Egypt sent support to the Yemen Arab Republic (North Yemen) in the 1960s in an effort to extend Gamal Abdel Nasser’s reach across the Red Sea.
In the 1960s Egypt was ruled by Nasser, a charismatic Pan-Arabist who had sought to extend his leadership across the Arab world. In the previous decade he had nationalized the Suez Canal (see Suez Crisis) and brought it under Arab (Egyptian) control. He had also entered into a short-lived union with Syria known as the United Arab Republic and a confederation with North Yemen’s ruler at the time. The arrangement brought the Red Sea and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait—which, like the Suez Canal, had long been under British control—closer to Arab control.
In 1962 some military officers in North Yemen staged a coup against monarchical rule, in similar fashion to Nasser’s coup in 1952, and established a republic. Although North Yemen’s ruler had already been favorable to Nasser, the new republic was led by figures sympathetic to Nasserist ideology. When civil war broke out between the Nasserist republic and the royalists, the republic invited Egyptian assistance. Over the following years Egypt gradually raised its troop levels in Yemen to 70,000 and attempted to end British rule in South Yemen through a Nasserist insurgency. Egyptian involvement in Yemen was so deep that it had a notable impact on Egypt’s preparedness for the Six-Day War with Israel in 1967.