The Two Yemens Become One 63 the formation of Yemen as the republic we know today, Zaydi tribes fiercely resisted Ottoman invasions from the north, which was key to Turkish trade with India. The Ottomans eventually conquered southern Yemen and the Tihama area along the Red Sea in the late 1530s, but Yemen proved to be a bloodbath for Ottoman soldiers sent in from Egypt. After a series of battles, territories traded hands many times between the Turks and various Yemeni forces, including Zaydi tribesmen of the northern highlands. By the midnineteenth century, Ottoman forces and the Zaydis, among other groups, were still battling for control. As the British Empire expanded its reach across the Asian continent, forces captured the southern port city of Aden, where they enforced a protectorate colonial status and signed treaties with local tribes. In 1892, the Ottomans again sent forces to conquer Yemen’s northern capital of Sanaʻa, which became the administrative capital of the Ottoman’s territory in Yemen. However, constant rebellions by Zaydi Imams, such as Yahya Hamidaddin, made imperialistic governance largely impossible. As a result, a treaty with the Ottomans in 1911 made Imam Yahya governor of the Zaydi northern highlands. Meanwhile, Imam Yahya did not recognize the British-Ottoman border agreement that divided Yemen into north and south. Fighting continued between the two sides over Yemen’s middle ground as Yahya himself sought to capture Aden. Eventually, a 1934 treaty between the Imam and the British recognized the latter’s authority over the “Aden protectorate” for forty years. During this period, Yemen became host to regional and internationalized mobilization by the Muslim Brotherhood and nationalists with competing visions for Yemen’s future. In 1948, a Zaydi prince named Abdullah bin Ahmad al-Wazir assassinated Imam Yahya, but Yahya’s son, the crown prince Ahmad, was able to regain control. Up until that point, Yahya had largely succeeded in sequestering Yemen from outside influences. At this time, Ahmad opened Yemen to foreign trade through an agreement with the USSR. When Imam Ahmad of the north died in 1962, a terrible civil war ensued in the northern Yemen Arab Republic that pushed out many Yemenis in search of sanctuary. An uprising in the south by Marxist republicans and a nationalist military organization, who would later turn on each other, ousted the British in 1967 and gave rise to the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, the region’s only socialist republic. The north and south then proceeded to fight each other on and off again in the 1970s. In the midst of this turmoil, Ali Abdullah Saleh came to power in the north in 1978. In 1986, an internal civil war in the south killed thousands, weakening the state considerably. By 1990, amid the fall of the Soviet Union, the two governments agreed to merge into the Republic of Yemen. However, a civil war broke out between them due to southern grievances about being marginalized under the new elected government. In 1994, Saleh triumphed and became the first elected president of Yemen in 1999. The reunification of Yemen’s two halves subjected the south to heavy repression, corruption, and neglect. Saleh relied https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press