Ali Abdullah Saleh

A veteran of North Yemen's civil war, Saleh became president in July 1978 after his predecessor's assassination, consolidating control through a turbulent decade of rebellions and a military defeat against the South. By the mid-1980s he had stabilized the North and drawn support from both Washington and Moscow. When South Yemen collapsed in 1986, he engineered reunification in 1990, sharing power until a brief 1994 civil war - won with the help of jihadist fighters - allowed him to revert to autocratic rule. His opposition to the Gulf War cost him Saudi favor and triggered a mass Yemeni exodus, but after 2001 he courted Western governments during the war on terror, even as evidence surfaced that he tolerated or encouraged Islamic terrorism to justify the alliance. The 2011 Arab Spring forced his resignation the following year. In 2015 he allied with the Houthi rebels he had once fought; two years later, after declaring he would switch sides again, a Houthi sniper killed him as battle raged around his compound.