In his biography of Gamal Abdel Nasser, Sir Anthony Nutting cites several factors that prompted the Egyptian president to send Egyptian troops to Yemen, including Syria's secession from the United Arab Republic in 1961. Nasser sought to restore his prestige after Syria's secession. A swift and decisive military victory could have restored his leadership of the Arab world. Nasser had a well-known reputation as an anti-colonial figure and sought to expel the British from southern Yemen and the strategic port of Aden, which overlooks the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.

At the beginning of the Yemeni revolution, in September 1962, Gamal Abdel Nasser decided to send three warplanes, a commando unit, and a company of 100 soldiers to Yemen, on a mission he thought would be easy at the time. However, he was surprised to find that someone opposed this decision, namely his friend Kamal al-Din Hussein, a member of the Revolutionary Command Council, who considered such a decision to distract the army from its primary mission, in its war with an ever-wary Israeli enemy. He recalled the huge losses incurred by the state budget as a result of the adventure of unification with Syria, which ended in a bitter separation.

According to a story recounted by Wagih Abu Zikri in his book, “Flowers are Buried in Yemen,” the discussion ended with Abdel Nasser telling his colleague, “There is no cucumber in the filter,” reminding him of his failure at the Ministry of Education and asking for the meeting to end “because Kamal was tired and needed to rest.” Kamal, under house arrest in Alexandria, immediately began a long break after the meeting.

The Egyptian forces traveled to Yemen, knowing nothing about it, its nature, or the nature of the war they would fight. They were not prepared for it, and it was not a war in the understood sense, but rather a guerrilla war of “hit and run.” To open the roads that the Yemeni tribes had cut off, Egypt sent a commando unit, and then the number reached “55” thousand Egyptian fighters in Yemen.

The Egyptian forces in Yemen fought against many types of people and mercenaries from all over the world. They did not know friend from enemy, and whether they supported the republic or against it. The nature of the enemy the Egyptian forces were fighting was characterized by treachery and betrayal. In addition to the nature of the terrain and the difficulty of moving on it, especially the mountainous region where the Egyptian forces were encamped, and the abundance of rocky stones, and their dangerous effect on the soldiers' shoes, which would be stripped off in a single walk, causing the soldiers' feet to be injured by the rocks and their toes to bleed.

With the scarcity of water, the long distance, the danger to the water resources in the valley, the possibility of contamination by the enemy, the difficulty of fresh food supplies arriving from Sana’a to the forces’ positions, and if they arrived, most of them were spoiled, in addition to the difficulty of newspapers, magazines and mail arriving, in addition to the problems of leave and transporting soldiers to and from Sana’a airport, to spend their leave in Egypt, it was a complex problem with no solution.

Because the weather in Yemen was very changeable, with severe cold at night and dust whirlpools rising upwards carrying all the dust of Yemen, and intense heat in the valleys, and harsh cold in the mountains, this required an abundance of blankets and woolen clothes at night, and other light clothes during the day.


In August 1967, Abdel Nasser summoned 15,000 soldiers to replace those lost in that year's war with Israel. The Yemen War was one of the reasons for the defeat, draining much of Egypt's financial and human resources at the time.

At the Arab Summit in Khartoum, held after the war, Egypt announced its readiness to withdraw its forces from Yemen. Egyptian Foreign Minister Mahmoud Riad proposed reviving the 1965 Jeddah Agreement, which King Faisal accepted and promised to send his forces to fight alongside Egypt against Israel. Nasser and King Faisal signed an agreement stipulating the withdrawal of Egyptian forces from Yemen, the cessation of Saudi aid to the royalists, and the deployment of observers from three neutral Arab states: Iraq, Sudan, and Morocco.
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The attached photo is a photo of Gamal Abdel Nasser with Yemeni tribal leaders who asked him to intervene in Yemen with Egyptian forces.