19al- Sauds, who were afraid of the Soviet intentions vis-à-vis the Arab world.
In the 1980s, this manifested in resolute Saudi opposition to the Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan and its decision to prop up, support and arm the
Afghan mujahedeen (Riedel 2014 ).
The al-Sauds faced the most ominous form of Nasserism in the next-
door Yemen when Egypt decided to support the republican regime of
Marshal Sallal against the forces loyal to the Imamate supported by Saudi
Arabia.^1 Far from being an ideological opponent, Egypt became a secu-
rity threat as the al-Sauds have been seeing Yemen as their backwaters, if
not as the southern frontiers of Saudi Arabia (Orkaby 2017 ). At the
height of the Yemen Civil war (1962–70), about 70,000 Egyptian sol-
diers were fighting on behalf of the Yemen Arab Republic against the
Riyadh- backed Zaidi Imamate. Egyptian officers were also training the
army of Abdullah al-Sallal. On a few occasions, the Egyptian air force
bombed the southern Saudi town of Najran close to the Saudi-Yemeni
borders. The Egyptian involvement in Yemen ended only after the Arab
debacle in the June War of 1967, and in return, oil-rich Arab countries
agreed to provide Egypt with an annual help to the tune of US$266 mil-
lion, out of which US$154 million would come from the Kingdom
(Dawisha 1983 ; Sela 2002 , 158–60).
Above all, willy-nilly Egypt was dragged into the power struggle within
the ruling Saudi family in the later years of King Saud’s reign. The regional
popularity of Nasserism and the overthrowing of the monarchy in Iraq had
their repercussions in the Arabian Peninsula. Some members of the al-
Saud toyed with the idea of republicanism, and under the slogan of “Free
Princes Movement” they called for reforms and even an end to the monar-
chical rule (Niblock 2006 , 110; Al-Rasheed 2002 , 106–10). There were
fears that Egypt, which was already active in Yemen, might direct and even
(^1) The civil war started after a coup d’état led by Abdullah Sallal who at the time was a
colonel in the Yemeni Army against the newly ascended Imam of the Rassidi dynasty, Imam
Muhammad al-Badr. Saudi Arabia, which had earlier fought a war with the Yemeni Imamate
to take over Najran, Asir and Jizan in 1926, along with Jordan extended support to the
Imamate fearing Egyptian and Soviet plot to throw out the monarchies from Arabian
Peninsula. The Zaidi Imamate in North Yemen was continuing since it was established in
897 AD by one of the descendants of Hasan son of Ali, the nephew and son-in-law of the
prophet and the fourth pious caliph. The Imamate had since then continued among the
Zaidi Sayyids of the Rassidi dynasty and Muhammad al-Badr proved to be the last Zaidi
Imam to rule north Yemen. See Witty 2001 ; Halliday 1984.
THE NEHRU ERA