clan, the Sanhan, was a lowly, overlooked group in a society seething with wild and larger tribes heavily armed with pride and Kalashnikovs. His family contained no sheikhs, and his village, flyblown...Continue reading