Free Officers, Yemen

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FREE OFFICERS, YEMEN

Junior officers who led North Yemen's 1962 revolution.

These fifteen or so junior officers were at the center of the planning and execution of the 1962 revolution that overthrew the Zaydi imamate in North Yemen. Inspired by the Egyptian revolution and the revolutionary Arab nationalism of Gamal Abdel Nasser, they recruited the more prominent senior officers who participated in the successful revolt, only to be upstaged or shunted aside by some of these older figures in the sharp political struggles that followed.

See also Nasser, Gamal Abdel; Zaydism.

Robert D. Burrowes