On Sunday, Egypt announced that it would provide support to Saudi Arabia amid its ongoing war against Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebel group, which controls most of northern Yemen.
The decision required authorisation from Egypt’s parliament, which usually votes according to government directives. Parliament, however, decided to delay the vote, in what may be a sign of reluctance by the Egyptian state to get involved.
It is not yet clear what form Egypt’s support will take, and it is likely to be only “defensive”, focused mostly on the interception of Houthi missiles and drones and the protection of shipping through the Red Sea.
However, the prospective intervention has already brought back memories of Egypt’s disastrous involvement in the 1962-1970 civil war in what was then North Yemen.
Key figures associated with the Houthi movement have warned Egypt against intervening.
Abdul Qader Mortada, the president of the Houthis’ National Committee for Prisoners’ Affairs, said in a post on X that Egypt’s 1962 intervention in Yemen had led to its disastrous defeat in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, and that if it were to get involved again, that would also embolden Israel’s expansionist ambitions across the region.
Israel, which is engaged in wars in Lebanon, Iran and Gaza and aggressive military activity in Syria, offered Saudi Arabia “assistance” in the conflict with Yemen’s Houthis, but this has reportedly been rejected by Riyadh.
Egypt’s bitter memories of intervening in Yemen
When Egypt first intervened in Yemen in 1962, the Arab World split into two camps, amid the Cold War taking place in the wider world. On the one hand were the pro-Western monarchies such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan. On the other were those exemplified above all by President Gamal Abdul Nasser’s Egypt, which espoused a pan-Arabist and socialist ideology and was friendly to the Soviet Union.
Egypt, however, had suffered a series of setbacks across the region. In 1961, the United Arab Republic it had formed with Syria broke up, dashing the hopes for a pan-Arab union many people in the region wished for at the time, while strengthening the position of Egypt’s adversaries.
After the 14 July 1958 coup which overthrew the Iraqi monarchy, Egypt hoped that it would gain a new ally, but Iraq’s new leader Abdul Karim Qasim kept his distance from Nasser and his pan-Arab nationalist ideology. Egypt therefore was facing isolation in the Arab World.
However, when army officers in what was then North Yemen, led by Nasser adherent Abdullah Sallal, overthrew Yemen’s new Imam Muhammad al-Badr, who had only taken power one week previously, Egypt saw a chance to extend its influence in the Arab world, while curtailing that of Saudi Arabia, its chief rival at the time.
Yemen was at the time seen as one of the most backward countries in the Arab world. Its rulers, the Imams, held near-absolute political as well as religious power. While Egypt had maintained relatively good relations with the Imams under Nasser, Egyptian views of the country were marked by contempt.
Mohammed Hassanein Heikal, the editor-in-chief of Al-Ahram, who was seen as Nasser’s leading propagandist, wrote in reference to the country, “while some of the Arabs live in the twentieth century, others find themselves still existing in the conditions of the thirteenth century”.
The army coup which overthrew the Imamate and declared a republic was seen as a revolution against “subservience, backwardness and tyranny” with the aim of building an “emancipated modern republic” according to the Egyptian state-owned newspaper Al-Jumhuriya.
Vietnam on the Red Sea
However, these simplistic views belied a much more complex reality. Sallal’s coup was bloody, with many monarchist officials executed without trial. Imam Muhammad al-Badr managed to escape Sana’a despite initial reports of his death.
While the coup did have some popular support in North Yemen, particularly in the old capital Taiz and the southern provinces, Imam Muhammad, with crucial support from Saudi Arabia, managed to rally northern tribes to his cause.
Saudi Arabia’s assistance to the Imam spurred an Egyptian decision to intervene militarily. Any abandonment of the “revolution” in Yemen would have been seen as a major setback to “progressive” forces in the Arab world.
Within two months, 15,000 Egyptian troops were in Yemen, and their number would increase to 70,000 by late 1965.
Egypt poured troops, money and resources into a war it could not win. While Saudi Arabia was its main opponent, ironically it was in a similar position to the one that Riyadh found itself in after it decided to intervene against the Houthis in 2015.
The result was a disaster, caused by what Adeed Dawisha called in a 1975 academic paper Egypt’s “almost total ignorance of the social and political conditions of Yemen”.
More than 10,000 Egyptian troops were killed, and Egypt was beset by massive war debts, but Nasser couldn’t afford the loss of face that would come with withdrawal.
Egypt even used chemical weapons in the conflict, killing an estimated 1,500 people. The conflict soon became known as “Egypt’s Vietnam”.
Its involvement in the Yemen war was one of the key causes of its humiliating defeat by Israel in 1967, and it was forced to withdraw from Yemen after that. The North Yemen Civil War kept going for three more years after that, ending with the victory of republican forces.
Parallels with today
Today Egypt finds itself contemplating intervention in Yemen again (albeit in a limited form) on the same side as Saudi Arabia, which opposed it and did so much to curtail its regional influence in the previous Yemen war.
Arguably, Saudi Arabia made many of the same mistakes Egypt did in the 1960s, underestimating the tenacity and ability of its opponents to resist it and the regional dynamics involved.
Saudi Arabia’s 2015 intervention against the Houthis was motivated by fear of being surrounded by the growing regional influence of Iran at the time.
Its involvement was – at least partially - responsible for what the UN previously described as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, and it was unable to dislodge the Houthis from the Yemeni capital Sana’a and their northern strongholds.
After the Yemen conflict reignited last September, the US refused to support Saudi Arabia militarily.
Saudi Arabia has looked for other allies almost everywhere, turning to Turkey and Pakistan, its allies in the Mecca Defence Pact, who initially seemed reluctant to get involved.
Egypt’s reliance today on Saudi aid and investment and its concerns over the Houthis’ presence on the Red Sea are perhaps the key drivers for its potential intervention in Yemen.
However, its past experience in Yemen has important parallels with today and suggests that both Saudi Arabia’s renewed war in the country – and any Egyptian involvement in it – will be long, complex and unpredictable.