Ali Abdullah Saleh, the former leader of Yemen, was known as a hardy survivor of Middle Eastern politics who had ruled for more than three decades and re-emerged to play a major role in his country’s devastating civil war.
Mr. Saleh, who was killed on Monday in Yemen under circumstances that remained unclear, was a canny manipulator of Yemen’s complex tribal politics who once likened his presidency to “dancing on the heads of snakes,” but his Machiavellian skills and good luck finally ran out. Aides said he died after an explosion at his home in Sana, the capital. Yemen’s Houthi rebels, his onetime allies in the war, said they had killed him in an ambush in the desert.
On Saturday Mr. Saleh had publicly broken with the Houthis, calling on Yemenis to “defend the nation” against them. That move in a lifetime of juggling alliances proved to be his last.
y most accounts Mr. Saleh was 75 at his death, though for years his official biography made him four years younger. It was not the only flexibility with the facts that he had shown in an eventful lifetime.
His long tenure as the leader of the poorest Arab country, which suffered periodic warfare and became a hotbed for Al Qaeda, left an undoubted mark. But he was universally seen as corrupt and unprincipled, interested mainly in wealth and power for himself and his relatives, whom he installed in powerful posts.
“It is a tragic end for a tragic 33 years of misruling Yemen,” said Farea al-Muslimi, a Yemeni scholar and chairman of the Sana Center for Strategic Studies. He compared Mr. Saleh to Saddam Hussein and Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, and said that Yemen, like Iraq and Libya, had descended into chaos in part because of Mr. Saleh’s failure to build durable institutions while in office.
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